Hey,
it’s me again right before traveling to beyondtellerrand conference tomorrow. I missed out to send the letter yesterday. You probably already know that I strongly support a good work-life and that’s basically what I did: After an intense work-week I felt the urge to stay away from my computer and went outside into the mountains. That gave me back my energy and here we go for this week:
News
- Google is shutting down another service: PageSpeed Service.
- Microsoft Edge will not have support for ActiveX, VBScript and attachEvent.
- You know I’m doing this gratipay thing and their philosophy of making everything about the company public is awesome. This week I haven’t received any money and you can learn about gratipay’s issues here if interested. But they want to pay out again by next week so don’t worry about your support.
Concepts & Design
- Luke Wroblewski on why most arguments about “above the fold” don’t fly.
- Senongo Akpem shares his thoughts on building non-linear narratives for the web and gives some smart examples.
- Why one hour of research can save many hours of development. Because assumptions on what your users need is a bad idea.
Generic / Tools
- Yahoo introduced a new Content Security Policy tester CSPtester.io. As a bonus there is also a phantomjs based CSP validator script you can use.
- RightFont is a new lightweight font manager for OS X with Photoshop and Sketch integrations.
- Awesome Electron is a great resource of building apps with Electron.
Web Performance / Security
- Cloudflare explains how a JavaScript DDoS works and why it’s so effective and easy and cheap to launch such an attack.
- Here’s a performance comparison for iconfonts, inline SVGs, and background SVGs.
HTML / SVG
- Ana Tudor explains the differences between using
transformin CSS and in SVG. And how to do properly in the latter.
JavaScript
- How to make
<abbr>element touch accessible. - dragula is a drag and drop script that’s super easy to use.
- Medium’s photo zoom is now an open source plugin.
- A short article on when to use
constand when to useletin ES6. - Debug your JavaScript remotely on different devices with Vorlon.js
- A detailed research of how much JavaScript the Google crawler can handle has been done. And it’s pretty interesting.
Tooling
- first aid git is a searchable collection of the most frequent git questions.
- Know when when git submodules are the right tool for the job and then master them. Because they have a couple of pitfalls you need to know about.
- Here are a few Gulp recipes like prompting for action, directory sync on your hard disk, or passing CLI arguments to Gulp.
- npm finally solved the problem of naming packages, simply by introducing user-based scopes.
- Christoph Rumpel tells you how to clean up your commits and prepare them for pull requests.
CSS / Sass
- There are more CSS pseudo-classes than you might know of.
- An introduction to graphical effects in CSS by Sara Soueidan reveals what is possible today with CSS already and how you can add live-filters to images.
Work life
- “Don’t go chasing the quick buck” says Zach Holman, ex-githubber, telling a story during his sales-career. Sometimes you need to say no to money to make a better product.
Go beyond…
- Save the Link is a campaign to prevent governments from breaking the web by blocking or altering links.