Looking Forward: Some Predictions for 2022
As we approach the end of the year, let's look ahead at some trends and predictions for 2022
Updating The Single Most Influential Book of the BASIC Era
In a way, these two books are responsible for my entire professional career. With early computers, you didn’t boot up to a fancy schmancy desktop, or a screen full of apps you could easily poke and prod with your finger. No, those computers booted up to the command line. From here, if you were lucky, you might have a cassette tape drive. If you knew the right commands, you could type them in to lo
2021: Year in review
2021: Year in review
New Year, Fresh Desktop (January 2022 Wallpapers Edition) — Smashing Magazine
What better way could there be to start the new year than with some fresh inspiration? Our collection of wallpapers for January 2022 is bound to put a smile on your face — and maybe spark new ideas, too.
On Yak Shaving and md-block, a new HTML element for Markdown
Lea Verou made a Web Component for processing Markdown. Looks like there were a couple of others out there already, but I agree with Lea in that this is a
Nerd Out on 10 of Our Favorite Posts From 2021 - Shopify
A curated selection of our favorite 2021 posts, spanning technologies & engineering disciplines, with a few classics you still love, read, and share.
How To Price Projects And Manage Scope Creep — Smashing Magazine
Scoping, estimating, and running digital projects can often feel like an exercise in futility. In this article, Paul Boag explains why you need to start breaking your projects down into manageable phases and why that’s the best way to achieve significant benefits.
GitHub’s top 10 blog posts of 2021
As the year winds down, we’re highlighting some of the incredible work from GitHub’s engineers, product teams, and security researchers.
Building Gatsby Themes For WordPress-Powered Websites — Smashing Magazine
Have you already built and published a Gatsby theme? In this article, Paulina Hetman explains how Gatsby themes work and what problems they can solve by comparing Gatsby themes with their WordPress counterparts.
Strut Your Stuff With a Custom Scrollbar
The first time I had my breath taken away by a humble scrollbar was on this very site. When CSS-Tricks v17 rolled out with its FAT CHONKY BOI, my jaw dropped.
Care for the Text
How do you make a great website? Everyone has an answer at the ready: Flashy animations! The latest punk-rock CSS trick! Gradients! Illustrations! Colors to
Fix the unit test and open a giant hole everywhere
Cloudflare Radar's 2021 Year In Review
In 2021, we continued to live with the effects of the COVID pandemic and Internet traffic was also impacted (differently than in 2020) from it.
2021 Roundup of Web Research
Last year, we kicked out a roundup of published surveys, research, and other findings from around the web. There were some nice nuggets in there, like a
Remember You Are Not the User
One thing people can do to make their websites better is to remember that you are not representative of all your users. Our life experiences and how we
Show, Don't Tell
How much time do you spend designing the content presentation for your websites? When you write a new blog post or create a new page, are you thinking about
Creating A Custom Range Input That Looks Consistent Across All Browsers — Smashing Magazine
Range inputs have notoriously been a pain to style. Each browser renders the input differently requiring you to use vendor prefixes in order to create a cohesive look and feel. In this article, we’ll take a look at the quirkiness of the HTML range input and demonstrate how to style the input to look consistent across all major browsers.
Increase Your Reach
NGL, I was a little overwhelmed when I sat down to write this article. There are so many things that immediately flooded my mind—take out any extra divs; use
Useful UX Guidelines, Tools And Resources — Smashing Magazine
A meaningful user experience is what can set your site apart from others. But what makes an experience truly meaningful? And how to achieve that? The tools, tips, and resources in this post not only help you to come up with a UX strategy that works for you and your team but also to circumvent potential UX pitfalls.
Fuzzing sockets: Apache HTTP, Part 3: Results
In this third and last part, I’ll share the results of my research on Apache HTTP server, and I’ll show some of the vulnerabilities that I’ve found.
How GitHub contributed to the Santa Clara Principles update
GitHub was honored to contribute to the Santa Clara Principles on Transparency and Accountability in Content Moderation 2.0.
Shopify’s Unique Data Science Hierarchy Of Needs - Shopify
You’ve probably seen the “Data Science Hierarchy of Needs” (pictured below) before. Inspired by Maslow, it shows the tooling you would use at different levels in data science—from logging and user-generated content at the bottom, to AI and deep learning at the very top. While hierarchies like this one can serve as helpful guides, at Shopify, we don’t think it always captures the whole picture. For
In 2021, the Internet went for TikTok, space and beyond
Join us in our Year in Review 2021 focused on the most popular domains-websites
How to leverage security frameworks and libraries for secure code
In this post, I’ll discuss how to apply OWASP Proactive Control C2: Leverage security frameworks and libraries.
Improving Core Web Vitals, A Smashing Magazine Case Study
How to improve Core Web Vitals, a Smashing Magazine case study on how we detected and fixed the bottlenecks, and how we ended up with green scores, all the way.
Log libraries and the tendency to open holes in things
Supporting Remix with full stack Cloudflare Pages
Cloudflare Pages now natively supports full stack Remix applications
A visual introduction to machine learning
Just the first sentence alone here from Stepanie Yee and Tony Chu is solid:
The surprising behavior of !important in CSS custom property values
Huh! I did not realize that CSS custom properties had their own resolution behavior for how !important works in their values. Uh, despite writing a guide
Getting started with GitHub Actions just got easier!
When you want to create a workflow in the Actions tab of your repository, the recommendations are now based on an analysis of repo content.
Designing Human-Machine Interfaces For Vehicles Of The Future — Smashing Magazine
Modern HMIs are transforming the way we interact with our vehicles. A car becomes a gadget that we use in a similar way as we use our phones. Users expect a lot of HMI, they even evaluate car experience based on the experience they have with HMI. In this article, let’s look at some ways to help us satisfy users’ needs with proper design.
Billing Management For Your Next SaaS Idea Using Stripe And Azure Functions — Smashing Magazine
In every software-as-a-service solution, user billing and payments are key aspects in the sale of services rendered. Let’s learn about Stripe and how the REST API can be programmatically used in serverless functions to manage the billing for an application.
From 0 to 20 billion - How We Built Crawler Hints
Cloudflare Is reducing the environmental impact of web searches with 20+ billions crawler hints delivered so far. This blog describes the technical solution of how we built the Crawler Hints system that makes all this possible.
Working With Web Feeds: It’s More Than RSS
Between Google Chrome experimenting with “following” sites, along with a growing frustration of how social media platforms limit a creator’s reach to their
Consistent, Fluidly Scaling Type and Spacing
When Chris first sent me this prompt, I was thinking about writing about progressive enhancement, but that subject is so wide-reaching to be one thing and all
Topological sort
Jordan Scales explores the computer science concept of topological sorting, and what it might look like if applied to the concept of z-index in CSS. So, you
HTML Sanitizer API
Three cheers for (draft stage) progress on a Sanitizer API! It's gospel that you can't trust user input. And indeed, any app I've ever worked on has dealt
Frame 2021: Design by the numbers
The trends, insights, and surprises that we saw in Figma and FigJam this year
Technical interviews via Codespaces
Codespaces is a great tool for technical hiring exercises and helps level the playing field for candidates.
5 automations every developer should be running
Looking to avoid security vulnerabilities, buttons that don’t work, slow site speeds, or manually writing release notes? This one’s for you.
Power Loss Siren: Making Meta resilient to power loss events
There are thousands of distributed services running on millions of servers in Meta’s data centers. Part of ensuring the reliability of those services means making them resilient to power loss events as our data center fleet grows. To help increase resiliency, we built the Power Loss Siren (PLS) — a rack level, low latency, distributed […]
Protection against CVE-2021-45046, the additional Log4j RCE vulnerability
This vulnerability is actively being exploited and anyone using Log4J should update to version 2.16.0 as soon as possible. Latest version is available on the Log4J download page.
An exposed apt signing key and how to improve apt security
Recently, we received a bug bounty report regarding the GPG signing key used for pkg.cloudflareclient.com, the Linux package repository for our Cloudflare WARP products.
Maybe there kinda is background-opacity?
I was reading Jake's "Cross-fading any two DOM elements is currently impossible" which is a wonderfully nerdy deep dive into how there is no real way to
Scaling the Practice of Architecture, Conversationally
Architecture need not be a monologue; delivered top-down from the minds and mouths of a centralised few. This article describes another way to do architecture; as a series of conversations, driven by a decentralised and empowering decision-making technique, and supported by four learning and alignment mechanisms: Decision Records, Advisory Forum, Team-sourced Principles, and a Technology Radar
A brief history of code search at GitHub
This blog post tells the story of why we built a new search engine optimized for code.
New tool: Mess with DNS!
New tool: Mess with DNS!
Charting the future of our bug bounty program
We’re tackling the industry-wide issue of scraping by expanding our bug bounty program to reward valid reports of scraping bugs and unprotected data sets. To the best of our knowledge, this is an industry first. Looking toward the future, we’re also launching new educational opportunities for researchers and hosting our first BountyConEDU — a three-day […]
Touch Design For Mobile Interfaces: Defining Mobile Devices (Excerpt) — Smashing Magazine
Before we can talk about how people interact, much less how to take advantage of that knowledge and design, it’s important to understand a bit about the history, the technology, and what today counts as a mobile touchscreen device at all. Touchscreens and our standard paradigms of interaction are not the same as the real physical world; touchscreen behaviors are as learned as the use of a mouse or
The future of Svelte, an interview with Rich Harris
In this 45-minute interview, hear Rich Harris (the creator of Svelte) talk about its plans for the future. Other topics include funding open-source, SvelteKit 1.0, the Edge-first future, and more.
Exploitation of Log4j CVE-2021-44228 before public disclosure and evolution of evasion and exfiltration
This article covers WAF evasion patterns and exfiltration attempts, trend data on attempted exploitation, and information on exploitation that we saw prior to the public disclosure of CVE-2021-44228.
Sanitizing Cloudflare Logs to protect customers from the Log4j vulnerability
Many Cloudflare customers consume their logs using software that uses Log4j, so we are mitigating any exploit attempts via Cloudflare Logs.
Think Without Boxes
What’s the one thing people can do to make their website better? Now that is a good question. One with many right answers, like improving performance, taking
Faulty logic
Ain't this the truth:
The Figma prototype challenge: 15 tips in 15 days
What we learned from 15 days of prototypes
You Can't Buy Integration
Commercial integration tools are a couple decades old now, but there has been little in the way of overarching architectural principles describing when and how to use them. In this article, I argue that “buy” decision mechanics have caused us to exaggerate the value proposition of such tools, often leading to mandates to use a certain integration tool over a general purpose language. I claim that
Using GitHub’s security features to help identify Log4j exposure in your codebase
Use GitHub’s security features to assess Apache Log4j exposure and, where possible, mitigate this vulnerability within your GitHub repositories.
How to define security requirements for your OSS project
Defining your security requirements is the most important proactive control you can implement for your project. Here’s how.
A Simple Kubernetes Admission Webhook
While adding a recent feature to our Kubernetes compute platform, we had the need to mutate newly-created pods based on annotations set by users. The mutation needed to follow simple business rules, and didn’t need to keep track of any state. Surely there must be a canonical solution to this simple problem? Well, sort of.…
Modifying Headers In HTTP(s) Requests In UI Automation Testing — Smashing Magazine
To be able to modify headers in a testing environment is a great thing to have, and a very powerful tool. It allows control over your application as one can bypass authentication, set cookies, and so on. In this article, Nafees Nehar explores some methods which allow modification of headers in an automation testing setup.
