Weeknotes 19:15, Part 2 – Reading and Reading List

October 14, 2019

Week of October 6-12

With a three-day weekend, I took some time on Saturday to catch up on some articles that I saved in Pocket.

Reading

• The W3c at Twenty-Five – Really enjoyed this personal perspective from Rachel Andrew. Enjoyed her story and makes me what to take the time to put together my own (I had first thought about it a couple of weeks ago after talking to a colleague about her story). #WebStories
• Why is CSS So Weird (video) – one of the first of the new Mozilla Developer videos. I think it is important to understand the design constraints of this programming language to understand why some things seem weird.
• A Guide To New And Experimental CSS DevTools In Firefox – Firefox has some great tools for designers and developers. I regularly use the Grid Inspector tool. Great article on some of the other great stuff they have in place or have coming soon.
• A Love Letter to my Website – great piece on the value of personal websites. One of the reasons I am doing weeknotes is to get back in the habit of posting on my own site.
• Unexpected Accessibility Tips – not quite what I was expecting when I first saved it to Pocket. But a good read and some good tips to help make anyone more aware of importance of accessibility to everyone.
• I Read 21 Articles About How to Become a Senior Developer So You Don’t Have To – Might be of interest if you are considering career advancement.
• The Obvious UI is Often the Best UI – Definitely found this to be true in my experience
• Images Are Not Static Content – This has peaked my interest to investigate image CDNs like ImageEngine. I think that services like this are the way to go for the future of images, optimization and performance.
• The “P” in Progressive Enhancement stands for “Pragmatism” – enjoyed this article by Andy Bell. He walks through how to use CSS Custom Properties with a progressive enhancement mindset. I think it is about time for me to consider using CSS Custom Properties in my work and use similar techniques.
• Assessiblity For Everyone – a presentation Laura Kalbag gave at the State of the Browser conference. Good resource as I have been thinking through the low-hanging fruit with accessibility (see last week’s post).
• A Modern CSS Reset – another Andy Bell post. I skimmed through this one and want to go back and think through it more. Might be time to come up with my own reset. I am still using normalize (though I am using 3.x version).

Articles I Want to Read

Though I did get a chance to read several articles over the weekend, I still have a list ones I want to get to.

• Editorial Design Patterns with CSS Grid and Named Columns – I still do not use this when I use CSS Grid but maybe this article will convince me to start.
• A Complete Guide to Responsive Images – I can still get tripped up with the different use cases.
• How to build a custom block with ACF (Advanced Custom Fields) and Block Lab – I want to learn more about creating Gutenberg blocks with ACF
• Let’s Not Forget about Container Queries –  a hearty amen. I look forward to the day container queries become part of the CSS Spec.
• Spacing, Grids and Layouts
• Quickly Alter Typography with Firefox Font Editor – part of a new series of short videos from Mozilla Developers.
• The Most Influential Assignment of my Design Education – article by friend of mine, Mike Houghton. Met him many years ago through the Front End Development Conference.
• Clipping, Clipping, and More Clipping – I really want to learn and be able to use clip path in my development work.
• Layout Fun with CSS Grid
• Superfriendly Helped The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas Build Three Sites With a Design System – Looking forward to reading this case study.
• Enhancing The Clickable Area Size – seen several sources recommend this article.
• Introducing Sass Modules  and Sass Modules, A Primer – need to catch up on this since I use Dart Sass
• Build a Classic Layout FAST with CSS Grid – another Mozilla Developer video
• Feeling Sassy Again – I know a lot of developers are moving away from Sass. I still use it because of the variables and mostly because of nesting. Want to find out why Cloud Nine is embracing it again.
• A README for “Simple Websites” – want to think more about documentation

Sites That Have Caught My Eye

Watched

• At the end of the week, I watched the first two episodes of Inside Bill Gates Mind on Netflix. I have enjoyed this look into his life and he takes in information, processes and sees connections. I am really glad he is putting this to work to solve the sanitation problem that is leading to unclean water and disease in so much of the Third World.
• I finally finished watching Enterprise on Netflix