Editor's Pick
CSS Holographic Masks
Experimenting with some CSS holographic effects, inspired by this guide from Robb Owen: Holograms, light-leaks and how to build CSS-only shaders.
Accessibility
How to Conduct an Accessibility Audit: A Step-by-Step Guide
Accessibility isn’t just a legal requirement—it’s a fundamental part of inclusive design that ensures everyone, regardless of ability, can access and interact with digital content. If you’re looking to improve the accessibility of your website or application, an accessibility audit is the best place to start.
An accessibility audit systematically evaluates a digital product against established accessibility standards like the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) or Section 508. The process helps identify barriers that might prevent users with disabilities from engaging with your site effectively.
In this guide, we’ll walk you through the key steps to conducting an accessibility audit, whether you’re an experienced developer, a product manager, or a business owner looking to improve compliance and usability.
My Favorite Tools for Web Accessibility Testing
Web accessibility has many facets: Operation with the keyboard and other input devices, alternative texts for images, descriptive headings and error texts, etc. The range of tools for testing the accessibility of websites is just as diverse.
First things first: there is no single power tool that automatically detects all barriers and ideally also removes them straight away. This also applies to AI-based accessibility tools.
The WebAIM Million 2025: Solving the most common issues
Every year, WebAIM conducts an automated survey of the top one million home pages to identify the most common accessibility issues and trends. They collect (automatically detectable) accessibility issues, along with information on technologies user, page language and other domain characteristics.
If you haven't seen it yet, check out the WebAIM Million 2025 report. There are a lot if interesting insights, like the growing home page size or the correlation between using ARIA and a page having detectable issues. For this article though, I want to focus on the most common accessibility issues.
Testing Tools for Accessibility Enhancement Part II
Learn about Automated Testing Tools, like:
- Axe DevTools
- Google Lighthouse
- Accessibility Insights
- WAVE
- Accessibility Cloud, and
- Accessible Frameworks and Overlays
Part one can be found here.
CSS
CSS Holographic Masks
Experimenting with some CSS holographic effects, inspired by this guide from Robb Owen: Holograms, light-leaks and how to build CSS-only shaders.
Minimal CSS-only blurry image placeholders
Here’s a CSS technique that produces blurry image placeholders (LQIPs - low quality image placeholders) without cluttering up your markup — Only a single custom property needed.
CSS vertical alignment: Best practices and examples
Learn about the concept of CSS vertical alignment and explore some of the best CSS vertical alignment techniques.
New CSS Masonry proposal - Item Flow, Part 1: A new unified concept for layout
CSS Grid and Flexbox brought incredible layout tools to the web, but they don’t yet do everything a designer might want. One of those things is a popular layout pattern called “masonry” or “waterfall,” which currently still requires a Javascript library to accomplish.
By October 2024, there were two competing ideas being debated — to “Just Use Grid” or to create a whole “New Masonry Layout”.
A lot has happened since October. Now, a third path forward is emerging — a path that would mean the CSS Working Group doesn’t choose either “Just Use Grid” or “New Masonry Layout”. It merges ideas from both with a completely-new idea to create a unified system of Item Flow properties. This article explains what Item Flow is, and its impact on both Flexbox and Grid. In Part 2, another article will more fully explain the implications for the future of masonry-style layouts.
Expanding CSS Shadow Effects
Shadows in CSS can be multi-directional, layered, and are animate-able. On top of being all that, they don’t affect the layout and computed size of an element even though they can make it appear bigger or smaller, which makes them an efficient tool for making visual changes.
CSS System colors
System colors are a way for the OS, the browser, or the users to provide some colors to your CSS. This is a great opportunity for accessibility, as the colors will also reflect users preferences on high contrast colors.
Make any website better with this :focus-visible
a:focus-visible {
outline-offset: 0.25em;
outline-width: 0.25em;
outline-color: currentColor;
}
Tweak em sizing to your liking.
Reanimating the CSS Day Buttons
A well-animated button can capture attention, reinforce branding, and make the experience more enjoyable. In this article, we’ll take a closer look at the existing buttons and explore ways to enhance them with modern CSS techniques.
JavaScript
Mastering React Re-Renders : The Key Prop Hack You Need to Know
One of React's main features is its efficient re-rendering process. Unlike core JavaScript, which re-renders the entire DOM tree, React re-renders only the elements that have changed. A critical factor in this process is the key prop, which helps React identify which items need to be updated, added, or removed.
But did you know you can also force React to re-render a specific component using this prop? Interesting, right? Let's dive into how it works.
PageCrypt - Password Protect HTML (client-side password-protection for HTML)
This tool lets you securely password-protect an HTML file. Unlike other password-protection tools, this tool:
- Has no server-side components (this tool and its password-protected pages run entirely in javascript).
- Uses strong encryption, so the password-protection cannot be bypassed.
All you need to do is choose an HTML file and a password, and your page will be password-protected.
Github repo here.
Enums vs Union Types: Why I Stopped Using Enums Everywhere
I used Enums by default in TypeScript, they seemed like the perfect way to define a set of named values. That was until a colleague during a code review wrote me this comment:
“Why don’t you just use a Union Type? It’s better and more performant.”
That one question made me stop and think: Had I been using Enums wrong all along? I decided to dig deeper, compare both approaches, and share it with you.
Understanding the Value of TypeScript Enums
In the past few years, there’s been a growing trend of criticizing TypeScript’s enum feature. Videos, blog posts, and tweets call for avoiding them entirely, and many developers are now defaulting to union types or const objects instead. And yes—TypeScript enums do have some quirky behaviors that make them less elegant than their counterparts in other languages. But here’s the thing:
Most of the complaints about enums aren’t about the feature itself—they’re about misuse.
React Makes You a Bad Developer
Here’s my beef with React. It’s a crutch that lets you get away with not understanding the fundamentals. When I began, I didn’t properly learn JavaScript. The language that underpins everything in the React ecosystem. Instead, I learned React. It’s a library, not a language, yet it became my entry point into web development.
17 Tips from a Senior React Developer
I've been writing React code as an engineer at Palantir for the past 5+ years. These are the 17 tips I wish someone had shared with me when I was starting.
Miscellaneous
Principles of User Interface Design
Clarity is the first and most important job of any interface. To be effective using an interface you've designed, people must be able to recognize what it is, care about why they would use it, understand what the interface is helping them interact with, predict what will happen when they use it, and then successfully interact with it.
Mastering typography in design systems with semantic tokens and responsive scaling
Creating efficient, consistent, and flexible typography for digital platforms using modern design system principles.
The 13 software engineering laws
Some of those are famous, and some are quite niche. ALL of them are super useful to engineers and managers.