Don't Solve Problems, Eliminate Them
How eliminating problems can drastically simplify your codebases and life
A Primer On CSS Container Queries — Smashing Magazine
In more recent years, design systems and component libraries have gained popularity. There is also a desire to build once, deploy anywhere. Meaning a component developed in isolation is intended to work in any number of contexts to make building complex interfaces more efficient and consistent. CSS container queries have landed and are now available for experimentation. Let’s look at what problem
The Conference Platform We Use For Our Online Events: Hopin — Smashing Magazine
At the beginning of 2020, the SmashingConf team was ready for a new year. We had so many things that excited us. New speakers, new workshops, new cities, new attendees, new experiences. And as we all know, 2020 had other ideas. With so many people working from home, we thought we would bring our [Smashing workshops](https://smashingconf.com/online-workshops/) from our home offices to yours — but h
Variable Aspect Ratio Card With Conic Gradients Meeting Along the Diagonal
I recently came across an interesting problem. I had to implement a grid of cards with a variable (user-set) aspect ratio that was stored in a --ratio custom
Migrating from Parcel to Snowpack
I find build tooling endlessly interesting, especially right now as we're in a juicy next-gen transitional period with players like Vite, wmr, Snowpack, and
Security keys are now supported for SSH Git operations
GitHub has been at the forefront of security key adoption for many years. We were an early adopter of Universal 2nd Factor (“U2F”) and were also one of the first…
Most of computing’s carbon emissions are coming from manufacturing and infrastructure
[…]
Get Started With React By Building A Whac-A-Mole Game — Smashing Magazine
Want to get started with React but struggling to find a good place to start? This article should have you covered. We’ll focus on some of the main concepts of React and then we’ll be building a game from scratch!
Poor Disk Performance
Some Typography Links IV
These are a few great links about typography that have been burning a hole in my saved bookmarks folder that I'm just now getting around to sharing. There's good stuff in there, from how to choose typefaces for app design to ideas for how to fix the concept of font sizing in CSS.
Release Radar
We’ve seen some amazing community projects this last month. These are exciting new releases from some of the coolest projects around. There’s everything from world-changing tech to weekend hobbies. There…
How To Organize Product-Related Assets And Collaborate Better — Smashing Magazine
A good management of your product records, i.e. all documents associated with your product — saves time, reduces anxiety, boosts onboarding and makes you ready for vacations or sudden leaves. All product specialists should know the basics. Of course, it would be easier for you to find, say, your July report for investors if everyone on the team named and structured their assets consistently. Let’s
Branch predictor: How many "if"s are too many? Including x86 and M1 benchmarks!
Is it ok to have if clauses that will basically never be run? Surely, there must be some performance cost to that...
Publishing maps with Geoserver and PostGIS
Analysing data within PostGIS is just one side of the coin. This blogpost is about publishing datasets as maps using Geoserver and PostGIS.
GitHub Enterprise Server 3.1 available as a release candidate
GitHub Enterprise Server 3.1 is now available to download as a release candidate. This release follows the most popular GitHub Enterprise Server release in years. GitHub Enterprise Server 3.0 brought…
How I Define My Boundaries to Prevent Burnout - Shopify
There’s a way to build a model for your life and the other demands on you. It doesn’t have to be 100 hours a week. It might not even be 40 hours a week. Whatever sustainable model you come up with, prioritize fiercely and communicate expectations accordingly. I’ve worked this way for three decades through different phases of my life. The hours have changed, but the basic model and principles remai
Improving The Performance Of Shopify Themes (Case Study) — Smashing Magazine
When tackling a big refactor, what are the things you should focus on and what performance improvements can you expect? Dealing with themes for large platforms and CMS, legacy issues often become a bottleneck. In this article, Carson Shold discusses how his team improved the performance and organization of their Shopify themes, and improved maintainability along the way.
GitHub Availability Report: April 2021
In April, we experienced two incidents resulting in significant impact and degraded state of availability for API requests and the GitHub Packages service, specifically the GitHub Packages Container registry service.…
Reducing HTML Payload With Next.js (Case Study) — Smashing Magazine
This article showcases a case study of Bookaway’s landing page performance. It’s about a couple of things that Bookaway faced and Liran Cohen (as part of a company in the traveling industry) managed to optimize the pages, so that the HTML they send is smaller. Smaller HTML means less time for Google to download and process those long strings of text. Today you’ll see how taking care of the props y
Jetpack Backup: Roll Back Your WooCommerce Site Without Losing Orders
Here's a dilemma: what happens if your WooCommerce site has a problem and the quickest and best way to fix it is to roll back to a previous version? The
Let’s use (X, X, X, X) for talking about specificity
I was just chatting with Eric Meyer the other day and I remembered an Eric Meyer story from my formative years. I wrote a blog post about CSS specificity, and
Creating Colorful, Smart Shadows
A bona fide CSS trick from Kirupa Chinnathambi here. To match a colored shadow with the colors in the background-image of an element, you inherit the
How we use Web Components at GitHub
At GitHub, we pride ourselves on delivering a first-class developer experience. A considerable part of our work is on our front end, which we strive to keep as lightweight, fast,…
A Guide To Undoing Mistakes With Git (Part 1) — Smashing Magazine
No matter how experienced you are, mistakes are an inevitable part of software development. But we can learn to repair them! During the course of this article, you’ll witness many disasters — but you’ll see that virtually nothing is beyond repair in Git! Once you know the right commands, you can always find a way to save your neck. And this is what Tobias will be looking at in this two-part series
Smashing Podcast Episode 36 With Miriam Suzanne: What Is The Future Of CSS? — Smashing Magazine
In this episode, we’re starting our new season of the Smashing Podcast with a look at the future of CSS. What new specs will be landing in browsers soon? Drew McLellan talks to expert Miriam Suzanne to find out.
Swipey Image Grids
I hope people think of SVG as a vector format that is good for drawing things. There is plenty more to know, but here's one more: SVG is good for composition.
Super Simple Start to Remix
The simplest distraction-free version of a remix app
The Evolution Of Jamstack — Smashing Magazine
Web-oriented databases, frameworks like Nuxt and Next.js, and even frameworkless approaches are evolving the Jamstack, but the core principles are more powerful than ever. As the developer community has grown, there’s also been more noise, and we’re even starting to test the boundaries of Jamstack’s best practices. It feels like the right time to both revisit the original vision some of us had fiv
I put all of my comics online!
I put all of my comics online!
Python and me, or when in Rome...
The Honest Troubleshooting Code of Conduct
A Product Story: The Lessons of Backstage and Spotify’s Autonomous Culture
TLDR; In episode 08 of our podcast series “”, we share stories and lessons from building and open sourcing , our homegrown developer portal. Hear why a developer-friendly, market-based platform like Backstage could only have been developed at Spotify (where autonomy is prized, not top-down mandates) and why that ends up making Backstage such a flexible fit for other companies, too. and get all our
Spotify Wins CNCF’s Top End User Award and Toots Own Horn About It
Last week, Spotify won an award — and we’re not playing it cool. We . We bragged . Our internal Slack is alive with emoji and exclamation points. We’re really very proud of this one.
Achieving Team Purpose and Pride with Scrum
Team purpose and pride — my team hit those high marks, but it was a long journey to get there from where we started.
Safari 14.1 Adds Support for Flexbox Gaps
Yay, it's here! Safari 14.1 reportedly adds support for the gap property in flexbox layouts. We've had grid-gap support for some time, but true to its name,
Web Languages as Compile Targets
Jim Nielsen quoting Eric Bailey:
Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For April 30th, 2021 - High Scalability -
Hey, HighScalability is back! This channel is the perfect blend of programming, hardware, engineering, and crazy. After watching you’ll feel inadequate, but in an entertained sort of way. Love this Stuff? I need your support on Patreon to keep this stuff going. Do employees at your company need to know about the cloud? My book will teach them all they need to know. Explain the Cloud Like I'm 10. O
The chilling effect versus attempts to fix things
May Is In The Air (2021 Wallpapers Edition) — Smashing Magazine
Do you need a little inspiration boost? Well, then our new collection of wallpapers is for you. Designed with love by the community for the community, the wallpapers are available with and without a calendar for May 2021.
How to Monitor Core Web Vitals and Take Action with Raygun
Raygun is an error and performance monitoring software for websites and mobile apps. In the case of websites, you install their JavaScript snippet onto your
List Markers and String Styles
Lists—we’ve all worked with them in one form or another. I’m talking about HTML’s <ol> and <ul>. Much of the time, because we desire styling
TLS: Demystifying communication encryption in PostgreSQL
TLS is a technology widely used in combination with PostgreSQL to encrypt client / server connections. This blogpost explains how TLS works.
Goodbye Dependabot Preview, hello Dependabot!
Dependabot Preview has helped more than 30,000 organizations keep their packages updated with more than seven million pull requests merged since it launched. As a result of that success, the…
A call for feedback on our policies around exploits and malware
April 30, 2021 update: Thank you to everyone who’s weighed in on the discussion so far. I’ve commented in the pull request to clarify a few points based on initial…
Scaling monorepo maintenance
At GitHub, we serve some of the largest Git repositories on the planet. We also serve some of the fastest-growing repositories. Each day, the largest repositories we host become even…
A brief history of Rust at Facebook
Facebook is embracing Rust, one of the most loved and fastest-growing programming languages available today. In addition to bringing new talent to its Rust team, Facebook has announced that it is officially joining the nonprofit Rust Foundation. Alongside fellow members including Mozilla (the creators of Rust), AWS, Microsoft, and Google, Facebook will be working to […]
The Humble Element And Core Web Vitals — Smashing Magazine
Images have also been a key part of the web. They communicate ideas instantly, but they are also a lot heavier than text to load. This means that it’s essential to get loading and displaying them right, if you want to give your users a fantastic first impression. An excerpt from Addy Osmani
GitHub Desktop supports hiding whitespace, expanding diffs, and creating repository aliases
GitHub Desktop 2.8 now includes several new features to make it easier to work with diffs and easier for people who have multiple copies of the same repository. Expand diffs…
How we use GitHub Actions to manage GitHub Docs
👋 Hello from the GitHub Docs team! We build everything you see at docs.github.com. Over the past year, we’ve written a bunch of GitHub Actions workflows to do some fun…
A Five-Step Guide for Conducting Exploratory Data Analysis - Shopify
Have you ever been handed a dataset and then been asked to describe it? When I was first starting out in data science, this question confused me. My first thought was “What do you mean?” followed by “Can you be more specific?” The reality is that exploratory data analysis (EDA) is a critical tool in every data scientist’s kit, and the results are invaluable for answering important business questio
Meet Image Optimization, A New Smashing Book By Addy Osmani — Smashing Magazine
The cat is out! For the last year, we’ve been working with Addy Osmani on a new Smashing Book all around image optimization. And now it’s here. Meet “Image Optimization”, our practical modern guide to delivering high-quality images on the web with the best performance. Image optimization, loading behavior and rendering in the browser require understanding of image formats and image compression tec
SSHing to my Raspberry Pi 400 from a browser, with Cloudflare Tunnel and Auditable Terminal
This is how I set up a Pi 400 on my home network, used Cloudflare Tunnel to connect it to the Cloudflare network, used Auditable Terminal to connect to the Pi 400 via Cloudflare and the tunnel using nothing more than a browser.
PostgreSQL: Understanding deadlocks
"ERROR: deadlock detected" - message - what should I do? This article explains what this really means and how deadlocks can be prevented.
Introducing branching: space to iterate and explore freely
Announcing branching in beta
Mind the platform execution gap
Developer productivity platforms are increasingly recognised as a way to manage the cognitive load of engineering teams and decrease time to market for new features. However, there are baseline capabilities that organisations need to cultivate in order to successfully execute on a plaform strategy. The platform team needs to think of the platform as a software product, needing dialog with its user
How we ship code faster and safer with feature flags
At GitHub, we’re continually working to improve existing features and shipping new ones all the time. From our launch of GitHub Discussions to the release of manual approvals for GitHub…
Reverse debugging at scale
Say you receive an email notification that a service is crashing just after your last code change deploys. The crash happens in only 0.1 percent of the servers where it runs. But you’re at a large-scale company, so 0.1 percent equals thousands of servers — and this issue is going to be hard to reproduce. Several […]
Understanding Easing Functions For CSS Animations And Transitions — Smashing Magazine
Easing functions can change the look and feel of an animation by affecting the rate, or speed, of an animation. As human beings, we are accustomed to a natural, non-linear motion. Using those custom-easing functions in the animations can lead to an improved impression on users and a more delightful user experience. In this article, we’re going to take a deep dive into easing functions and see how
Project Jengo Redux: Cloudflare’s Prior Art Search Bounty Returns
On March 15th, 2021, Cloudflare was sued by a patent troll called Sable Networks. Today, we are launching our efforts to fight back.
Exploring color-contrast() for the First Time
Update! The color-contrast() function has been renamed to contrast-color(). See this article to get more recent information and use cases.