Design handoffs are inefficient and painful. They cause frustration, friction and a lot of back and forth. Can we avoid them altogether? Of course we can! Let’s see how to do just that.

Designers often complain about the quality of feedback they get from senior stakeholders without realizing it’s usually because of the way they initially have framed the request. In this article, Andy Budd shares a better way of requesting feedback: rather than sharing a linear case study that explains every design revision, the first thing to do would be to better frame the problem.

While obtaining a job internationally may seem daunting, this guide will walk you through all the steps you need to find and secure a developer job abroad.

In this article, I share how how to prepare your resume for getting a developer job abroad, how to search for international opportunities, application strategies, important considerations to make when applying, the do’s and don’ts of successful interviews, and more!

Sacha Greif gets out his crystal ball and tries to anticipate the future CSS trends (as well as some far-fetched and futuristic CSS features that might one day make their way to the browser) based on his learnings from running the State of CSS survey (go take it!)

Smashing Mag’s Vitaly Friedman puts down some of his recent thoughts on authentication flows:

nobody wakes up in the morning hoping to finally identify crosswalks and fire hydrants that day. Yet every day, we prompt users through hoops and loops to sign up and log in, to set a complex enough password or recover one, to find a way to restore access to locked accounts and logged-out sessions.

Of course security matters, yet too often, it gets in the way of usability. As Jared Spool said once, “If a product isn’t usable, it’s also not secure.” That’s when people start using private email accounts and put passwords on stick-it-notes because they forget them. As usual, Jared hits the nail on the head here. So what can we do to improve the authentication UX?

Vitaly lists seven recommendations. Nothing radical here, but solid advice worth thinking through.

Jaun Diego covers some little known yet extremely useful APIs, such as the Page Visibility, Web Sharing, Broadcast ChanneI and Internationalization.

Josh Comeau writing for Smashing Mag:

Developers often reach for UI frameworks like Bootstrap or Material UI, hoping that they’ll save a bunch of time and quickly build a professional-looking app. Unfortunately, things rarely work out this way. Let’s talk about it.

Stick around for the rebuttals section, too.

Louis Lazaris describes/demos somewhat obscure HTML attributes you may find useful enough to personally use in one of your projects. I learned a few things, maybe you will too.

Knut Melvær with a thoughtful attack on one of my all-time favorite tools:

Markdown is a signifier for the developer and text-tinkerer culture. But since its introduction, the world of digital content has also changed. While Markdown is still fine for some things, I don’t believe it’s should be the go-to for content anymore.

There are two main reasons for this:

1. Markdown wasn’t designed to meet today’s needs of content.
2. Markdown holds editorial experience back.

Now, I did say it’s a thoughtful atttack and it’s also a long one (30 minute read). Knut does the work, diving deep into Markdown’s history and John Gruber’s desires for it:

I want to build my advice against Markdown by looking back on why it was introduced in the first place, and by going through some of the major developments of content on the web. For many of us, I suspect Markdown is something we just take for granted as a “thing that exists.” But all technology has a history and is a product of human interaction. This is important to remember when you, the reader, develop technology for others to use.

Leonardo Losoviz is pretty excited that Matt Mullenweg expressed interest in having WordPress’s editor comply with the Block Protocol:

My excitement comes from what happened with GraphQL, where the release of servers, clients, and tools adhering to a common specification has produced a rich ecosystem; and from my own development of a plugin that could support new features through the protocol.

Don’t fret if you’re new to this “Block Protocol” concept, like myself: Leonardo starts off this (long) article with a nice explainer before he gets into the potential outcomes of WordPress’s involvement.

Smashing Mag always delivers on these epic reference-style posts packed with knowledge:

Writing CSS has probably never been more fun and exciting than it is today. In this post we’ll take a look at common problems and use cases we all have to face in our work and how to solve them with modern CSS.

I’ve never gone full mouseless (nor do I necessarily recommend it), but there’s extreme productivity wins to be mined by keeping your hands on the home row as much as possible.

Building a development environment with the shell as a keystone offers multiple benefits. You can use tools that fit nicely with each other, you can customize everything depending on your own needs, and the biggest of all, you can control your entire development environment with your keyboard. This can save a lot of cognitive energy as well as deliver a pleasant user experience.

This is an excellent walk-through on Smashing Mag for those ready to level up their terminal game:

Today, I’d like to share with you these tools so that you too can increase your efficiency and your comfort in your daily job. They work well together — shaping what I call my Mouseless Development Environment. More precisely, we’ll discuss:

• Why using the Linux shell can be very powerful when working with plain text (including code);
• Why using the dreaded Arch Linux;
• The advantage of a tiling window manager;
• How to have a great terminal experience with URxvt, tmux, and tmuxp;
• Why Vim can become your best friend.

By adding visual elements to your tests, you can gain more options to add meaningful ways in maintaining a high level of quality for your app. Colby Fayock explains how.

This article pairs nicely with what Angie Jones had to say about visual testing on Our recent JS Party episode.

Andy Bell writing for Smashing Mag:

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. In this article, we’ll look into masonry layout, :is selector, clamp(), ch and ex units, updated text decoration, and a few other useful CSS properties.

This Smashing article is a nice introduction to Tauri, which was news to me as well. It tells you why you might want to use Tauri instead of Electron, how to get set up for Tauri development, and how to build a Vue-based desktop app with the framework.

This is a nice, Smashing deep-dive by the author of React HereMaps:

Armed with basic knowledge, beginner and intermediate developers of Node.js struggle with many things: “It’s just a runtime!” “It has event loops!” “Node.js is single-threaded like JavaScript!”
While some of these claims are true, we will dig deeper into the Node.js runtime, understanding how it runs JavaScript, seeing whether it actually is single-threaded, and, finally, better understanding the interconnection between its core dependencies, V8 and libuv.

Mailchimp CPO John Foreman drops some contra-conventional wisdom in this Smashing Magazine piece:

When I as CPO say, “we’re going to do this thing!” the reply then is often, “OK, so then what are we going to kill?” The Mythical Man-Month turns product development into a zero-sum game. If we want one thing, we must stop another. Now, that’s an actual myth, and I call hogwash.

WordPress is MASSIVE — so why would a site using WordPress consider moving to JAMstack? This technical case study from Sarah Drasner covers how Smashing Magazine manages their content and what an actual WordPress migration looks like (using Smashing Magazine).

In this two-part article series, we’ll cover what an actual WordPress migration looks like, using a case study of the very site you’re reading from right now.

We’ll talk through the gains and losses, the things we wish we knew earlier, and what we were surprised by. And then we’ll follow it up with a technical demonstration of one possible migration path, not off WordPress completely, but how you can serve decoupled WordPress so that you can have the best of both worlds: a JAMstack implementation of WordPress that gives you all the power of their dashboard and functionality, with better performance and security.

This is a fascinating look at how “size negligence”, AKA not paying close attention to the size of your images, javascript, etc impacts people in parts of the world where data is slow and expensive. Author Chris Ashton on why you should care:

We don’t have the power to change the global cost of data inequality. But we do have the power to lessen its impact, improving the experience for everyone in the process.

So good…anyone collaborating on code with other humans should 💯read this.

Take a moment to remember the last time you collaborated in a code review. Did your team overcome feedback resistance and manage time expectations? Fostering a healthy mindset is the key to build trust and sharing knowledge with your colleagues.

One of the most amazing things about Open Source is how much it enables you to learn from the best. Just open up the source for your favorite library or framework and you can start learning from the best in the business. But that can feel intimidating. This article breaks down some approaches you can use to make it easier. As author Carl Mungazi says:

Reading source code is difficult at first but as with anything, it becomes easier with time. The goal is not to understand everything but to come away with a different perspective and new knowledge. The key is to be deliberate about the entire process and intensely curious about everything.

Margins in CSS seem simple enough at first glance. Applied to an element it forms a space around the element, pushing other elements away. However, there is more to a margin than you might think.

No kidding! Margin collapsing has got to be one of the hardest things about CSS for new developers, and this article not only goes into it and how to avoid it, but explains the “why” behind it.

A brilliant look at how CSS custom properties allow you to both utilize the cascade and provide some level of scoping and proximity-based styling. Prior solutions include the ‘big blunt hammer’ of inheritance-based styling or ignoring the cascade completely utilizing methodologies like BEM, but as author Miriam Suzanne points out:

Custom properties provide a new, browser-native solution; they inherit like any other property, but they don’t have to be used where they are defined.

Native lazy loading is coming to the web. Since it doesn’t depend on JavaScript, it will revolutionize the way we lazy load content today, making it easier for developers to lazy load images and iframes.

I’m excited about native lazy loading! We’ve been using lozad.js for lazy loading with some success. There are times when it seems that IntersectionObserver fails to its job and an image won’t load. (If you scroll the element out and back in to the viewport, it will usually work the second time.)

But it’s not a feature we can polyfill, and it will take some time before it becomes usable across all browsers. n this article, you’ll learn how it works and how you can progressively replace your JavaScript-driven lazy loading with its native alternative, thanks to hybrid lazy loading.

I might try this hybrid approach and see what happens…

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.