Web Development Reading List #167: On Team Retreats, Immutable Cache, And Eliminating Clearfix Hacks

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Coding, Tools, 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.

When working in a team, we focus so much on the work, that we often forget that we all have something in common. Something that is so obvious that we underestimate it: we all are human beings. And well, if we want to grow as a team and get better at what we do, we should embrace this fact more. In fact, I just came back from a week-long team retreat where we had team activities, team games, and sessions and discussions about how we can achieve just that.

We figured out how much we value diversity, we realized how different the English language and its words are perceived by people from different countries, and we’ve seen short talks on various topics like work-life-balance but also on technical stuff like Docker or intercepting any computer’s traffic with a Raspberry Zero. So if you have the chance to work in a team, use the opportunity and exchange views and share information with your co-workers. Work is part of your life, so why not make it a lovely part?

News

Say hello to Firefox 51. It ships unprefixed ::placeholder, broader ES2015 support, WebGL 2, IndexedDB v2, and tabindex for SVG. Scripts served with an image/*, video/*, audio/* or text/csv MIME type are now blocked.
Samuel Reed shares how Google Chrome 56 will make throttling of background tabs more aggressive, what this actually means and what the plans for Chrome 57 are.

General

Firefox has been supporting Immutable Caching since version 49. Now they share how efficient the technique is for Facebook and other big sites that are frequently visited by the same people.

Tools & Workflow

Anne van Kesteren shares tips on using SSH securely in the context of a CI service such as Travis CI or Circle CI.

Security

Joschi Kuphal explains how to implement HPKP with Certbot, the Let’s Encrypt client.
In response to the recent MongoDB ransom attack, Mattias Geniar shares his thoughts on the return of unauthenticated, unfirewalled protocols.

Web Performance

Mazdak Hashemi gives insights into Twitter’s infrastructure. They focus mostly on the large amount of traffic and the challenges that come with it.

HTML & SVG

SVG icons often have one problem: They don’t align well to the text surrounding them. Elliot Dahl explains how to fix that.

SVG icons and text neatly aligned. Elliot Dahl explains how to do it.

JavaScript

Sara Soueidan shows how to build a fully accessible help tooltip and why CSS-only methods sound neat but often aren’t.
Mathias Bynens shares what’s currently happening at the TC39 in regards to Regular Expressions and shows what the proposals could look like and what problems they would solve.

How To Build An Accessible Tooltip — How can you make a tooltip like the one in the top right corner accessible? Sara Soueidan explains. (Image credit)

CSS/Sass

Rachel Andrew explains the new display property value flow-root that was added to Chrome and Firefox (both Nightly/Canary only) and why it will finally replace the old clearfix hacks that we’re currently using to fix parent box sizes when floating inner elements.

Work & Life

Lara Hogan on how to hold better meetings. A concise list of tips and tricks to make your meetings a lot more efficient and interesting.
With tons of productivity articles out there, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed or even bad about how you get work done. But each one of us is an individual, and, thus, productivity is not only a subjective matter but also has a personality.

Going Beyond…

Ben Sauer questions the use of digital media for everything and asks himself if embracing paper to share information in a team is a better idea.

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.

— Anselm