A few evenings ago, while trying to answer a question on Quora, I had the pleasure of coming across Morten-Rand Hendriksen’s[1] talk CSS Grid Changes Everything (About Web Layouts)[2]. While I had briefly played around with CSS Grid a while back, it wasn’t’ until I watched this vid, that I truly became hooked. If you take nothing else from this post, watch this vid!!
It’s been close to a whole year since I’ve written, and we’re in the middle of Never Graduate Week (which I’ll now call NGW), here at Recurse Center. I’m surrounded by so many wonderful, and inspiringly awesome people this week – so I decided it was time to start blogging again!
I’m in the middle of lots of transition and balancing right now in my life, and it’s been a super busy week (on top of all the really awesome talks, workshops, and events going on during NGW). As dev stuff goes, my laptop died 2 weeks ago (which turned out to be a blessing in disguise) – so I went from a 4 or 5 year old Acer V3-551G-X419 15-inch running Windows 8, to an XPS 12 (which simultaneously doubles as a tablet and a laptop)!! It’s turned out to be a blessing in disguise, and I’ve discovered (much to my surprise) that I really love Windows 10, and that I’m really loving having a 12-inch laptop[1] – words I never thought I’d say about either one of those!
Here’s some dev stuff I’ve been working on recently: Continue reading
I just came across this really amazing article by Aimee Marie Knight, called CSS Isn’t Black Magic, that explains how CSS Rendering works in the browser, as well as the CSSOM (CSS Object Model) and the CSS stack(s). One great thing is that it expands on how specificity works, and what gets prioritized – which is really important for targeting tags and elements, and knowing which css portions will be effective in making the changes you want.
I thought I’d developed a pretty solid knowledge and understanding of CSS by now, but this is a whole new area I wasn’t really aware of, and it’s really integral to writing great CSS code.
I highly recommend giving it a read!
Back in WordPress 4.2, they added emoji into WordPress – which I think is one of the loveliest things in the world 🙂
Unfortunately, YSlow does not… those lovely little emoji take up some precious HTTP requests – one of WordPress’ biggest challenges can be that it comes with so much overhead – which can slow down your load time quite a bit!
Thankfully, they’re super easy to remove:
Disable emojicons introduced with WP 4.2
Between turning off the emoji and disabling Jetpack (sorry Jetpack!), my YSlow speed went up by almost 10% to an 81 🙂
To be fair to Jetpack, it is a pretty nifty plugin – I just wasn’t using it for anything on this site :p
Programming is unnecessarily unfriendly to newer programmers. We can make it better through simple optimizations. This is the Third of a Series of blog posts where I’ll be exploring that!
A lot of people teach Git Internals. It’s a great thing! It helps people understand Git and just how it works, and what all those commands do. However, there’s one frequent problem with their approach: They don’t use their Operating System’s GUI*.
The problem with this is that the command line is implicit. You have to trust that it’s just doing its thing. Yes, at some point, every programmer needs to be proficient and comfortable with the command line, but it’s inaccessible and confusing to most newer programmers. This makes your presentation harder to absorb and learn from.
On the other hand, there’s something we all already know how to do: Double click our folder in our Window System and see what’s actually going on. There’s another thing we all know how to do: Open up a file with a text editor, and see what’s actually inside! Continue reading
Programming is unnecessarily unfriendly to newer programmers. We can make it better through simple optimizations. This is the Second of a Series of blog posts where I’ll be exploring that!
One of the most challenging and popular topics amongst newer (and especially self-taught programmers) is contributing to open source. The scope of making your first open source contribution can be extremely overwhelming – especially when so many open-source projects don’t make any significant efforts to be inclusive of new or first-time contributors.
Here’s a list of light-weight suggestions for your Readme.md and Contributing.md files that will make your open-source project accessible to beginners, and build a stronger community around your project*. Continue reading
Git & GitHub are essential tools for almost any software developer. Here’s a list of what I’ve found to be the best resources for them:
Git:
GitHub:
