Editor's Pick
The deskilling of web dev is harming the product but, more importantly, it's damaging our health – this is why burnout happens
Even before the web developer job market became as dire as it is today, I was regularly seeing developers burn out and leave the industry. Some left for good; some only temporarily. Many have outright destroyed their health through anxiety and burnout.
Even those still in web dev are feeling burnt out and the reason for that is – unfortunately – quite straightforward:
We’re expected to keep up with multiple specialities that, in a sensible industry, would each be a dedicated field.
You’re expected to follow half-a-dozen different specialities, each relatively fast-paced and complex in its own right, and you’re supposed to do it without cutting into the hours where you do actual paid web development.
Worse yet, you’re not actually expected to use any of it directly. Instead you’re also supposed to follow the developments of framework abstractions that are layered on top of the foundation specialities, at least doubling the number of complex fields a web dev has to follow and understand, right out of the gate.
Accessibility
Rethinking Text Resizing on Web
Airbnb has made significant strides in improving web accessibility for Hosts and guests who require larger text sizes. This post takes an in-depth look at:
- The problems encountered on mobile web when relying solely on browser zoom.
- The challenges of introducing changes that would impact the workflow of all frontend engineers.
- The benefits seen since launching these accessibility improvements.
A Designer's Guide to Documenting Accessibility & User Interactions
Accessibility is unfortunately still an afterthought on many projects. User interaction and accessibility requirements are poorly documented, at best. Or forgotten, when handing over designs to developer teams. And fixing it later costs a LOT more than building it right to begin with. Great documentation helps teams implement accessibility requirements the right way. This is the text version of a talk, where I explain why, what and how designers can document different aspects of accessibility and user interactions requirements, to build better more inclusive products from the start.
guidepup: Screen reader driver for test automation.
Guidepup is a screen reader driver for test automation. It enables testing for VoiceOver on MacOS and NVDA on Windows with a single API.
CSS
Making a tic-tac-toe game with 'randomness' using pure HTML and CSS. Without JavaScript!
Everyone loves CSS! Continuing in my obsession, I have created a tictactoe game, with an option to have a CPU that plays randomly. This was made without any JavaScript, only HTML and CSS. In this blog post I discuss how I made it.
Animating the Dialog Element element with CSS
When the <dialog> element became widely available in 2022, I was thrilled. Opening a dialog? Easy. Closing a dialog? Even easier. Nested dialogs and keyboard interactions? Built-in, for free. It’s like living in the future.
But what about animating? That’s a little trickier. At first glance it doesn’t appear to be animatable in CSS—transitions and animations don’t seem to work. JavaScript can do it, but that requires managing the state of your dialogs manually, losing some of the simplicity of using <dialog> in the first place.
Fortunately, thanks to modern CSS, we can do it without resorting to JavaScript.
JavaScript
Coding my Handwriting
Coding my handwriting in Javascript - how I did it and what I’m doing with it.
xlsxtable: A small, simple library to create nice .xlsx Excel files from tabular data
A small, simple library to create nice .xlsx Excel files from tabular data, which:
- Emboldens and (optionally) freezes and autofilters the headings
- Sets column widths based on cell content
- Converts dates and times to native Excel format (roughly: floating-point days since 0 Jan 1900)
- Works everywhere, including Node and browsers
Size: under 7KB gzipped. The only runtime dependency is littlezipper (which is by the same author, tiny, and has no runtime dependencies of its own).
A virtual DOM in 200 lines of JavaScript
In this post I’ll walk through the full implementation of a Virtual DOM in a bit over 200 lines of JavaScript.
The result is a full-featured and sufficiently performant virtual DOM library (demos). It’s available on NPM as the smvc package.
The main goal is to illustrate the fundamental technique behind tools like React.
UX
UI Density
UI density is not just the way an interface looks at one moment in time; it’s about the amount of information an interface can provide over a series of moments. It’s about how those moments are connected through design design decisions, and how those decisions are connected to the value the software provides.
If you’re a designer, I’d like you to question the density of the interfaces you’re creating; if you’re not a designer, use the lens of UI density to understand the software you use.
Guidelines for Discussing UX
A short and simple set of guidelines to encourage better UX discussions. This (or a variation) could be posted near your code of conduct in your repos. It’s not a silver bullet, but allows teams to level up how they discuss UX.
Miscellaneous
Stories of reaching Staff-plus engineering roles
The transition into Staff Engineer, and its further evolutions like Principal Engineer, remains particularly challenging and undocumented. What are the skills you need to develop to reach Staff Engineer? What skills do you need to succeed after you've reached it? How do most folks reach this role? What can companies do to streamline the path to Staff Engineer? Will you enjoy being a Staff Engineer or toil for years for a role that doesn't suit you?
The deskilling of web dev is harming the product but, more importantly, it's damaging our health – this is why burnout happens
Even before the web developer job market became as dire as it is today, I was regularly seeing developers burn out and leave the industry. Some left for good; some only temporarily. Many have outright destroyed their health through anxiety and burnout.
Even those still in web dev are feeling burnt out and the reason for that is – unfortunately – quite straightforward:
We’re expected to keep up with multiple specialities that, in a sensible industry, would each be a dedicated field.
You’re expected to follow half-a-dozen different specialities, each relatively fast-paced and complex in its own right, and you’re supposed to do it without cutting into the hours where you do actual paid web development.
Worse yet, you’re not actually expected to use any of it directly. Instead you’re also supposed to follow the developments of framework abstractions that are layered on top of the foundation specialities, at least doubling the number of complex fields a web dev has to follow and understand, right out of the gate.
The Best Weather APIs for 2024
With the shutdown of Dark Sky Weather API, many people have sought after a better weather API for their weather data needs. But how do you know what’s the right choice for you?
Does anyone else always go for a weather API when playing with a new javascript framework or is it just me?
Pitfalls of best practices
The software industry has an extensive repertoire of so-called “best practices” that, in theory, should produce net positive results. Some of these practices are inherently useful but suffer in how they are disseminated, adopted, and applied. Meanwhile, some “best practices” inherently have a negative ROI.
The raison d'être of this essay is to surface some of the perils of mindlessly using “best practices”. Pragmatically, “best practices” serve as a good baseline. Unfortunately, too often, they are used as a substitute for thinking (critically).