Bookmarks

The Ultimate Collection of CSS-only Shapes

Pretty much does what it says on the tin. Possibly useful if for some reason an icon isn't viable.

June 2024
Icônes

Nice & lightweight icon search across a large number of icon collections.

May 2024
Designing better target sizes

Good article on increasing touch target sizes, particularly for mobile. There's a big grab bag of potential problems and solutions. The first section in particular is more general UX principles, then going onto looking in detail at CSS implementation details.

May 2024
Robots.txt API

Interesting API to provide robots.txt output to block (known) various web scrapers, including those from AI bots.

April 2024
On popover accessibility: what the browser does and doesn’t do

Clear description of the behaviours of the new popover attribute, particularly focused on the "accessibility guardrails" that it automatically applies. Will be useful reference for what precisely the behaviours are.

April 2024
Steal this popover code

Adam Argyle has written the CSS for animating one of the elements with the new popover attribute so that we don't have to. It's pretty clean too!

April 2024
SVG Icons with CSS Masks

Interesting new technique to use the mask property to link to an SVG to create icons. I think I'd want to test this without the pseudo element though.

April 2024
Two Types of Composition

Nice practical description of composition and comparison of the different ways it can be implemented.

April 2024
Some little ways I’m using CSS :has() in the real world

Useful and practical uses for the new :has() selector

April 2024
All About Career History Interviews

Brief (and unfortunately cut off for non-subscribers) description of a format of a technical (IC or leadership) interview they call "Career History". The summary is that you find 3 - 4 roles in their history then ask the same rough set of questions about those roles with a view to discovering what the trajectory of their career is. There's also a description of red flags to watch out for (mostly lack of improvement and lack of empathy). The structure intentionally doesn't follow questions that the interviewee may have polished, prepared answers for, which I can see the value of but worry isn't the best for neurodivergent candidates.

March 2024
Internationalize your keyboard controls - Mozilla Hacks

Thorough explanation of how different physical and virtual keyboards (such as French AZERTY and German QWERTZ keyboards) can affect the KeyboardEvent events.

December 2023
Shortery

Utility Mac app that adds various Shortcuts automations, so it could run a Shortcut on a time schedule or when connecting to wifi or when folder contents change etc.

November 2023
Uncut.wtf

Open source font chooser/display with no cruft.

October 2023
Obsidian Google Calendar Plugin

Create views into the your Google Calendar from Obsidian. Looks like it also supports creation of notes that are linked to calendar events. Possibly also useful for a "Dashboard" note showing some top level info.

October 2023
The Next Larger Context

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.

October 2023
Introducing Baseline

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

October 2023
Temporal API is Awesome

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.

October 2023
[PDF] Detecting Code Quality Issues in Pre-written Templates of Programming Tasks in Online Courses

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.

September 2023
What the top 10% of dev teams look like in 2023

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.

September 2023
RSC From Scratch. Part 1: Server Components

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

September 2023