Let’s make this February more colorful! Apart from a new collection of wallpapers, we also have a little creativity challenge waiting for you this month. It’s the perfect occasion to share your ideas with the world — and win a smashing prize along the way. The wallpapers in this post come with and without a calendar for February 2021, and, as a little bonus goodie, you’ll also discover some familiar faces here and there: February favorites from our archives that are just too good to be forgotten.
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In this article, we look at some of the more advanced features of TypeScript, like union types, conditional types, template literal types, and generics. We want to formalize the most dynamic JavaScript behavior in a way that we can catch most bugs before they happen. We apply several learnings from all chapters of TypeScript in 50 Lessons, a book we’ve published here on Smashing Magazine late 2020. If you are interested in learning more, be sure to check it out!
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What makes a good chatbot experience? Most people think of witty responses and machine learning, but the basis of a chatbot UX is actually rooted in content strategy. In this article Marli Mesibov will answer those questions and identify what you as a content designer can do to make your chatbot successful. A poor chatbot simply says “I’m sorry, I don’t understand” on repeat (or worse “error”.) A good chatbot feels almost-human. Learn how to develop a chatbot that sounds human and engages people.
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The promise of seamless design to code translation goes back to the early WYSIWYG page builders. Despite the admirable goal, their biggest flaw was the code that they generated. Skepticism remains to this day and whenever this idea reappears, the biggest concerns are always related to the quality and maintainability of the code. In this article, Miroslav Bekyarov will show you how to turn our static designs into a live, code-based prototype with real fields, forms, maps, and animations, and in turn, transform this prototype into React code — all integrated into one tool.
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In this episode, we’re talking about Web Performance. What does the performance landscape look like in 2021? Drew McLellan talks to expert Harry Roberts to find out.
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How to stay creative, focused, and organized when working remotely? In this article, Cosima Mielke has compiled some useful tools and resources to help you tackle some of the challenges of working remotely. The collection is by no means complete, but rather a selection of things that we found useful and that we hope will make your day-to-day work more productive and efficient, too.
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Saying no is a skill. Saying yes to the wrong freelance opportunities can lead you toward misery and burnout, and we could all probably improve how mindful we are about our work, partners, and clients. For hungry freelancers, it can be hard to turn work away. But in the long run, saying no to a project that’s a bad fit will make you a better freelancer. This article will help freelancers and consultants think critically about when to decline an opportunity or request and how to do so assertively but kindly.
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In this article, we’ll take a close look at some of the changes we made on this very site — running on JAMStack with React — to optimize the web performance and improve the Core Web Vitals metrics. With some of the mistakes we’ve made, and some of the unexpected changes that helped boost all the metrics across the board. Hopefully, this little case-study will be useful to you, and perhaps there are one or two techniques that you might be able to apply to your project right away. In the end, performance is all about a sum of all the fine little details, that, when added up, make or break your customer’s experience.
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why do we need blockchain? Blockchain is a safe way to record activities and keep data fresh while maintaining a record of its history compared to the traditional records or databases where hacks, errors, and downtimes are very possible. In this article, John Agbanusi explains how you can build a Node.js API from scratch by building and deploying an Ethereum Blockchain for decentralization. He also shows you a step-by-step process of integrating both the API and blockchain into a single API called a “decentralized application API”.
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In this tutorial, Fortune Ikechi is going to show you how to use Grommet as a UI library for React applications. He’ll use Grommet as a UI library of choice to create a pricing component, this would help you have a better understanding of how to use Grommet. This tutorial will be beneficial to readers who are interested in developing responsive components in their React application using Grommet. This article requires a basic understanding of React and Styled-components.
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