Web Development Reading List #170: Hamburger Alternatives, Libsodium In PHP And Choosing Profit

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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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As web developers, we need to rely on our knowledge, and choosing solutions we’re already familiar with is often the most convenient approach to solving a problem. However, not only technology is evolving but also our knowledge of how to use it.

For a while, we thought it’s best to use base64 encoding for inlining assets into CSS files, for example, and that loading JavaScript asynchronously will make websites faster. With more evidence and research, however, we came to realize that we were wrong. We should take this as an occasion to remind ourselves to question our habits and from now on ask ourselves if the solution we have in mind for a given problem really is still the best one we could choose.

Concept & Design

• Levi Kovacs shares alternative ideas and concepts to the hamburger menu.
• The folks at Brand.ai published a new tool for version-controlled design collaboration workflows in Sketch.

Security

• PHP (probably 7.2) will get an implementation of Libsodium, one of the most modern and best cryptographic libraries available. This is a huge step forward that’ll improve security for millions of users.

Web Performance

• Harry Roberts explains why you shouldn’t use base64 in CSS and why base64 and gzip don’t work well together. He also dives deeper into performance differences to help you figure out the best solution.

JavaScript

• Jack Franklin explains context in ReactJS applications — something that’s discussed a lot in the community and often defined in many different ways. Jack explains why it exists, when to make use of it, and how you can avoid using it.
• In his essay about JavaScript start-up performance, Addy Osmani explains what slows our web apps from booting up.
• With all the talk about CSS in JavaScript and markup in JavaScript, we had quite some discussions lately. However, these topics were mostly discussed in the context of React applications. Now there’s a holistic approach to keeping everything in one place for vue.js: your markup, your logic, your styles. An interesting concept that could be very useful for vue.js web applications.

Work & Life

• Jason Fried wrote about depending less on each other in a company to ensure that team members don’t slow each other down.
• Basecamp gives insights into why they chose profit as their route to a healthy work environment and a sustainable business.

Going Beyond…

• So how can you be sure to not leak data from your phone or computer to authorities when you cross the border? According to The Verge, the only reliable way is to delete it upfront. An interesting look at the options you have and why it can indeed make sense to delete your data on the phone and restore it later from the Cloud, if you want to avoid any hassle.

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

Further Reading

• Mobile Navigation For Smashing Magazine: A Case Study
• The Beauty Of React Native: Building Your First iOS App With JavaScript (Part 1)
• Improving Smashing Magazine’s Performance: A Case Study
• Using Sketch For Responsive Web Design (A Case Study)

(mrn)