Changelog

We’re talking with Sacha Greif to discuss the State of CSS survey and results. CSS is evolving faster than ever. And, coming off the heels of their annual State of JavaScript survey, they’ve decided to take on the world of styles and selectors to help identify the latests patterns and trends in CSS. We talk through the history and motivations of this survey, the methodology of their data collection, the tooling involved to build and run the survey, and of course we dig deep into the survey results and talk through the insights we found most interesting.

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Sahil Lavingia is the founder and CEO of Gumroad, a platform for creators to sell the things they make. Since 2011 Gumroad has sent over $200 million dollars to creators. That’s a big number. Sahil’s ambitions lead him to believe that Gumroad would become a billion-dollar company, have hundreds of employees, and eventually IPO. That didn’t happen. …we were venture-funded, which was like playing a game of double-or-nothing. It’s euphoric when things are going your way — and suffocating when they’re not. And we weren’t doubling fast enough to raise the $15M+ Series B we were looking for to grow the team. For the type of business we were trying to build, every month of less than 20 percent growth should have been a red flag. But at the time, I thought it was okay… We talk through Sahil’s journey with Gumroad, why it failed to meet his goals, the path he’s on today and the things he now values…but to understand why Gumroad didn’t live up to his expectations, we really have to understand the backstory of Gumroad.

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Fascinating read through covering historical context for accessibility and assistive technologies as well as diving into the way we do accessibility in the web today. According to author Be Birchall this article aims to shift your perspective by showing how web accessibility fits into the broader areas of technology, disability, and design. We’ll see how designing for different sets of abilities leads to insight and innovation. I’ll also shed some light on how the history of browsers and HTML is intertwined with the history of assistive technology.

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From basic to advanced: test how well you know JavaScript, refresh your knowledge a bit, or prepare for your coding interview! 💪 🚀 Nice use of the the <details> element to hide the answers from view until you’re ready for them.

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Here’s some hard-earned experience on how to validate an email address. If you listened to JS Party #39, then you already know this. If you think I’m about to hand the best regex you’ve ever seen…

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nannou is a collection of code aimed at making it easy for artists to express themselves with simple, fast, reliable, portable code. Whether working on a 12-month installation or a 5 minute sketch, this framework aims to give artists easy access to the tools they need.

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it comes with convenient features such as autocomplete suggestion and gesture typing keyboard. It is useful for quickly troubleshooting server problems on the go, or in your bed in the middle of the night. If you occassionally use the SSH app on your phone, you may want to give Swell.sh a try!

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There’s a lot of CSS love & hate that flows around online, and one of the key reasons it is so polarizing is that it takes a different mental model than most other programming. Author Max Böck has put together a list of some of the items that go into that mental model: For most people who write CSS professionally, the mindset just comes naturally after a while. Many developers have that “aha!” moment when things finally start to click. It’s not just about knowing all the technical details, it’s more about a general sense of the ideas behind the language. I tried to list some of these here.

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Panelists Mat Ryer, Johnny Boursiquot, Jon Calhoun, and guest panelist Egon Elbre discuss what they build, why, and how they do it. Everybody has their own unique process for getting things done, so today we’re going to learn about them. Too often processes get in the way and slow things down. How do we look for signs of those slow downs? How do we create a space where people are free to discuss their thoughts and struggles?

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Learn from other people’s fail stories. This is a compiled list of public Kubernetes failure stories. Why? Kubernetes is a fairly complex system with many moving parts. Its ecosystem is constantly evolving and adding even more layers (service mesh, …) to the mix. Considering this environment, we don’t hear enough real-world horror stories to learn from each other! This compilation of failure stories should make it easier for people dealing with Kubernetes operations (SRE, Ops, platform/infrastructure teams) to learn from others and reduce the unknown unknowns of running Kubernetes in production. For more information, see the blog post.

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Matt Gallagher: A little over a month ago, I released CwlViews and then followed up with an article suggesting that Apple might be about to release their own declarative views library. At WWDC this week, they did just that, releasing SwiftUI. This article will look at how SwiftUI’s approach to declarative views compares to CwlViews, why the two approaches differ and what Apple changed to make this possible. I’ll end with some thoughts about how this will affect macOS and iOS development.

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Inspired by JSParty #70, 4 quick lessons on the philosophy of testing. The motivation? Tools like Mocha, Jasmine and Jest have made writing tests far easier… But there’s still a gap. It’s extremely hard to find information on the philosophy of testing. What to test and why. How much is enough? What type of tests should I be writing, and when does it fit into my process?

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There’s still a use case for tables!! No seriously, there is. If you’d like to learn how to optimize table elements for mobile using minimal CSS, read on… My recent article, Write HTML Like It’s 1999, received far more attention than I ever expected on HackerNews. With this attention came a few comments mentioning how table elements don’t play nice with mobile devices or that it’s not possible to have a useable layout on smaller screens. This simply isn’t true.

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This isn’t just an awesome list of resources. The repo IS the resource! If you click through and the content is a bit too dense, start with the latest episode of Practical AI where Daniel and Chris explain many of these concepts in detail.

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OctoLinker is a Chrome extension that turns language-specific statements like include, require, import, etc. in to clickable links. Try before you buy install with their in-browser demo.

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Daniel and Chris explore three potentially confusing topics - generative adversarial networks (GANs), deep reinforcement learning (DRL), and transfer learning. Are these types of neural network architectures? Are they something different? How are they used? Well, If you have ever wondered how AI can be creative, wished you understood how robots get their smarts, or were impressed at how some AI practitioners conquer big challenges quickly, then this is your episode!

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What’s the front-end equivalent of a micro-services architecture? A micro-frontends architecture of course. This approach makes a ton of sense, though in my opinion you will definitely want to have an internal components library and some cross-frontend coordination so your UI doesn’t degrade into a series of disconnected, disjointed experiences. It’s hard to argue against the benefits stated by author Cam Jackson: Micro frontends are all about slicing up big and scary things into smaller, more manageable pieces, and then being explicit about the dependencies between them. Our technology choices, our codebases, our teams, and our release processes should all be able to operate and evolve independently of each other, without excessive coordination.

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If you’d like to follow along with someone who “has no idea what they’re doing” to learn how to take a base Docker image made with a single line Dockerfile FROM debian:latest and convert it to something launch-able, then read on… …messing about with things like this is the only way to gain extra knowledge of any system internals. We are going to speak Docker and Linux here. What if we want to take a base Docker image, I mean really base, just an image made with a single line Dockerfile like FROM debian:latest, and convert it to something launchable on a real or virtual machine? In other words, can we create a disk image having exactly the same Linux userland a running container has and then boot from it?

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Zach Leatherman joins the party with Divya and Nick to talk about fonts and static site generators! Zach shares his knowledge about font loading, what can go wrong, and how we can avoid issues. Then we discuss Zach’s newest project, Eleventy, a simple static site generator, and the panelists share things they are excited about.

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A simple guide to what CNNs are, how they work, and how to build one from scratch in Python. This buils on Victor’s original intro to Neural Networks that we linked up previously.

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