15 articles by Juan Diego Rodriguez.
Have you heard of the Screen Orientation API? What about the Device Orientation API, Vibration API, or the Contact Picker API? Juan Diego Rodriguez is interested in these under-the-radar web features and discusses how they can be used to create more usable and robust progressive web apps if and when they gain broader support.
What are these CSS Container Style Queries, and why should you use them? Juan Diego Rodríguez delves deeply into style queries, and not at the syntax level, but at what exactly they are solving and what sort of use cases you would find yourselves reaching for them in your work if and when they gain browser support.
Juan Diego Rodriguez explains why media queries still occupy a vital role in responsive layouts; only they are now one tool in a larger toolbox with modern techniques that are best when used together.
Free-tier pricing is a common marketing strategy. “Free” gets people in the door and allows them to settle in and see how things work. But, as Juan Diego Rodriguez explains, the practice of free *tiers* is often conflated with free *trials*. And while the distinction may be nuanced, the consequences of sunsetting free-tier pricing may be huge.
[“Gatsby headaches”](https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2023/06/gatsby-headaches-i18n-part-1/) are over. Juan Diego Rodríguez reflects on his decision to stop using Gatsby as his go-to framework. Through a detailed examination of its strengths and weaknesses, he provides valuable insights and alternative options for developers navigating their tooling choices.
An overwhelming number of frameworks and tooling available today gives the impression that web development has gotten perhaps too complex. Juan Diego Rodríguez explores if web development really is that complex and, most importantly, how we can prevent it from getting even more difficult than we already perceive it to be.
JavaScript may be the most popular client-side language in the world, but it’s far from perfect and not without its quirks. Juan Diego Rodriguez examines several “absurd” JavaScript eccentricities and explains how they made it into the language as well as how to avoid them in your own code.
Discussing the decisions surrounding JavaScript prototypes, the article by Juan Diego Rodriguez scrutinizes their origin, examines missteps in the design, and explores how these factors have affected the way we write JavaScript today.
Removing properties from an object in JavaScript might not be the most exciting job, but there are many ways to achieve it, each revealing a fundamental aspect of how JavaScript works. Juan Diego Rodríguez explores each technique in this article.
In the final part of this two-part series on solving headaches when working with media files in Gatsby projects, Juan Rodriguez demonstrates strategies and techniques for handling various types of documents, including Markdown files, PDFs, and 3D models.
Discover how to incorporate a variety of media formats, such as images, videos, GIFs, SVGs, and so on, in a Gatsby website. Juan Rodriguez shares what he’s learned about optimizing files for improved performance after working with different plugins and techniques.
Part 2 of the series concentrates on implementing internationalization (i18n) on a Gatsby website, an essential feature on any multilingual website that can be quite a bit of trouble if incorrectly implemented, creating more problems than it solves.
In this first part of a two-part hands-on guide, Juan Rodriguez explains how to use several i18n plugins for Gatsby and reviews some others.
In this article, Juan Diego covers the least known yet extremely useful APIs, such as the Page Visibility API, Web Sharing API, Broadcast Channel API and Internationalization API. Together we will see what they are, where we should use them, and how to use them.
Until a few months ago, Gatsby.js was best suited to make not-so-big Jamstack websites, but with the release of Gatsby 4, how well does Gatsby work with big and rapidly-changing pages? And how will it compare to other frameworks like Next.js? Gatsby 4 came out in October 2021 with a lot of new features. It may seem as if Gatsby 4 didn’t cause a big stir among developers, but it brought several gam