Keeping that tight-knit feeling, at a distance
A round-up of tips and activities to keep your team close.
Learn about open source in the social sector from our latest report
Learn more about open source’s impact in the social sector from the Open Source for Good research paper.
One Team at Uber is Moving from Microservices to Macroservices - High Scalability -
There may be an undiscovered tribe deep in some jungle somewhere that hasn’t made up their mind on microservices, but I doubt it. People love microservices or love to hate microservices. There’s not much in between. So it means something when even a team at a company like Uber announces a change away from microservices to something else. What? Macroservices. But we’ll get to that. Think what you w
How To Set Up An Express API Backend Project With PostgreSQL — Smashing Magazine
In this article, Chidi Orji will create a set of API endpoints using [Express](https://expressjs.com/) from scratch in ES6 syntax, and cover some development best practices. Find out how all the pieces work together as you create a small project using Continuous Integration and Test-Driven Development before deploying to Heroku.
Simpler Pricing
Project Crossbow: Lessons from Refactoring a Large-Scale Internal Tool
Crossbow is a tool that is now allowing Cloudflare’s Technical Support Engineers to perform diagnostic activities from running commands (like traceroutes, cURL requests and DNS queries) to debugging product features and performance features using bespoke tools.
CSS Findings From The New Facebook Design
Ahmad Shadeed digs around the new Facebook's front-end code.
How to Re-Create a Nifty Netflix Animation in CSS
The design for Netflix's browse page has remained pretty similar for a few years now. One mainstay component is the preview slider that allows users to scroll
Celebrating 15 years of Git: An interview with Git maintainer Junio Hamano
GitHub is built on Git, and as Git celebrates its 15th anniversary, our own Jeff King interviews Git maintainer Junio Hamano about Git’s impact over the years.
Styling Ordered Lists with CSS Counters
Styling an ordered list can be surprisingly tricky; there's no way to get at that bullet! In this tutorial, we'll see a handy trick using CSS counters that lets us style ordered lists without breaking proper semantics.
Building Arrive's Confetti in React Native with Reanimated - Shopify
Shopify is investing in React Native as our primary choice of mobile technology moving forward. As a part of this we’ve rewritten our package tracking app Arrive with React Native and launched it on Android—an app that previously only had an iOS version. One of the most cherished features by the users of the Arrive iOS app is the confetti that rains down on the screen when an order is delivered. T
Smashing Podcast Episode 13 With Laura Kalbag: What Is Online Privacy? — Smashing Magazine
In this episode of the Smashing Podcast we’re talking about online privacy. What should web developers be doing to make sure the privacy of our users is maintained? Drew McLellan talks to an expert on the subject, Laura Kalbag, to find out.
Conntrack tales - one thousand and one flows
We were wondering - can we just enable Linux "conntrack"? How does it actually work? I volunteered to help the team understand the dark corners of the Linux's "conntrack" stateful firewall subsystem.
A Grid of Logos in Squares
Let's build a literal grid of squares, and we'll put the logos of some magazines centered inside each square. I imagine plenty of you have had to build a logo
The State Reducer Pattern with React Hooks
A pattern for you to use in custom hooks to enhance the power and flexibility of your hooks.
A Day in the Life of a Backend Product Engineer at Slack
7am I’m definitely not a morning person, so when my alarm goes off, I can’t help but stay in bed a little while longer. I have two cats, Stella and Orion, who are especially cuddly in the mornings, so it’s hard to leave them and get out of bed. My cats are well known by…
Create Your Free Developer Blog Using Hugo And Firebase — Smashing Magazine
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 e
CSS-Only Marquee Effect
You make sure the text is more than twice the width of the screen, then use negative translate animations to do the marquee movement.
Function forms
When I prefer to use function declarations instead of arrow functions
Trailblazing a Development Environment for Workers
When I arrived at Cloudflare for an internship in the summer of 2018, I was taken on a tour, introduced to my mentor who took me out for coffee (shoutout to Preston), and given a quick whiteboard overview of how Cloudflare works.
Some Typography Links II
I just can't stop bookmarking great links related to typography. I'm afraid I'm going to have to subject you, yet again, to a bunch of them all grouped up. So
Getting JavaScript to Talk to CSS and Sass
JavaScript and CSS have lived beside one another for upwards of 20 years. And yet it’s been remarkably tough to share data between them. There have been large
Google's Technical Writing Guide
It's good!
Releasing The Ethical Design Handbook When We Needed It Most — Smashing Magazine
Early this month, [The Ethical Design Handbook](https://www.smashingmagazine.com/printed-books/ethical-design-handbook/) joined the Smashing Library of essential books for designers and developers. Changes around the world have meant changes in the book release, but readers love it so far! Ethical Design principles are timeless and we are seeing the results of that during an unprecedented time of
The Mistake that Caused 1.1.1.3 to Block LGBTQIA+ Sites Today
Today we made a mistake. The mistake caused a number of LGBTQIA+ sites to inadvertently be blocked by the new 1.1.1.1 for Families service. I wanted to walk through what happened, why, and what we've done to fix it.
Cloudflare Doubling Size of 2020 Summer Intern Class
Today we are announcing that we will double the size of Cloudflare’s summer 2020 internship class.
Accessibility Links
Austin Gil has kicked off the first in a five-part series about "HTML Forms Right" and to starts with semantics. It's talking to the "we build our front-ends
typespecimens.io
If you’re looking for a new typeface for that side project of yours then here’s a great website by John D. Jameson that collects a bunch of the latest type
Why Do Some HTML Elements Become Deprecated?
The internet has been around for a long while, and over time we’ve changed the way we think about web design. Many old techniques and ways of doing things
Rethinking Code Comments
Justin Duke asks if treating code comments like footnotes could help us understand the code in a file better. In his mockup, all the comments are hidden by
GitHub Protips: Tips, tricks, hacks, and secrets from Vitor Monteiro
There are lots of hidden secrets, keyboard shortcuts, hacks, and more that can make you and your team’s GitHub experience more productive, personal, and entertaining. Here are some Protips that Vitor Monteiro, GitHub Strategic Architect, has picked up along the way that might be useful to you.
Django Highlights: Templating Saves Lines (Part 2) — Smashing Magazine
Creating front-end code in Django with templating and server-side rendering combines the fine-grained control of handwritten HTML with the clean code and powerful features of generated pages. We explore breaking down a complex webpage into multiple templates, composing those components, and applying tags and filters to refactor a plain HTML page.
Announcing the Beta for WARP for macOS and Windows
While WARP started as an option within the 1.1.1.1 app, it's really a technology that can benefit any device connected to the Internet. In fact, one of the most common requests we've gotten over the last year is support for WARP for macOS and Windows. Today we're announcing exactly that.
Introducing 1.1.1.1 for Families
Introducing 1.1.1.1 for Families — the easiest way to add a layer of protection to your home network and protect it from malware and adult content.
Cloudflare now supports security keys with Web Authentication (WebAuthn)!
We’re excited to announce that Cloudflare now supports security keys as a two factor authentication (2FA) method for all users.
Performant Expandable Animations: Building Keyframes on the Fly
Animations have come a long way, continuously providing developers with better tools. CSS Animations, in particular, have defined the ground floor to solve
How Students Who Design set up Figma in their online classroom
Learn how SWD onboards students, organizes files, teaches classes, and provides project feedback with Figma for their online courses.
Building A Web App With Headless CMS And React — Smashing Magazine
In this article, Blessing Krofegha introduces the concept of the headless CMS, a backend-only content management system that allows developers to create, store, manage and publish the content over an API. It gives developers the power to quickly build excellent user experiences, free from the worry of its impact on the back-end business logic.
How We Use Backstage at Spotify
is Spotify’s homegrown developer portal. We’ve been using it internally for years, but only recently released the open source version. You can read more about what Backstage does, and our plans for its future, in our previous post, “”
Stefan Ålund: Senior Product Manager
I usually get up way earlier than this, because it’s a 20-minute subway ride to the office and I have three children to drop off at school en route. But right now, we’re all staying home for the foreseeable future and that means I can take things a little slower, get up a little later and have an extra cup of coffee with my wife in the mornings. It’s a silver lining in this crazy situation.
Reach for the Top: How Spotify Built Shortcuts in Just Six Months
The , which now appears at the top of Spotify Home, is an important step forward in how listeners experience their favorite music and podcasts. Engineering Manager, Damien Tardieu, tells the story behind the launch of this exciting new feature and why the methodology chosen to support its development was the foundation for success.
When Should I Write an Architecture Decision Record
An Architecture Decision Record (ADR) is a document that captures a decision, including the context of how the decision was made and the consequences of adopting the decision. At Spotify, a handful of teams use ADRs to document their decisions. One of these teams, The Creator Team, focuses on providing tools for creators to express themselves on Spotify, as well as access data about their content.
Introducing the Spotify Podcast Dataset and TREC Challenge 2020
Podcasts are exploding in popularity. Since 2015, we’ve added hundreds of thousands of shows, and users are listening more and more. With the additions of acquisitions including Gimlet and Parcast, we have a whole host of expertly created content, and with the addition of DIY podcasting platform Anchor, now everyone has access to tools to create their own podcast and publish it to Spotify, so the
Ann Clifton: Senior Research Scientist
I like to start the day slowly – I’m not a morning person, so my husband kindly walks the dogs while I enjoy the peace and quiet, and wake myself up with a matcha or kombucha. After that, I’m more ready to get going and start to think about the day ahead of me.
Announcing the Results of the 1.1.1.1 Public DNS Resolver Privacy Examination
We took a big step toward improving Internet privacy and security with the launch of the 1.1.1.1 public DNS resolver. And we really meant privacy first. We were not satisfied with the status quo and believed that secure DNS resolution with transparent privacy practices should be the new normal.
How to run a remote brainstorm
The Figma team shares tips for running a remote brainstorm, based on what’s working well for us.
Optimizing Ruby Lazy Initialization in TruffleRuby with Deoptimization - Shopify
Shopify's involvement with TruffleRuby began half a year ago, with the goal of furthering the success of the project and Ruby community. TruffleRuby is an alternative implementation of the Ruby language (where the reference implementation is CRuby, or MRI) developed by Oracle Labs. TruffleRuby has high potential in speed, as it is nine times faster than CRuby on optcarrot, a NES emulator benchmark
What Should You Do When A Web Design Trend Becomes Too Popular? — Smashing Magazine
By now, you’re probably used to seeing design trends come and go. But have you ever given any thought to what passing trends do to a website when left there for too long? As a web designer, you have a few choices. You can ignore popular design trends altogether; you can adopt them, but pull them out of rotation the second they go stale, or you can put your own unique spin on them. This guide will
Stay Creative, Stay Inspired (April 2020 Wallpapers Edition) — Smashing Magazine
Let’s welcome the new month with some fresh wallpapers. Designed with love by artists and designers from across the globe, they are available with and without a calendar for April 2020.
Introducing Quicksilver: Configuration Distribution at Internet Scale
At peak, Cloudflare’s network processes more than 14 million HTTP requests per second. We spend a lot of time thinking about the tools we use to make those requests faster and more secure.
How They Fit Together: Transform, Translate, Rotate, Scale, and Offset
Firefox 72 was first out of the gate with "independent transforms." That is, instead of having to combine transforms together, like:
RSS Stuff
Laura Kalbag wrote How to read RSS in 2020. This would be a nice place to send someone curious about RSS: what it is, what it's for, and how you can start
gqless
This is so cool. I mean, GraphQL is already cool. It's very satisfying to write an understandable-looking query for whatever you want and then use that data
4 CSS Grid Properties (and One Value) for Most of Your Layout Needs
CSS Grid provides us with a powerful layout system for websites. The CSS-Tricks guide gives you a comprehensive overview of Grid’s properties with layout
How Otter.ai automatically transcribes your media files in Dropbox
You can now automatically transcribe your media files in Dropbox by using the Otter.ai integration. Welcome to the future of work.
Pair Programming
Post: InterviewCamp.io, Scrapinghub, Fauna, Sisu, Educative, PA File Sight, Etleap, Triplebyte, Stream - High Scalability -
Who's Hiring? * InterviewCamp.io has hours of system design content. They also do live system design discussions every week. They break down interview prep into fundamental building blocks. Try out their platform. * Scrapinghub is hiring a Senior Software Engineer (Big Data/AI). You will be designing and implementing distributed systems: large-scale web crawling platform, integrating Deep Learning
Announcing “use-sound”, a React Hook for Sound Effects
By and large, using the web is a visual experience. This is in terrible contrast to mobile apps, which interact with three of our human senses (sight, sound, and touch, through haptic feedback). I just released a library to make it easy to add sound to your React app, and I make the case that you should consider using it!
Replace axios with a simple custom fetch wrapper
Axios can do a ton of stuff, but here's a simpler solution that can handle most use cases
Visual Design Language: The Building Blocks Of Design — Smashing Magazine
We use language as a tool for communication with other people. Writers use words to communicate with their readers, while designers use visual language to communicate with their users. Fonts, colors, shapes, visual elements such as icons — those are elements of design language. Effective design language streamlines communication. A robust visual design language is the cornerstone of good design. I
