You may already be familiar with webpack for asset management on projects. However, there’s another cool tool out there called Parcel, which is comparable to webpack in that it helps with hassle-free asset bundling. Where Parcel really shines is that it requires zero configuration to get up and running, where other bundlers often require writing a ton code just to get started. Plus, Parcel is super fast when it runs because it utilizes multicore processing where others work off … Read article
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Ben Frain just made some notes about the switch from Gulp to Parcel, a relatively new "web application bundler" which, from a quick look at things, is similar to webpack but without all the hassle of setting things up. One of the things I’ve always disliked about webpack is that you kinda have to teach it what CSS, HTML and JS are before making whatever modifications you want to those files. However, Parcel does a lot of the asset … Read article
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Part 1: Privacy Concerns And Privacy In Web Forms Part 2: Better Cookie Consent Experiences Part 3: Better Notifications UX And Permission Requests Part 4: Privacy-Aware Design Framework We’ve already explored approaches for better cookie consent prompts, permission requests, and notifications UX, but how do they fit into an overall design strategy as we make design decisions in our design tools?
In her article “What does GDPR mean for UX?
You could say that the opposite of version control—from the perspective of internal software development—is chaos. If development teams don’t manage various versions of their work, things can quickly spiral out of control.
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CSS is what gives every website its design. Websites sure aren’t very fun and friendly without it! I’ve read about somebody going a week without JavaScript and how the experience resulted in websites that were faster, though certain aspects of them would not function as expected.
But CSS. Turning off CSS while browsing the web wouldn’t exactly make the web far less usable... right? Or, like JavaScript, would some features not work as expected? Out of curiosity, I decided to … Read article
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Ivan Akulov has collected a whole bunch of information and know-how on making things load a bit more quickly with preload and prefetch. That's great in and of itself, but he also points to something new to me – the as attribute:
<link rel="preload" href="/style.css" as="style" />
Supposedly, this helps browsers prioritize when to download assets and which assets to load.
My favorite part of this post is Ivan’s quick summary at the end which clearly defines what all … Read article
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In contrast to the world of print design, our creative process has often been constrained by what is possible with our limited tools. It also has been made more difficult by the unique challenges of designing for the web, such as ensuring that our sites cater well to a diverse range of devices and browsers.
Now, the web isn’t print of course, and we can’t take concepts from sturdy print and apply them blindly to the fluid web.
Kubernetes has become a standard way—many would say the standard way — to deploy containerized applications at scale. But if Kubernetes helps us to tame sprawling and complex container deployments, what’s available to help us tame Kubernetes? It too can be complex, messy, and difficult to manage.
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Microsoft has released .Net Framework 4.8, the latest version of the company’s application development framework for Windows. The update brings a number of bug fixes, security patches, and improvements to the Common Language Runtime, ASP.Net, Windows Forms, Windows Presentation Foundation, and Windows Communication Foundation.
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Specific design systems, I mean. Design systems, as a concept, are something just about any site can benefit from.
A lot of hype goes into design systems these days. Just the other day, an organization's published their design system publicly and I got a slew of DMs, emails, and Slack messages encouraging me to check it out. "Looks good to me," I said. But I'm merely knocking on the hood of a new car, so to speak. I haven't sat … Read article
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A React component goes through different phases as it lives in an application, though it might not be evident that anything is happening behind the scenes.
Those phases are:
- mounting
- updating
- unmounting
- error handling
There are methods in each of these phases that make it possible to perform specific actions on the component during that phase. For example, when fetching data from a network, you’d want to call the function that handles the API call in the componentDidMount() method, which … Read article
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Engineers working on Google’s TensorFlow machine learning framework have revealed a subproject, MLIR, that is intended to be a common intermediate language for machine learning frameworks.
MLIR, short for Multi-Level Intermediate Representation, will allow projects using TensorFlow and other machine learning libraries to be compiled to more efficient code that takes maximum advantage of underlying hardware. What’s more, MLIR could in time be used by compilers generally, extending its optimization benefits beyond machine learning projects.
MLIR isn’t a language like C++ or Python. It represents an intermediate compilation step between those higher-level languages and machine code. The compiler framework LLVM uses an intermediate representation, or IR, of its own. One of LLVM’s originators, Chris Lattner, is a co-creator of MLIR. Making MLIR an LLVM co-project could be a way to spread its adoption.
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Let's say you're rocking a JAMstack-style site (no server-side languages in use), but you want to do something rather dynamic like send an email. Not a problem! That's the whole point of JAMstack. It's not just static hosting. It's that plus doing anything else you wanna do through JavaScript and APIs.
Here's the setup: You need a service to help you send the email. Let's just pick Sparkpost out of a hat. There are a number of them, … Read article
The post Netlify Functions for Sending Emails appeared first on CSS-Tricks.
Node.js 12 has arrived as the latest version of the server-side JavaScript framework, with faster startup and improved default heap limits. Node.js 12 is an LTS (Long Term Support) release, meaning it will be supported for three years, including six months as the current release, 18 months as an active release, and 12 months as a maintenance release.
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(Insider Story)
Markdown is a lightweight text markup language that allows the marked text to be converted to various formats. The original goal of creating Markdown was of enabling people “to write using an easy-to-read and easy-to-write plain text format” and to optionally convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML). Currently, with WordPress supporting Markdown, the format has become even more widely used.
The purpose of writing the article is to show you how to use Node.
You can have multiple classes on an HTML element:
<div class="module p-2"></div>
Nothing incorrect or invalid there at all. It has two classes. In CSS, both of these will apply:
.module { }
.p-2 { }
const div = document.querySelector("div");
console.log(div.classList.contains("module")); // true
console.log(div.classList.contains("p-3")); // false
But what about grouping them? All we have here is a space-separated string. Maybe that's fine. But maybe we can make things more clear!
Years ago, Harry Roberts talked about grouping them. He wrapped … Read article
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You’ve been scouring the web for upcoming events. You’ve subscribed to Developer Avocados and you’ve bookmarked conferences.css-tricks.com. And now you’ve found a call for proposals (CFP) that you can’t wait to enter. You quickly fill out the online form and your pinky races towards the Enter button...
Stop. Take a deep breath. And move slowly away from the keyboard.
As a conference organizer, I’ve gone through hundreds — if not thousands — of speaking proposals. While … Read article
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ASP.Net Core MVC provides support for uploading files through model binding that leverages the IFormFile interface. Recall that model binding maps data from an HTTP request to action method parameters. Model binding simplifies access to the data sent by an HTTP request and makes it easier for the action methods to be unit tested. The IFormFile interface simply represents a file sent with an HTTP request.
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At some point, we all need to show our work. Most programming work is shared either as raw source code or as a compiled executable. The source code provides complete information, but in a way that’s more “tell” than “show.” The executable shows us what the software does, but even when shipped with the source code it can be difficult to grasp exactly how it works.
Imagine being able to view the code and execute it in the same UI, so that you could make changes to the code and view the results of those changes instantly, in real time? That’s just what Jupyter Notebook offers.
Jupyter Notebook was created to make it easier to show one’s programming work, and to let others join in. Jupyter Notebook allows you to combine code, comments, multimedia, and visualizations in an interactive document — called a notebook, naturally — that can be shared, re-used, and re-worked.
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It’s a classic Hollywood plot: the battle between two old friends who went separate ways. Often the friction begins when one pal sparks an interest in what had always been the other pal’s unspoken domain. In the programming language version of this movie, it’s the introduction of Node.js that turns the buddy flick into a grudge match: PHP and JavaScript, two partners who once ruled the internet together but now duke it out for the mind share of developers.
In the old days, the partnership was simple. JavaScript handled little details on the browser, while PHP managed all the server-side tasks between port 80 and MySQL. It was a happy union that continues to support many crucial parts of the internet. Between WordPress, Drupal, and Facebook, people can hardly go a minute on the web without running into PHP.
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There is a huge difference between a website (which can generate leads) and a lead capture page (which is only supposed to generate leads).
Websites tell visitors:
This is all of the stuff we can do for you. Have a look around and let us know when you’re ready to spend some money! Lead capture pages, instead, tell visitors:
We have this one super valuable thing we want to give you for free.
Scott O'Hara recently published "Inclusively Hidden," a nice walkthrough of the different ways to hide things on the web. Nothing is ever cut and dry when it comes to the web! What complicates this is that hidden begs the question: hidden for whom? Different answers to that have different solutions:
- Hidden for everyone?
display: none; or visibility: hidden; or the hidden attribute. (But watch out for that hidden attribute, says Monica Dinculescu.)
- Hidden visually, but present for assistive
… Read article
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The Eclipse Foundation has proposed the creation of an open-source project called Eclipse Tempest to build tools for developing, testing, and debugging applications for the Kubernetes container orchestration platform. The tools would also help developers migrate existing applications to Docker and Kubernetes.
With Tempest, Eclipse wants to provide tools for building Kubernetes applications without regard to IDE or programming language. The initial code contribution is to include plug-ins for the Eclipse Java IDE, the Eclipse Che cloud IDE, and Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code editor.
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Docker is a software platform for building applications based on containers — small and lightweight execution environments that make shared use of the operating system kernel but otherwise run in isolation from one another. While containers as a concept have been around for some time, Docker, an open source project launched in 2013, helped popularize the technology, and has helped drive the trend towards containerization and microservices in software development that has come to be known as cloud-native development.
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For a while now, Sketch has been the application of choice for many UX and UI designers. However, we have lately seen many new contenders for Sketch’s position #1 as a universal UI design tool. Two apps that I think stand out mostly from the rest (and that have made the biggest strides in their development) are Figma and Adobe XD.
This article is oriented towards user interface designers and developers.
Android Studio 3.4, the latest version of Google’s IDE for building Android applications, is now available, building on the Project Marble effort to improve fundamental features and workflows. Along with performance improvements and bug fixes, Android Studio 3.4 features a streamlined UI for managing dependencies and build files, a new default code shrinker and obfuscator, a new app resource management tool, and a more efficient Android Emulator.
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(Insider Story)
Part 1: Privacy Concerns And Privacy In Web Forms Part 2: Better Cookie Consent Experiences Part 3: Better Notifications UX And Permission Requests Part 4: Privacy-Aware Design Framework Imagine you are late for one of those meetings that you really don’t want to be late to. You hastily put on your shoes and your coat and fetch your door keys and grasp for the door handle — just to head out in time.
Microsoft has launched a new open-source project to develop the Bosque programming language. The purpose of the Bosque language project is to build a functional programming language that avoids “accidental complexity” in the development process.
Design goals for the Bosque language include improved developer productivity, better software quality, and enablement of a range of new compilers and tool experiences. The new language is positioned as an experiment in regularized design for a machine-assisted, rapid, and reliable software development lifecycle.
A key goal is elimination of accidental complexity. Bosque code is supposed to be simple and easy to comprehend for both machines and humans. But Bosque remains very much in development at this point; proponents do not recommend using Bosque for any production work. Developers are encouraged to experiment with it.
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Last week, I casually dropped the term “higher-order function” when talking about memoization. While I feel comfortable throwing around terms like that now, I didn’t always know what they meant. This week we’ll examine what higher-order functions are, show some common examples, and learn how to go about creating our own.
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(Insider Story)
Red Hat is taking over maintenance responsibilities for OpenJDK 8 and OpenJDK 11 from Oracle. Red Hat will now oversee bug fixes and security patches for the two older releases, which serve as the basis for two long-term support releases of Java.
Red Hat’s updates will feed into releases of Java from Oracle, Red Hat, and other providers. Oracle released JDK (Java Development Kit) 8, based on OpenJDK 8, in March 2014 while JDK 11, based on OpenJDK 11, arrived in September 2018. Previously, Red Hat led the OpenJDK 6 and OpenJDK 7 projects. Red Hat is not taking over OpenJDK 9 or OpenJDK 10, which were short-term releases with a six-month support window.
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Modern web browsers use all sorts of techniques to help improve page load performance by guessing what the user may be likely to do next. The browser doesn’t know much about our site or application as a whole, though, and often the best insights about what a user may be likely to do come from us, the developer.
Take the example of paginated content, like a photo album. We know that if the user is looking at a photo in an album, the chance of them clicking the ‘next’ link to view the following image in the album is pretty high.
The application development world is continuously changing, evidenced by the analyst community’s frequent revisions of their various categories and definitions of application development tools and platforms. The rapid evolution and consequent flux are fueled by organizations clamoring for a single platform and toolset that can help them quickly deliver omnichannel, customer-grade apps spanning desktop, web, mobile, wearables, etc.
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(Insider Story)
Blink and you might miss some of the most interesting developments around Docker these days. Kubernetes may be getting more of the hot-new-tool thunder, but Docker continues to offer “just enough” container orchestration for most development projects and deployments.
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(Insider Story)
Mozilla’s experimental Pyodide project is bringing a Python data science stack to the web browser, by compiling it to WebAssembly. Pyodide is a WebAssembly implementation of Python’s Numpy scientific computing library, the Pandas data analysis library, and parts of the SciPy library for math, science, and engineering. Python’s Matplotlib plotting library is incorporated as well.
Closely related to Mozilla’s Iodide project for doing data science in a browser, Pyodide can be used in a stand-alone fashion or in any context where developers want to run Python in a browser. Transparent conversion of objects is provided between JavaScript and Python, giving Python full access to web APIs. Basic data types are implicitly converted as well, while JavaScript typed arrays are converted to Python memoryviews.
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Every user interaction with your website is part of a story. The user—the hero—finds themselves on a journey through your website on the way to their goal. If you can see this journey from their perspective, you can better understand what they need at each step, and align your goals with theirs.
My first article on websites and story structure, Once Upon a Time: Using Story Structure for Better Engagement, goes into more depth on story structure (the frame around which we build the house of a story) and how it works.
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Some WordPress users dismiss multipurpose themes. They do so under the assumption that a theme that promises to do everything, can’t do it. They’re on the lookout for a single-purpose theme that will be just right for the next project. That’s OK, but they’ll end up spending a lot of extra time and money. There […]
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Google has introduced Google Cloud Code, a set of plug-ins for the JetBrains IntelliJ Idea IDE and the Microsoft Visual Studio Code editor that assists with the development of cloud-native applications. The first release of Cloud Code is intended to make it easier to build applications that run on the Kubernetes container orchestration platform, including Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE).
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This article will be about how large teams can benefit from using more open, collaborative tooling and how to make adoption and migration feasible and pleasant. Also, in case you didn’t guess from the title of the article just yet, a lot of it will be about Figma and how we succeeded at adopting this design tool in our team.
The intended audience is experienced designers working in larger teams with design systems, developers or product managers looking to improve the way cross-functional teams work in their organization.
Graph databases such as Neo4j, TigerGraph, Amazon Neptune, the graph portion of Azure Cosmos DB, and AnzoGraph, the subject of this review, offer a natural representation of data that is primarily about the relationships between people, places, and things. Graph databases are good for applications for fraud detection, social networks, recommendation systems, and so on.
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(Insider Story)
Design patterns are used to solve common design problems in software development and to reduce the complexities in our source code. Design patterns can be creational (related to object creation), structural (related to object assembly), or behavioral (related to object collaboration and separation of responsibilities).
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(Insider Story)
Graph databases such as Neo4j, TigerGraph, Amazon Neptune, the graph portion of Azure Cosmos DB, and AnzoGraph, the subject of this review, offer a natural representation of data that is primarily about the relationships between people, places, and things. Graph databases are good for applications for fraud detection, social networks, recommendation systems, and so on.
To read this article in full, please click here
(Insider Story)
“‘Ethics’ and Ethics” is more than a typical article. It’s a detailed essay exploring what the term ‘ethics’ really means, how its meaning changed in recent times, and how diffusion of responsibility makes it hard to address and fix problems in big organizations.
Implementing design ethics, tech ethics, or business ethics as individual responsibilities might seem like a quick and easy solution, however, it’s not a very effective one as they all lack context when they don’t have support from other people who provide the foundation for their work.
Last year, Rachel Andrew wrote an article that took a new look at CSS Shapes in which she reintroduced readers to the basics of using CSS Shapes. For anyone keen to understand how to use properties like shape-outside, shape-margin, and shape-image-threshold, Rachel’s is the ideal primer.
I’ve seen many examples of using the properties, but very few go beyond Basic Shapes, including circle(), ellipse(), inset(). Even examples using polygon() shapes rarely go far beyond them.
jQuery has a new release! It’s been a while since our last release, but we expect this to be the last minor release in the 3.x branch, and then we will move on to the overhaul that will be jQuery 4.0. But before we get to 4.0, we’re excited to share the bug fixes and …
Continue reading →Part 1: Common Concerns And Privacy In Web Forms Part 2: Better Cookie Consent Experiences Part 3: Better Notifications UX And Permission Requests Part 4: Privacy-Aware Design Framework With the advent of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in May 2018, the web has turned into a vast exhibition of consent pop-ups, notifications, toolbars, and modals. While the intent of most cookie-related prompts is the same — to get a user’s consent to keep collecting and evaluating their behavior the same ol’ way they’ve been doing for years — implementations differ significantly, often making it ridiculously difficult or simply impossible for customers to opt out from tracking.
Kubernetes has many core abstractions, sometimes called primitives, that make the experience of deploying and managing applications so much better than what came before. Understanding these abstractions helps you take full advantage of Kubernetes and also avoid complexity—especially when running stateful applications like databases, data analytics, big data applications, streaming engines, machine learning, and AI apps.
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(Insider Story)
If you’ve ever used a CDN-hosted version of a JavaScript library, you may have noticed a strange looking integrity attribute on the script tag. This attribute contains seemingly endless alphanumeric junk that you may be tempted to strip out in the quest for cleaner code.
All that junk is actually a really useful security feature called Subresource Integrity (SRI) that can help to defend your site against certain types of hacks and compromises.
A flex or grid layout starts out with you declaring display: flex or display: grid. These layout methods are values of the CSS display property. We tend not to talk about this property on its own very much, instead concentrating on the values of flex or grid, however, there are some interesting things to understand about display and how it is defined that will make your life much easier as you use CSS for layout.
Mark Hurd, the CEO of Oracle, is a numbers guy. In a recent CNBC interview, he was asked about competition from high-flying MongoDB. Rather than respond directly to the challenge, Hurd said, “Just look at the numbers and look at the facts, and see what they're telling you.”
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(Insider Story)
If you haven’t heard, here’s the TL;DR: WebAssembly is a new language that runs in the browser alongside JavaScript. Yes, that’s right. JavaScript is no longer the only language that runs in the browser!
But beyond just being “not JavaScript”, its distinguishing factor is that you can compile code from languages such as C/C++/Rust (and more!) to WebAssembly and run them in the browser. Because WebAssembly is statically typed, uses a linear memory, and is stored in a compact binary format, it is also very fast, and could eventually allow us to run code at “near-native” speeds, i.
Many of us are awash in data, to the point where conventional databases and conventional BI systems can’t keep up, at least not in real time. There are workarounds, such as sampling the data or working with day-old reports, but each one is a compromise.
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(Insider Story)