We'll always be screwing up code, but we can also always be finding ways not to… There is probably no practical way to make it impossible to write sloppy, bad code, but it is fascinating to consider how tooling has evolved to make it harder. Let's get all Poka-yoke on development.

The z-index property, despite all that’s written about it, is still widely misunderstood and mishandled. Stacking issues in a complex single-page web application can become a major pain. Adhering to some principles, however, we can easily avoid these issues.

Create your own custom HTML tags that inherit all properties of the HTML elements they extend and which you can use in any supporting browser by simply importing a script. All HTML, CSS and JavaScript defined inside the component is fully scoped to the component itself.  The component will show up as a single HTML tag in your browser's dev tools with its styling and behaviour fully encapsulated, no workarounds, frameworks or transpiling needed.

The way CSS Houdini works brings two advantages: modularity and configurability. Both are common ways to make our lives as developers easier. We see these concepts often in the JavaScript world, but less-so with CSS world… until now.

But life would give me a lesson I would probably never learn otherwise: last October, my abled life took a drastic change—I started to feel extremely dizzy, with a constant sensation of falling or spinning to the right. I was suffering from a bad case of vertigo caused by labyrinthitis that made it impossible to get anything done. In my case, it was a little over a month. Here’s what I learned while going through it.