Smashing Newsletter: Issue #222

Editorial

I hope that your January is going well!

Our entire aim here at Smashing Magazine — and my focus as Editor-in-Chief — is to provide the most helpful and interesting content and resources for web professionals. We aim to introduce new tools, the latest technologies and best practices; to give you handy resources to refer back to; and put on interesting live events such as our conferences and webinars.

To be able to do that well, we need to understand the people who read Smashing Magazine, come to our conferences, and sign up as members. Given that we don’t ever get to meet or interact with the majority of folks who visit the site, this can make it quite difficult for us to better understand our readers and subscribers. Many of our Smashing Members join us in Slack, and we get to chat with conference attendees. However, these two groups are small in comparison to our worldwide audience.

Today, we’ve decided to launch a Smashing Survey which will help us create even more relevant content and shape the future of Smashing. The information will be used only here at Smashing to guide our content and our work, to ensure that we are doing the best we can for those who you who give us your time and attention.

The survey contains up to 35 questions and will take you only 5–10 minutes to complete. Complete the survey here.

We look forward to learning more about your experience with Smashing Magazine, and the things that matter to you. We promise to use that information to provide the resources that you need.

Thank you for helping us to help you,
— Rachel Andrew (@rachelandrew)

Find Git Commands The Easy Way
Free Handbook To Get You Started With React
SmashingConf San Francisco 2019
Getting Cross-Cultural Design Right
The Flexbox Holy Albatross
Automating Tedious Release Tasks
A Magical Wrapper Around Nginx
Talks From Accessibility Scotland
Explore The Dimensions Of The World Around You
Upcoming In Smashing Membership
Our Next Smashing Workshops

1. Find Git Commands The Easy Way

There’s probably no developer who knows every git command by heart. Or do you? Before you start digging through the web next time you need a particular command, you might want to give Git Command Explorer a try. The site takes you step by step to the command you’re looking for by asking what exactly it is that you want to do. Once you’ve found the right command — which won’t take more than a few seconds — you can copy it directly to your clipboard. A real timesaver! (cm)

2. Free Handbook To Get You Started With React

With so many resources online, it’s always nice to have a useful reference with all the fine details gather in one place. For anyone exploring the world of React, Flavio Copes has you covered with a free React Handbook.

The book covers the basic building blocks you need to get started — from the JavaScript core concepts to practical React examples and tips for styling, tooling, and testing. You can also read the book for free in your browser or download it in PDF, ePUB, and Kindle formats. (cm)

3. SmashingConf San Francisco 2019 (Apr 16-17)

The web is diverse and fascinating because it’s designed and built by people who are diverse and fascinating. Every year, we’re happy to bring some of these wonderful people together at SmashingConf — to share what they learned in a friendly, diverse and inclusive space. The next one is SmashingConf San Francisco in April, followed by SmashingConf Toronto in June.

SmashingConf SF is a friendly, inclusive event focused on real-world problems and real-world solutions. Convince Your Boss PDF (249 KB).

For 2019, we encourage speakers to show how they work, design and build, live on stage. Take a seat, open your laptop, open a blank canvas and make something wonderful in 40 mins — together with the audience. Session covering live debugging and live redesign, accessibility and security audits, sketching, debugging and refactoring.

In San Francisco, we’re happy to welcome new and old friends — Brad Frost, Sara Soeuidan, Miriam Suzanne, Steve Schoger, Katie Sylor-Miller and so many other speakers. Of course, the tickets are available — and we’d love to welcome you there, too — just sayin’. ;-)

4. Getting Cross-Cultural Design Right

Expanding into new global markets is more than translating an existing product to another language. But even multinational corporations sometimes fail to master the step, as Jenny Shen shows in her article “Cross-Cultural Design and the Role of UX.” So how can you do better? Jenny points out how important it is to adapt every aspect of a product to a market’s unique cultural characteristics. Her seven cross-cultural design guidelines — which were successfully tested, of course — are bound to give you a head-start in cross-cultural design. (cm)

5. The Flexbox Holy Albatross

Heydon Pickering spent half a year trying to solve a particularly vexing CSS layout problem: you want your flex items to wrap in a particular way, but there’s an intermediary layout state you’d like to skip. Solving the issue with a media queries wasn’t an option for Heydon, so after a lot of tinkering, he came up with a much smarter CSS-only solution. Heydon also made a video in which he explains how to create self-governing CSS layouts with Flexbox and Grid. (cm)

6. Automating Tedious Release Tasks

Releasing software can be a tedious task. To make the release workflow more efficient, Lars Kappert built Release It. The repository automates releases for Git repositories and npm packages. It executes tests and builds commands, generates changelogs, publishes to npm, manages pre-releases, and does some other nice things that will save you a lot of time and efforts. Handy! (cm)

7. A Magical Wrapper Around Nginx

Every time you create a new virtual host, this little tool saves you 2-3 minutes of repetitive typing. Jinx is a script for nginx that lets you manage your sites and configurations, and avoid typing in the same set of commands again and again. (ms)

8. Talks From Accessibility Scotland

In case you missed it, Accessibility Scotland have released their videos, slides, and transcripts from speakers like Heather Burns, Vasilis van Gemert, Hampus Sethfors, Phil Day, Paul Bepey, and Curt Holst. Definitely worth watching. (cm)

9. Explore The Dimensions Of The World Around You

A yoga pose, a designer chair, and a dinosaur don’t have that much in common at first sight, except for maybe one thing: all three are part of Dimensions.Guide, an ambitious project that wants to enhance our awareness of the parameters and dimensions of the world around us.(cm)

10. Upcoming In Smashing Membership

While we added our newest book Form Design Patterns to the Smashing Membership only a few weeks ago, we are already working on two new titles which we’ll release early this year! All future eBooks are included in the Smashing Membership.

Coming up next:

Smashing TV: “Get Ready For Gutenberg” with Suzanne Scacca (Jan 29, 11:00 AM Eastern)
Smashing TV: “How A Screen Reader User Surfs The Web” with Léonie Watson (Feb 5, 11:00 AM Eastern)

We are most grateful for your support which allows us to bring you great content, pay all our authors fairly, and reduce advertising on the site. (You could become a Member, too! )

11. Our Next Smashing Workshops

In our workshops, we are looking into the current state of front-end and interface design, covering advanced challenges and actual real-life solutions to front-end problems. Coming up next:

Tel Aviv, Israel, UX Salon, March 11

San Francisco, USA, SmashingConf, April 15 & 18

Toronto, Canada, SmashingConf, June 24 & 27

Or, if you’d like to run an in-house workshop at your office, please get in touch with Vitaly at vitaly@smashingconf.com and briefly describe what problems you’re facing and would like to solve. Get in touch — it’s that easy!

January 22, 2019 Smashing Newsletter: Issue #222

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