Links
7 absolute truths I unlearned as junior developer
Next year, I’ll be entering my 10th year of being formally employed to write code. Ten years! And besides actual employment, for nearly 2⁄3 of my life, I’ve been building things on the web. I can barely remember a time in my life where I didn’t know HTML, which is kind of weird when you think about it. In reflecting on this first decade of getting regularly paid money to type weird symbols into my Terminal, I wanted to take some time to share some of the ways my thinking shifted over the years as a developer.
Accessibility Standards: Defining What Success Means
With all those different kinds of work, and with accelerated schedules as the norm, how can we possibly fulfill our mandate to create accessible web content? We decided that the answer was to choose a set of accepted guidelines (currently WCAG 2.1 AA), and then define what success would look like under each of the work scenarios I’ve described above. This document answers those questions at a sufficient level of detail to guide our and our colleagues’ and successors’ work.
Zeldman is doing something interesting here, directly confronting the idea that rapid schedules don't leave room for accessibility.
Self-Host Your Static Assets
One of the quickest wins—and one of the first things I recommend my clients do—to make websites faster can at first seem counter-intuitive: you should self-host all of your static assets, forgoing others’ CDNs/infrastructure. In this short and hopefully very straightforward post, I want to outline the disadvantages of hosting your static assets ‘off-site’, and the overwhelming benefits of hosting them on your own origin.
Image Optimization In WordPress
Are you using many full-sized images on your WordPress site? Take note that this is causing your pages to load slowly. A slow website affects your SEO, increases the bounce rates, and keeps your audience at a distance. This article will help you learn how to easily optimize all the images on your site (manually or on autopilot) in order to gain better loading times.
JAMstack? More like SHAMstack.
Don't think, "Oh, JAMstack is just for Jekyll blogs," or whatever. True, static site generators are extremely JAMstack-y, and JAMstack highly encourages as much prebuilt markup as possible (which is good for speed and SEO and all that), but pre-built markup isn't a requirement.
I'd go so far as to say that a client-side JavaScript-powered app that ships a
<div id="root"></div>and a bundle of JavaScript that hits APIs and builds out the site is still a JAMstack site. It's still statically hosted (probably) with cloud functions serving up data.
Videos
The World-Wide Work, by Ethan Marcotte
These days, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. The tech industry is facing a veritable raft of ethical, moral, and political crises. Automation and industrialisation are reshaping our world. And sitting in the middle of all that? You and me. We’re digital designers, we’re developers, we’re product owners. But each day, our work is changing — more quickly than it ever has before.
Here’s the question we have to ask ourselves: what do we want that change to be? In this talk, we’ll look at some of the challenges facing our industry, and ask ourselves: what kind of work do we want to do?
"This might be the best conference talk I’ve ever seen. It’s certainly the most important." —Jeremy Keith