I was at my parents place over Christmas. Besides eating the whole day and playing board games I tried to read two books I brought with me.
One of the books was RESPONSIBLE RESPONSIVE DESIGN by Scott Jehl. It was released recently and it is a really good read. I have not finished it yet, but I enjoy it and it is for sure in the TOP5 list of my favourite books about responsive web design.
Read on →Today I was listening to the NodeUp episode 70, which is all about the npm command line client. And there is tons of useful information in this episode. It is all about where npm is at the moment and what the plans are for the future. Especially the recent changes inside of the command line client are a heavy discussed topic and I highly recommend to listen to this episode, when you are dealing with npm on a daily basis.
One thing that is mentioned and really gets me excited is the change regarding the functionality to run scripts via npm which was introduced in the latest major version of npm – npm@2.0.0. Read on →
Recently I had some time to play around with some CSS animations. Unfortunately I am not able to use them on a regular basis in my daily work and that is why I am really enjoying to do #cssonly stuff in my free time.
When using CSS animation there are two different (not technical) types of css animation. Read on →
I use npm for a while now and it is heavily integrated in my daily workflow. One thing that always bothers me, is that a fresh npm install on your project will probably download the same packages over and over again. Let us imagine your project has multiple dependencies that all have one package defined as another dependency.
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Playing around at CodePen is one of my favourite activities, when doing ‘nothing’ lately. Especially the combination of dribbble and CodePen is super nice. Browsing for beautiful designs and ideas on dribbble and putting them into code became a nice activity for me. There are a lot of great people hanging around at dribbble and you can get a lot of inspiration over there.
Over the last few month I started being interested in dashboards and how to analyze/visualize data. Unfortunately I am not a designer and this is why I really enjoy to just build dashboards according to a dribbble design.
Read on →Currently I am working on a huge so called “redesign”, which means to make a big e-commerce plattform responsive. But it is not only about fiddling a few media queries into some existant CSS. For me that is the perfect opportunity to clean up everything and build up a nice and modular CSS architecture. Each component separated into its own file. Margins, paddings, widths, colors, etc. controlled by a main config file. Maintainable and easy to work with. The tech stack is quite modern, so that I had the perfect basement to do fancy stuff. Read on →
When you are a frontend developer, you are on the constant journey to find the right tool to measure the performance of your site. Sure, there are the Developer Tools of your choice, Google Pagespeed or webpagespeed.org available. And those tools are great (if you do not know them, you should definitely check them out), but for me it was always “just” nice to use these tools. They provide lots of useful information and I check them on a regular basis, but as far as I know, these tools do not provide a kind of timeline view of my daily work. They only give useful information to a given time – that is it. What I want to know, is how the site evolved after my latest deploy to production … Read on →
A few days ago I was attending the Developer Conference Hamburg. Topics of the talks were nearly everything you could think of ( from Java to PHP to JavaScript and much more ). For me only frontend related talks were important and that was why I attended the talk of Alois Reitbauer with the title “W3C Web Performance – A detailed overview” ( slides of his talk can be found here ).
And well, what should I say? He introduced the window.performance object to the audience and that absolutely blew my mind,
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Yesterday I procrastinated the stuff I wanted (and should) do and spent a lot of time browsing Github and checking what is going on in the JS world. I discoverd a discussion held by the grunt guys about how Grunt can be promoted better. That was quite a good read and it was really nice to see, that these people try to push Grunt forward to make tooling much better for everyone.
A lot of new issues were created at Github to push the project to the next level. It turns out that the Gruntjs.com website is a seperate repository whose code is available on Github (man, I really love that Open Source approach).
What else can I do than checking out the source? I mean the website of Grunt itself must include a lot of best practices and stuff to discover. I forked it and opened in my editor and there they were – a lot of JS promises… Read on →
Many projects include utility libraries like underscore/lo-dash these days. The reasons for that can be different. Either a MV* framework like Backbone.js is on bord and has it as dependency or the developers just discovered how much value these utility libraries provide. They are able to improve your daily workflow heavily by giving you a bunch of useful functions and helpers that will work across all the common browsers. I am using underscore for quite a long time now and last week I had to discover, that I am still not using all the features and that I reinvent the wheel in some cases for stuff that could (and should) be done by these libraries. Read on →