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Year 2021

1,767 articles published in 2021.

Engineering — New global ID format coming to GraphQL

New global ID format coming to GraphQL

The GitHub GraphQL API has been publicly available for over 4 years now. Its usage has grown immensely over time, and we’ve learned a lot from running one of the…

WAWissam AbirachedWissam Abirached·February 10, 2021Engineering
Engineering — Technical Mentorship Reimagined: Time-bound and No Awkward Asks Necessary - Shopify

Technical Mentorship Reimagined: Time-bound and No Awkward Asks Necessary - Shopify

Authors: Sarah Naqvi and Steve Lounsbury Struggling with a concept and frantically trying to find the answers online? Are you thinking: I should just ping a teammate or Is this something I should already know? That’s fine, I’ll ask anyway. And then you do ask and get an answer and are feeling pretty darn proud of yourself and move forward. But wait, now I have about 25 follow-up questions. Sound f

SEShopify Engineering·February 10, 2021Engineering
Security — 2020 U.S. Election: Cybersecurity Analysis

2020 U.S. Election: Cybersecurity Analysis

As we protect many entities in the election space, we have the ability to identify, learn and analyze attack trends targeted at these sites that provide authoritative election information.

JJocelynJocelyn·February 9, 2021Security
Frontend — Nested Media Queries

Nested Media Queries

We don't have "regular" nesting in CSS. Maybe this becomes a thing someday, or something like it. That would be cool, although that pre-spec doesn't mention

CCChris Coyier·February 9, 2021Frontend
Frontend — An Interactive Guide to CSS Transitions

An Interactive Guide to CSS Transitions

This comprehensive guide shows how to use CSS transitions! A back-to-basics look at the fundamental building blocks we need to create microinteractions and other animations.

JWJosh W. Comeau·February 9, 2021Frontend
Engineering — Getting The Most Out Of Git — Smashing Magazine

Getting The Most Out Of Git — Smashing Magazine

Git has so many powerful features under the hood! From Interactive Rebase to Submodules and from the Reflog to File History, these advanced features help you become more productive and make fewer mistakes. In this article, Tobias explores some of the less known but very useful features in Git. You’ll learn how to recover deleted commits, clean up your commit history, use submodules to manage third

TGTobias GuentherTobias Guenther·February 9, 2021Engineering
Engineering — Congratulations to Cloudflare’s 2020 Partner Award Winners

Congratulations to Cloudflare’s 2020 Partner Award Winners

We are privileged to share Cloudflare’s inaugural set of Partner Awards. These Awards recognize our partner companies and representatives worldwide who stood out this past year for their investments in acquiring technical expertise in our offerings

MKMatthew, KristinaMatthew, Kristina·February 8, 2021Engineering
Frontend — Managing CSS Z-Index In Large Projects — Smashing Magazine

Managing CSS Z-Index In Large Projects — Smashing Magazine

We use abstractions and conventions to hide away the tricky and error-prone parts, which in turn makes it easier for everyone who needs to do the same task. The ideas Steven Frieson shares here should be actionable in most applications depending on your styling solution and browser support. Migrating to use this system is not very risky since stacking contexts are already scoped individually; you

SFSteven FriesonSteven Frieson·February 8, 2021Frontend
Engineering — Release Radar

Release Radar

Not everyone takes a break over the festive season. Some people in the community have been busy shipping releases. So we’re here to bring you the latest and greatest releases…

MDMichelle DukeMichelle Duke·February 5, 2021Engineering
SRE & Ops — Open-sourcing Thrift for Haskell

Open-sourcing Thrift for Haskell

What it is: Thrift is a serialization and remote procedure call (RPC) framework used for cross-service communication. Most services at Facebook communicate via Thrift because it provides a simple, language-agnostic protocol for communicating with structured data. Thrift can already be used in programming languages such as C++, Python, and Java using fbthrift. We are also […]

MEMeta Engineering·February 5, 2021SRE & Ops
Design & UX — How we illustrate at GitHub

How we illustrate at GitHub

In the fourth installment of our five-part series on building GitHub’s new homepage, we’ll explore the artistic pipeline at GitHub to explain story, character and color, and to show how…

TJTony JaramilloTony Jaramillo·February 4, 2021Design & UX
Performance — Deployment reliability at GitHub

Deployment reliability at GitHub

Last week, we described how we improved the deployment experience for github.com. When we describe deployments at GitHub, the deployment experience is an important part of what it takes to ship applications to production, especially at GitHub’s scale, but there is more to it: the actual deployment mechanics need to be fast and reliable.

RDRaffaele Di FazioRaffaele Di Fazio·February 3, 2021Performance
Design & UX — Designing Better Tooltips For Mobile User Interfaces — Smashing Magazine

Designing Better Tooltips For Mobile User Interfaces — Smashing Magazine

Tooltips are powerful design patterns implemented to enhance the design experience by providing additional information precisely when users need it. The key to designing tooltips that fit seamlessly into the overall design is to plan for them early in the design process. Specifically, designing useful tooltips requires proper timing and proper implementation. In this article, Eric Olive will show

EOEric OliveEric Olive·February 3, 2021Design & UX
SRE & Ops — GitHub Availability Report: January 2021

GitHub Availability Report: January 2021

Introduction In January, we experienced one incident resulting in significant impact and degraded state of availability for the GitHub Actions service. January 28 04:21 UTC (lasting 3 hours 53 minutes)…

KBKeith BallingerKeith Ballinger·February 2, 2021SRE & Ops
Engineering — How To Port Your Web App To Microsoft Teams — Smashing Magazine

How To Port Your Web App To Microsoft Teams — Smashing Magazine

On your list of places where people might access your web app, Teams is probably number “not-on-the-list”. But it turns out that making your app accessible where your users are already working has some profound benefits. In this article, Tomomi Imura and Daisy Chaussee will take a look at how Teams makes web apps a first-class citizen, and how it enables you to interact with those apps in complete

TITomomi Imura Daisy ChausseeTomomi Imura Daisy Chaussee·February 2, 2021Engineering
Engineering — "Cancelable" Smooth Scrolling

"Cancelable" Smooth Scrolling

Here's the situation: Your site offers a "scroll back to top" button, and you've implemented smooth scrolling. As the page scrolls back to the top, users see

CCChris Coyier·February 1, 2021Engineering
Frontend — No-Jank CSS Stripes

No-Jank CSS Stripes

My mind goes immediately to repeating-linear-gradient and hard-stop gradients when thinking of creating stripes in CSS. You make one stripe by using the same

CCChris Coyier·February 1, 2021Frontend
AI & ML — Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For February 1st, 2021 - High Scalability -

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For February 1st, 2021 - High Scalability -

Hey, it's HighScalability time once again! Amazon converts expenses into revenue by transforming needs into products. Take a look at a fulfillment center and you can see the need for Outpost, machine learning, IoT, etc, all dogfooded. Willy Wonka would be proud. Do you like this sort of Stuff? Without your support on Patreon this Stuff won't happen. Know someone who could benefit from becoming one

HSHigh Scalability·February 1, 2021AI & ML
SRE & Ops — Slack’s Outage on January 4th 2021

Slack’s Outage on January 4th 2021

And now we welcome the new year. Full of things that have never been. — Rainer Maria Rilke January 4th 2021 was the first working day of the year for many around the globe, and for most of us at Slack too (except of course for our on-callers and our customer experience team, who never…

LNLaura Nolan·February 1, 2021SRE & Ops
Frontend — Things You Can Do With CSS Today — Smashing Magazine

Things You Can Do With CSS Today — Smashing Magazine

The present and future of CSS are very bright indeed and if you take a pragmatic, progressive approach to your CSS, then things will continue to get better and better on your projects, too. Some of the really handy powers CSS gives you might have slipped you by, so in this article, Andy Bell will take a look into masonry layout, :is selector, clamp(), ch and ex units, updated text decoration, and

ABAndy BellAndy Bell·February 1, 2021Frontend
Engineering — Inspiring Wallpapers For February 2021 And A Little Creativity Challenge — Smashing Magazine

Inspiring Wallpapers For February 2021 And A Little Creativity Challenge — Smashing Magazine

Let’s make this February more colorful! Apart from a new collection of wallpapers, we also have a little creativity challenge waiting for you this month. It’s the perfect occasion to share your ideas with the world — and win a smashing prize along the way. The wallpapers in this post come with and without a calendar for February 2021, and, as a little bonus goodie, you’ll also discover some famili

CMCosima MielkeCosima Mielke·January 31, 2021Engineering
Frontend — Bulletproof flag components

Bulletproof flag components

A clever use of CSS grid from Jay Freestone to accomplish a particular variation of the media object design pattern (where the image is centered with the

CCChris Coyier·January 29, 2021Frontend
Frontend — Dynamic Static Typing In TypeScript — Smashing Magazine

Dynamic Static Typing In TypeScript — Smashing Magazine

In this article, we look at some of the more advanced features of TypeScript, like union types, conditional types, template literal types, and generics. We want to formalize the most dynamic JavaScript behavior in a way that we can catch most bugs before they happen. We apply several learnings from all chapters of TypeScript in 50 Lessons, a book we’ve published here on Smashing Magazine late 2020

SBStefan BaumgartnerStefan Baumgartner·January 29, 2021Frontend
Frontend — GreenSock ScrollTrigger

GreenSock ScrollTrigger

High five to the Greensock gang for the ScrollTrigger release. The point of this new plugin is triggering animation when a page scrolls to certain positions,

CCChris Coyier·January 28, 2021Frontend
Frontend — A Whole Website in a Single HTML File

A Whole Website in a Single HTML File

I can’t stop thinking about this site. It looks like a pretty standard fare; a website with links to different pages. Nothing to write home about except

RRRobin RendleRobin Rendle·January 28, 2021Frontend