I’d say cloud functions are one of the most transformative technologies in the last bunch of years. They are (usually) cheap, scale well, secure in their inherit isolation, and often written in JavaScript—comfortable territory for front-end developers. Nearly every cloud provider offers them, but AWS Lambda was the OG and remains the leader. But also: The DX around cloud functions is just as interesting to watch as the tech behind the functions themselves. There is all..

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We’ve already discussed how creating web components is easier than you think, but there’s another aspect of the specification that we haven’t discussed yet and it’s a way to customize (nay, supercharge) a built-in element. It’s similar to creating fully custom or “autonomous” elements — like the <zombie-profile> element from the previous articles—but requires a few differences. Customized built-in elements use an is attribute to tell the browser..

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HTTP Caching is a Superpower — Hugh Haworth covers how the Cache-Control header is an awfully potent ingredient in web performance. I mis-read the title at first and was waiting to read about HTML caching. Hugh covers it a bit (like how you’d need to be careful doing so on something like a forum, where the content on pages changes rapidly), but I find it something that’s generally under-talked-about. As in, generally, people just don’t cache HTML at all, because it ch..

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Have you ever fretted that front-end web development moves so fast that if you stepped away for a while, you’d be lost coming back? Rachel Smith has: The hectic pace of needing to learn one thing after the next didn’t bother me so much because when I was 26 because I was quite happy to spend much of my free time outside of my day job coding. I was really enjoying myself, so the impression that I had to constantly up-skill to maintain my career wasn’t a concern. I did..

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Zach did that thing where each of his blog posts has a special URL with the design of social image card that is screenshat by a headless browser (like Puppeteer) and used as a true meta Open Graph image, meaning it’s displayed on Twitter, Facebook, iMessage, Slack, Discord, and whatever else supports that card look. I like it. Even though I’ve got a pretty good solution cooking now (for WordPress), the templates aren’t controlled with HTML/CSS like I wish they we..

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(This is a sponsored post.) Static site generators are popular for their speed, security, and user experience. However, sometimes your application needs data that is not available when the site is built. React is a library for building user interfaces that helps you retrieve and store dynamic data in your client application.  Fauna is a flexible, serverless database delivered as an API that completely eliminates operational overhead such as capacity planning, data replica..

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Nathan Hardy shares when things “clicked”: Reflecting back on this time, I think there are a few key concepts that were vital to things finally all making sense and fitting together. These were:• The Box Model (e.g. box-sizing, height, width, margin, padding)• Layout (e.g. display)• Document Flow and Positioning (e.g. position, top, left, etc.) I called this my ah-ha moment a few years back: For me, it was a couple of concepts that felt like an unl..

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SKWAR — Heydon Pickering made a hard-edged monospaced variable font. The axes are width and weight. Twenty Bits I Learned About Making Fonts Book — Dan Cederholm has been making fonts, like Captain Edward and Ship Whistle and has turned his learnings into a book.The perfect cross-platform serif and sans-serif font stacks — Daniel Aleksandersen has lots of details about pre-installed fonts across operating systems, like: Mac and iOS also come with Helvetica Neue preinst..

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I think this is good advice from Silvestar Bistrović: An enabling selector is what I call a selector that does a job without disabling the particular rule. The classic example is applying margin to everything, only to have to remove it from the final element because it adds space in a place you don’t want. .card { margin-bottom: 1rem; } /* Wait but not on the last one!! */ .parent-of-cards :last-child { margin-bottom: 0; } You might also do… /* "..

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You know like https:? That’s a URL Scheme. You’re probably familiar with the concept, thanks to others that come up in front-end development, like mailto:. You can actually make your own, which is pretty cool. There are a lot of them. I find that custom URL schemes come up the most with apps that are both web apps and native apps. For example, two that I use nearly every day: Notion and Figma. I love that the things I work on in these apps have URLs. URLs for everythin..

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