Bookmarks

Article from Camille Fournier, giving advice to senior engineers about how they can get to the next level by considering the "next larger context". This seems like a really good framing of the problem, so useful to keep in mind for career progression conversations.

New Google initiative to easily show if a feature is well supported.

Good primer on the Temporal API, with a really nice explanation of some of the nuances of the API that I'd struggled with before. There's also some really great info on the state of the spec and what's blocked on.

Interesting study describing an algorithm they created to identify issues in pre-written code snippets used as the basis for learning exercises (they called them templates). The idea being that teacher may introduce issues in these code snippets, meaning that students may be confused or unable to complete the exercise tasks. Detection relies on a dataset of completed exercise tasks, diff-ing the output of code quality tools against the output from the original code.

This is fairly transparently an ad for Linear, and most of the actual numbers seem pretty suspect, however it is a concise list of potential team metrics to measure.

Dan Abramov walks through creation of a React Server Component server & client, explaining how each piece and what it's needed for.

Well reasoned argument for using type over interface for types for objects in TypeScript.

Really interesting comparison of power usage when loading images, using Firefox's dev tools (it's built into the performance capture tool now). tl;dr: WebP comes out on top.

Explainer of new ish @property in CSS, which allows variables to be declared with a "type" as well as a fallback if an override doesn't match the type. This is really useful for design systems, as you can provide more guarantees that your variables are being used correctly.

The title doesn't do a good job of describing this, but it's really a decent article on how Senior/Staff can influence organisations to solve bigger, structural problems with a pretty good specific example (improving a11y).

Really in-depth look - with lots of citations - at the ways in which Google's Core Web Vitals affect search ranking. I'm sure this will be useful reference material for when SEO comes up.

Controlling the outline styles via CSS variables is a really clever idea: it allows customisation of elements (either on a one-off basis, or as part of the design system).

Looks like Node 18 has a drop-in replacement for Mocha/Jest. Looking at the docs it even supports it.only which isn't mentioned in the article.

We can replace minimist and friends with a built-in Node util now.

Handy little tip from Stefan, I can see this being useful in a number of ways.

Sets out an argument for project planning via "stepping stones" over "milestones". The argument is that avoiding a big plan-up-front (a series of milestones) in favour of stepping stones at each you can stop and chose the next stone allows for demonstrating progress but with flexibility. Each stepping stone has some kind of deliverable and moves towards the overall strategic goal. This sounds a lot like how I approached our migration to React, but frames it a bit better than "flying by the seat of my pants" :D

Explains a neat CSS snippet that gives flexibility to focus outline styles using CSS variables. This allows the focus ring to be restyled based on different contexts (like buttons/form elements etc).

Wide ranging article (adapted from a conference talk) from Modern CSS. Covers some global helpers, layout utilities and some specific components based on the latest CSS features.

Excellent article outlining an overall approach to engineering metrics, with a particular focus on practicality and application over theoretical purity.

Article describing the different (ARIA) roles that should be attached to the new popover attribute.