May 14, 2021 — Since its early days, JavaScript programs have grown in complexity and the number of tasks they perform. The need to compartmentalize such tasks into closed scopes of execution became apparent. “Tree-shaking” is a must-have performance optimization when bundling JavaScript. In this article, we dive deeper on how exactly it works and how specs and practice intertwine to make bundles leaner and more performant. Plus, you’ll get a tree-shaking checklist to use for your projects. Read more…

May 12, 2021 — They are everywhere. Confusing and frustrating design patterns that seem to be chasing you everywhere you go, from one website to another. Perhaps it’s a disabled submit button that never communicates what’s actually wrong, or tooltips that — once opened — cover the input field just when you need to correct a mistake. In this new series of articles on UX, we take a closer look at some frustrating design patterns and explore better alternatives, along with plenty of examples to keep in mind when building or designing one. Don’t miss the next ones: subscribe to our newsletter to get updates. Read more…

May 12, 2021 — Over a decade ago, we set out to send a truly smashing newsletter with useful tips and techniques for designers and developers. The first issue was sent out in early 2009. Today marks the day we sent out our 300th edition of the Smashing Newsletter. This article is a little celebration in which we share little Smashing stories from people working behind the scenes. Read more…

May 11, 2021 — In more recent years, design systems and component libraries have gained popularity. There is also a desire to build once, deploy anywhere. Meaning a component developed in isolation is intended to work in any number of contexts to make building complex interfaces more efficient and consistent. CSS container queries have landed and are now available for experimentation. Let’s look at what problem is being solved, learn how container queries work, and see how they compare with and complement existing CSS features for layout. Read more…

May 11, 2021 — At the beginning of 2020, the SmashingConf team was ready for a new year. We had so many things that excited us. New speakers, new workshops, new cities, new attendees, new experiences. And as we all know, 2020 had other ideas. With so many people working from home, we thought we would bring our Smashing workshops from our home offices to yours — but how? Read more…

May 10, 2021 — Want to get started with React but struggling to find a good place to start? This article should have you covered. We’ll focus on some of the main concepts of React and then we’ll be building a game from scratch! Read more…

May 7, 2021 — A good management of your product records, i.e. all documents associated with your product — saves time, reduces anxiety, boosts onboarding and makes you ready for vacations or sudden leaves. All product specialists should know the basics. Of course, it would be easier for you to find, say, your July report for investors if everyone on the team named and structured their assets consistently. Let’s have a look at how to do that. Read more…

May 6, 2021 — When tackling a big refactor, what are the things you should focus on and what performance improvements can you expect? Dealing with themes for large platforms and CMS, legacy issues often become a bottleneck. In this article, Carson Shold discusses how his team improved the performance and organization of their Shopify themes, and improved maintainability along the way. Read more…

May 5, 2021 — This article showcases a case study of Bookaway’s landing page performance. It’s about a couple of things that Bookaway faced and Liran Cohen (as part of a company in the traveling industry) managed to optimize the pages, so that the HTML they send is smaller. Smaller HTML means less time for Google to download and process those long strings of text. Today you’ll see how taking care of the props you send to Next.js pages can make loading times and Web Vitals better. Read more…

May 4, 2021 — No matter how experienced you are, mistakes are an inevitable part of software development. But we can learn to repair them! During the course of this article, you’ll witness many disasters — but you’ll see that virtually nothing is beyond repair in Git! Once you know the right commands, you can always find a way to save your neck. And this is what Tobias will be looking at in this two-part series: how to undo mistakes using Git. Read more…