Web Development Reading List #112: Edge Update and Performance Monitoring

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Tools, Coding, Web Development Reading List
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Anselm is a freelance front-end developer who cares about sustainable front-end experiences and ethical choices in life. He writes the WDRL, and is co-founder … More about Anselm ↬

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What’s going on in the industry? What new techniques have emerged recently? What insights, tools, tips and tricks is the web design community talking about? Anselm Hannemann is collecting everything that popped up over the last week in his web development reading list so that you don’t miss out on anything. The result is a carefully curated list of articles and resources that are worth taking a closer look at.

Last week I was talking about avoiding working all day and night. But Erik actually added a valid point to it: For you as an employee, it’s not always easy to turn off devices and just not respond to requests of your manager. And many companies still have the thinking of “we pay you salary, so we pretty much own you”. This is not true and we all need to educate people, including our managers, to respect that. Because work without joy is not efficient work. And we need some downtime to deliver good work and enjoy our work.

First major update to Microsoft Edge (and Windows 10) is out today. Evergreen browser.

News

A new Microsoft Edge Release is out, now supporting <picture>, CSS initial and unset values, extended srcset, the [download] attribute, SVG external content (wohoo, you can use use now with external resources), and WebRTC.

General

If you ever open sourced code that was used by other companies, you probably know this: Corporations and Open Source Software do not mix well. While you provide your work for free, most corporations using your code want bugs fixed immediately but don’t want to pay for it. A dilemma we should try to get rid of. As a company, give money to open source projects you use to keep them maintained.
Gerry McGovern shares how important it is to “declutter” your website from unnecessary content and how much the big websites like government websites benefited from doing that.

Concepts & Design

From Pages to Patterns: An Exercise for Everyone by Charlotte Jackson does explain why it’s a much better idea to think in small components than a whole page when designing and building websites.

Tools

cloc is a tool that counts blank lines, comment lines, and physical lines of source code in many programming languages. Very helpful to create statistics for your project.
It didn’t take long until someone brought a browser on the new Apple TV. Actually, it’s a very simplistic browser for tvOS using private API (aka UIWebView) and you need to build it manually with some tricks to get it running but it’s amazing how smooth it works.
This series of articles covers a lot of cool things you can do with PostCSS: The PostCSS Deep Dive.
Get a clue on how to use the new Firefox Developer Memory Tool to analyze your website’s memory usage. It splits your JavaScript into coarse types and gives you deep insights.

Privacy

Julia Powles recognized an interesting thing at one of the biggest tech events. Companies want to have more and more personal data to serve personalized products and services. The prevailing, unquestioned view was that our cities, homes and bodies will automatically be better, smarter and faster if they’re connected. But no one could actually tell why, how and what this will mean, in real, practical, day-to-day terms to people’s lives.
Facebook just got forced to stop tracking internet users in Belgium within 48 hours by a court, showing how serious the judges were on their decision. It’s interesting to see this happening after the Safe Harbour law is not in place anymore.
I bet no other rule has set the tech industry so much into trouble recently than the fall of the Safe Harbour law. As a consequence, Microsoft will open data centers in Europe to follow the guidelines.

Web Performance

Paul Lewis built Big Rig, a performance measurement tool that you can either use in the CLI or as a browser dashboard.

JavaScript

Learn Regular Expressions with a free online book in depth. It’s a great resource with lots of useful insight and can help you as a beginner or as an expert.
Jeremy Keith shares his experience and code to make his first project work with ServiceWorker. The post contains a lot of useful tips and hints. If you want an entry point with a more visual explanation, see a talk by Max Stoiber about Service Worker.
It’s not that difficult to add a value to an array in JavaScript. But many people don’t know how to remove a value from an array. This article tells you how to do it properly.
Learn how to avoid XSRF attacks in your Angular application with this little guide.

CSS / Sass

Ana Tudor shares in this CodePen example why it’s generally a bad idea to use gradient generators for CSS gradients.

Work & Life

You’re not one of these cool, young developers out there? Here’s the thing: James Victore shares the secret of how to stay relevant in one of his famous Burning Questions videos.

Go Beyond…

Now local businesses in Crickhowell are turning the tables on the likes of Google and Starbucks by employing the same accountancy practices used by the world’s biggest companies, to move their entire town “offshore”. What first might sound a bit weird, actually puts again some light on how broken our tax model currently is, and how unethical so many big companies are, avoiding taxes wherever they can. I can only hope that so many small companies follow this example so that countries need to change laws.
We all love to complain, but it’s not good for us on several levels. The only one who can make a difference is you.

And with that I’ll close for this week. In case you like what I write each week, please support me with a donation or share this resource with other people. You can learn more about the costs of the project here. It’s available via E-Mail, RSS and online.

Thanks and all the best, Anselm