January 31, 2018 — GraphQL’s features are not a revolution, but what makes GraphQL powerful is that the level of polish, integration, and ease-of-use make it more than the sum of its parts. Many of the things GraphQL accomplishes can, with effort and discipline, be achieved using REST or RPC, but GraphQL brings state of the art APIs to the enormous number of projects that may not have the time, resources or tools to do this themselves. In this article, Eric Baer focuses almost entirely on why GraphQL exists and the problems it solves. Read more…

January 30, 2018 — The past years have been remarkable for web technologies. Our design process is systematic and efficient. And after so many years, accessibility and performance have finally become established, well-recognized pillars of user experience. It’s a truly wonderful time to be designing and building for the web, and Vitaly Friedman couldn’t be more excited and honored to be a part of these developments. However, as designers and developers, we focus on beautiful interfaces and fast experiences, but there is one side often missing: respect towards privacy, security, inclusivity, authenticity, personality, and ethics. It’s about time we change that. Read more…

January 30, 2018 — Manually clicking through different browsers as they run your development code, either locally or remotely, is a quick way to validate that code. However, it’s not a solution for testing the full breadth of your site’s code base on the assortment of browsers and device types available to your customers. That’s where automated testing really comes into its own. In this article, Jason McConnell provides an overview of the concepts, technologies and coding techniques involved with running test scripts against browsers automatically using WebDriverJS on Windows 10 and Microsoft Edge. Read more…

January 30, 2018 — One of the toughest challenges Harris Schneiderman came across is the reorderable drag-and-drop list. While a reorderable list is a somewhat commonly used widget with intuitive conventions for mouse users, it’s not clear how keyboard-only assistive technology users can perform this simple task. Dragon Drop seeks to fill this gap by providing means for all users to perform this somewhat common task. Due to the absence of supported ARIA attributes, Dragon Drop utilizes live regions to convey the information needed for all users to reorder a list. Read more…

January 29, 2018 — Offboarding is something users come into contact with every time they complete an online transaction. It is usually described as the interaction between a company and their customer at the end of the customer journey. Whether a user is permanently ending their relationship with a company, or they are just finishing a single transaction, offboarding should be acknowledged as the last impression a user has of your business. In this article, Christine Logan will show you everything about the benefits offboarding can bring to your company and how to apply it in such a way that it is a good experience for all users. Read more…

January 25, 2018 — The most important step anyone can take to make sure that a site is secure is to keep in mind that no single process or method is sufficient to ensure nothing bad happens. WordPress itself provides a sizable library of functions, some of which can be dangerous. Beyond that, there are lots of PHP functions that a WordPress (PHP) developer will use with some frequency that can be dangerous when used. Before deploying a new plugin in WordPress, it’s a good idea to keep a list of easy-to-misuse functions by your side. In this article, David Hayes will take a closer look at some functions which you can and should use as part of a broader security strategy. Read more…

January 25, 2018 — Web design trends have changed rapidly in recent years, with some things disappearing for a while and then making a gradual comeback. That’s the case with gradients. So, what are gradients, and why are they so valuable to designers? One thing is for sure: Gradients are making a comeback, and we can already see this trend on many websites. In this article, Manuela Langella brings you a tutorial on how to create a simple web layout with linear and radial gradients. Read more…

January 24, 2018 — Rather than exploring features first, it is helpful to put them into context and to understand how they came to exist. In this series, Eric Baer wants to introduce you to GraphQL. By the end, you should understand what it is and also its origins, its drawbacks and the basics of how to work with it. Today, Eric will go over how and why we have arrived at GraphQL by looking at the lessons learned from the last 60 years of API development, from RPC to now. Read more…

January 23, 2018 — Let’s be honest: It’s not the design files that become bigger by magic. It’s designers who fill their files with unused, unoptimized and hidden elements that take unnecessary space. There are huge Sketch files that exist, and not only do they slow down Sketch, but also any designer’s productivity. In this article, Ahmed Sulaiman introduces a menu bar application that is bound to help you get rid of this headache. Read more…

January 23, 2018 — How do you get the most out of both your career and your personal life? The most important thing to note when thinking about work-life balance is that it is different for everyone. While there may a perfect solution for an individual in any given time, place and work situation, it is almost certain to be different for another individual – by a degree that can be tiny or enormous. Ricky Onsman asked the community to share their tips and advice on achieving a healthy work-life balance, and this is what they had to say. Read more…