CategoryTools

April 6, 2020 — Writing is a crucial skill every software developer should cultivate. And writing on your own technical blog can have immense benefits to your career as a software developer and help you cultivate your skills and expertise. Creating and hosting a technical blog provides an opportunity to do just that. In this article, Zara Cooper will take a look at how to deploy a blog for free and with minimal effort using Hugo and Firebase. Read more…

March 27, 2020 — You don’t need to know your trees from your dangling blobs. If you use Git every day and feel like it’s a juggling act, then here are some tricks and tips to help make your life a bit easier. There’s been a lot written about getting started with git, understanding how git works under the hood or techniques for better branching strategies. In this article, Shane Hudson will specifically target the stuff that just makes your life better in a small way. Read more…

March 25, 2020 — In Part 1, Paul explained the basics of the terminal, shared a few productivity hacks to get you started, and how to choose a code editor. In this part, he’ll continue with the topics of version control (Git), HTML and CSS, semantic code, and a brief introduction to some key engineering principles. Read more…

March 20, 2020 — Making your tables sortable in React might sound like a daunting task, but it doesn’t have to be too difficult. In this article, Kristofer Giltvedt Selbbekk is going to show you how to implement all you need to sort out all of your table sorting needs. By the end of this tutorial, you will have found a way to model your state, wrote a generic sorting function, and wrote a way to update what our sorting preferences are. After making sure everything is performant and refactored you will provide a way to indicate the sort order to the user. Read more…

March 19, 2020 — Houdini, an umbrella term for the collection of browser APIs, aims to bring significant improvements to the web development process and the development of CSS standards in general. Frontend developers will be able to extend the CSS with new features using JavaScript, hook into CSS rendering engine and tell the browser how to apply CSS during a render process. Houdini’s browser support is improving and some APIs are available for use today, so it’s a good time to become familiar with them and experiment. We are going to take a look at each part of Houdini, its current browser support and see how they can be used today using progressive enhancement. Read more…

March 18, 2020 — For the purpose of this two-part series of articles, we’re going to assume the answer for “Should designers code?” is “It depends.” If you’ve started and never finished courses in some online coding school — or if you’ve finished the courses but found it difficult to apply this style of learning in your day-to-day work, these two articles will provide a few different learning methods and will highlight different opportunities for their everyday application. In this first part of the series, we’ll take a look at getting comfortable with the command line and text editors. Read more…

March 17, 2020 — There isn’t a ton of mystery when it comes to what makes for an attractive and modern-looking design these days. What’s not always clear, however, is the usability aspect of it. In other words, have the pathways you’ve designed for users intuitive enough? The truth is, it’s all really just a guessing game unless you start getting user feedback early on. Thankfully, Indigo.Design has a usability testing solution to help us out. Read more…

March 13, 2020 — It’s that time of the month! Join us as we share the latest news and highlight the things we’ve been working on and have also enjoyed reading over the past month.

It’s nice to have an overview of the most important things in one place, but do feel free to follow us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and subscribe to our RSS feed as well as our bi-weekly newsletter. We like helping you stay on top of things and making life at least just a little bit easier! Read more…

March 12, 2020 — We are fortunate to have robust patterns to choose from when optimizing accessibility in SVGs — but most people stop there, focusing on code compliance and not actual users and their needs. If true inclusiveness lies beyond patterns — what other factors should we consider when designing and developing accessible SVGs? Read more…

March 6, 2020 — Transliteration is a popular way to input non-English characters using an English keyboard. The typical method of implementing this is via keyboard event capturing but there’s no uniform support from mobile browsers. In this article, Sandamal Siripathi explains a new method to eliminate such browser-related problems when developing web apps that use transliteration. Read more…