Web Development Reading List #127: jQuery 3, UX Research And XSS In Ads

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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.

Working on very different projects, in different teams and with different people can sometimes be a challenge. But one thing that works out remarkably well is doing retrospectives with your team.

In retrospectives, you talk about how a certain project went, and the whole team shares what problems/challenges they faced, what was good and what was annoying people, why people were unhappy. And after each person has written this down on a wall (you can use Post-Its), you try to find useful solutions, small improvements that avoid conflicts, that avoid people feeling bad in a project, and that avoid unnecessary stress situations. Ideally, you do this often — like every two weeks. In every team so far, talking about issues and addressing them has helped to bind the team together and improve future work. Let’s work more together in our teams instead of on our own.

Concepts & Design

Tools

Security

Ad networks
Many code networks are vulnerable to XSS attacks as Randy Westergren shows. (Image credit: Randy Westergren)

Web Performance

  • Yoav Weiss clarifies Preload, a relatively new specification to define custom loading logic without suffering the performance penalty that script-based resource loaders incur.
  • Bruce Lawson explains why he personally thinks ad blockers are important. While that is just another opinion, it also reveals some lesser known problems of advertising these days. The major point here being the cost of large JavaScript files, graphics and banners that matters way more in developing countries than in our cheap-data-plan countries. Notably, he also mentions that we finally need to find alternatives to displaying ads to gain money from publishing content on the web.

HTML/SVG

Accessibility

JavaScript

Work & Life

  • Estimating a web development job is very hard, especially in front-end where you have so many variables. But with some clever tricks you can achieve a better estimation and cost proposalby splitting things into small tasks and by creating user stories.
  • It’s not a new finding but still so many start-ups and companies think that people are more effective if they work longer. The opposite is the case, and it’s hurting creativity, productivity and the work-life balance of employees.

And with that, I’ll close for this week. If 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 email, RSS and online.

Thanks and all the best,
Anselm

Further Reading

Smashing Editorial (mrn)