Smashing Newsletter: Issue #236

Editorial

In the last few weeks, I had the pleasure of being on the Shoptalk Podcast to chat with Chris Coyier and Dave Rupert. We talked about writing for technical publications.

Here at Smashing (due to our daily schedule), we are always looking for writers. As we have an editorial team who is able to work with you on your article, we are very open to new voices. We won’t turn down your proposal due to a lack of writing credits; I am far more interested in a great story or solid tutorial than I am about your previous work.

I began writing about web development to share the things I was learning as I went about learning them. I had no background as a writer — I left school at 16. When I was asked to contribute two chapters to a book, I thought it was unlikely I would be able to produce something good enough. Yet, almost 20 years later, I have a huge string of writing credits to my name. Writing about the web is the thing that has opened more doors for me than anything else. I was given chances to get started in writing, and I love the fact that at Smashing we are often the first large publication for many of our writers.

Your first contact with a publication is typically your article pitch. Different publications will ask for slightly different things here, so it’s always worth checking out what each publication requires. I do know that it can be quite daunting pitching your ideas for the first time. To that end, I’ve written a guide on how to pitch to publications — heavily weighted towards technical publications such as us at Smashing as well as our friends over at CSS-Tricks and A List Apart.

Have a great week, and take note of the interesting things you are working on that might make a great article for the Smashing community!

— Rachel Andrew (@rachelandrew)

Cheatsheet For Moving From jQuery To Vanilla JavaScript
Animated Dynamic Charts With React
Grow As A Design Manager
Ladybug, A Podcast About Debugging The Tech Industry
An Introduction To inputmode
Accessibility Testing Made Easy
The Long-Term Impact Of Your Work
Work Responsibly
Upcoming In Smashing Membership
Our Next Smashing Workshops

1. Cheatsheet For Moving From jQuery To Vanilla JavaScript

With browser support of ES6 having reached more than 96%, it might be a good idea to move away from jQuery to accomplish basic tasks like fetching data, selecting elements, styling and animating them, as Tobias Ahlin argues.

Tobias took the step away from jQuery himself, and since he had to Google over and over again to find out how to substitute the common patterns he had used jQuery for with vanilla JavaScript, he summarized his findings in a handy reference guide that is bound to make your life easier, too. One for the bookmarks. (cm)

2. Animated Dynamic Charts With React

Data visualization doesn’t need to be boring — a lot of fantastic examples out there prove that! So if you’d like to breathe some life into your data charts, Daniel Sternlicht’s React Dynamic Charts library might just what you need.

The library animates your dynamic charts and offers some nice little details to customize the experience: you can add images rather than plain text as a label, start the animation after a certain timeout or trigger it with a start button. And the styling can be changed and controlled, too, of course. Thank you for sharing, dear Daniel! (cm)

3. Grow As A Design Manager

Managing a team always comes with special challenges. How do you scale your team and find and onboard new talent? How can you help the designers in the team grow? And what if conflicts arise, how do you best go about resolving them? To help you master these challenges, design leaders from Dropbox, Shopify, Atlassian, and other companies and startups share their advice as a part of the “Grow as a Design Manager” Playbook. Practical tips from real life. (cm)

4. Ladybug, A Podcast About Debugging The Tech Industry

Could there possibly be a better name for an all lady-hosted tech podcast about debugging the web as, well, Ladybug? That’s probably what Kelly Vaughn, Ali Spittel, Emma Wedekind, and Lindsey Kopacz had in mind, too, when they started their Ladybug Podcast (which is aimed at all developers, not only women, by the way) back in July.

In each episode, they talk about tech, entrepreneurship, and careers. Balancing side projects was among the topics they discussed already, just like starting a blog, exciting new web technologies, the impostor syndrome, and CSS fundamentals. Each episode is between half an hour and an hour long and a new one is coming up each week. Entertaining and inspiring. (cm)

5. An Introduction To `inputmode`

The inputmode attribute that helps browsers on devices with on-screen keyboards decide which keyboard to display (e.g. telephone, numeric, email, search) has been around for long, but it wasn’t until a few months ago that Safari for iOS and Chrome for Android adopted it. Time to get familiar with the concept. Christian Oliff’s article “Everything You Wanted To Know About inputmode” is a great primer to dive deeper into the attribute and how to make use of it. (cm)

6. Accessibility Testing Made Easy

The Paciello Group is known for its efforts to help make websites and applications accessible for everyone. To help you integrate accessibility testing into your development workflow, they released the free ARC Toolkit. Available as a Chrome extension, it enables you to evaluate screens for accessibility and uncover and address issues related to the WCAG 2.1 Level A and AA. Handy! (cm)

7. The Long-Term Impact Of Your Work

The tech industry is advancing at such a fast pace and technologies which sounded like sci-fi have become or are about to become part of our reality. But what impact will the work you do today have on the future? Will it be used against people? To spread misinformation, build a surveillance state, or do other harm in unexpected ways?

The Ethical OS Toolkit helps you and your team anticipate the future impact of today’s technology so that you can make choices that actively safeguard users, communities, and society from future risk. Or as the creators of Ethical OS put it: “The last thing you want is to get blindsided by a future you helped create.” (cm)

8. Work Responsibly

Always running on maximum capacity, hustling, and exposed to pressure and unrealistic expectations, a lot of people in the tech industry struggle with an unhealthy lifestyle. With his new project Work Responsibly, Ales Nesetril wants to open up a conversation about this and about the benefits that a balanced, mindful, and more responsible approach to work can have.

To start the conversation, he collects resources that help lead and promote healthy habits — from practical tips to better cope with stress and finding better sleep to strategies to stay focused. A good opportunity to reconsider how we work. (cm)

9. Upcoming In Smashing Membership

Thank you for being smashing! A few weeks ago, we released the brand-new Smashing Magazine Print, with practical and thought-provoking articles on ethics and privacy to make us all think. Members ($5 plan) receive the digital version for free, Smashers ($9 plan) get the printed issue shipped directly to their doorsteps. And we have a new webinar coming up as well (new ones are already being planned):

Smashing TV on August 20 at 16:00 GMT
Interactive Web Animation With SVG with Cassie Evans
Smashing TV on August 27 at 16:00 GMT
“Inspired By: Alexey Brodovitch” with Andrew Clarke
Smashing TV on Sept. 3 at 16:00 GMT
“WebAssembly: How And Why” with Milica Mihajlija
Smashing TV on Sept. 17 at 16:00 GMT
“Image Optimization” with Colin Bendell

Dear friends, thank you for your kind support. It allows us to bring you great content, pay all our contributors fairly, and reduce advertising on the site. (Ah, you could become a Smashing Member, too! Join us in Smashingland where everyone is beautiful and you never get merge conflicts. 😉)

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:

🇨🇭 Front Conference (Aug 29–30) in Zürich, Switzerland.
🇩🇪 SmashingConf Freiburg (Sept 9–10) in Freiburg, Germany.
🇨🇿 WebExpo (Sept 20–22) in Prague, Czechia.
🇺🇸 Awwwards Digital Thinkers (Sept 25–27) in NYC, USA.

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! (vf)

August 20, 2019 Smashing Newsletter: Issue #236

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