The ability to identify users is vital for maintaining the security of any applications. Equally important is the code that’s written to manage user identities, particularly when it comes to avoiding loopholes for unauthorized access to data held by an application. Writing authentication code without a framework or libraries available can take a ton of time to do right — not to mention the ongoing maintainance of that custom code. This is where Firebase comes to the re..

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Jim Nielsen’s mom couldn’t open a website. Jim worked on confirming the issue and documented how he got to the bottom of it: “[…] well it can’t be a browser issue. It’s not like my Mom is using Internet Explorer! She has relatively modern tech: an iPad (Safari) and a Chromebox (Google Chrome).”But the more I thought about it—a website that works on some devices but not on others—the more I realized this had to be a browser issue.So I looked at the version..

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I have a coworker who is smart, capable, and technologically-literate. Like me, they work on the web full-time. When they are sharing their screen in a meeting, I find myself disassociating fixating on the red update button in their copy of Chrome. Clicking this button would start the process to update Chrome to the latest stable version. I’ve asked some probing questions about how frequently they reboot, which would also force Chrome to update upon relaunc..

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Maggie Appleton gets into what is perhaps the foremost metaphor the web is founded on: paper. Paper documents were the original metaphor for the web. […]The page you’re reading this on still mimics paper. We still call it a page or an HTML document. It follows the same typographic rules and conventions – black text on white backgrounds and a top-to-bottom / left-to-right heirarchical structure. Over in the ShopTalk Discord, the idea of CSS custom properti..

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Lemme do this one quick-hits style: Mary Lou published a quintessentially-Codrops-y demo called Alternate Column Scroll.The scrolling effect is powered by Locomotive Scroll, which we’ve coincidentally covered before.Bramus has been exploring native CSS scrolling effects using the future CSS Scroll-Timeline feature for a while now. He’s got a four-parter that digs deep into it, starting here.It’s early days for it, but @scroll-timeline is flagged in Chrome-land. Bramu..

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I was doing my Advent of UI Components, and I stumbled upon the from-font value for the text-decoration-thickness CSS property. I was curious about it, so I did a little research and I think what I found (and learned) is both interesting and worth sharing. About the from-font value Here’s how MDN defines the from-font value: If the font file includes information about a preferred thickness, use that value. If the font file doesn’t include this information, be..

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I’m always on the wrong branch. I’m either on master or main working on something that should be on a fix or feature branch. Or I’m on the last branch I was working on and should have cut a new branch. Oh well. It’s never that big of a deal. Basically means switching unstaged changes to a new branch. This is what I normally do: Stash all the changed-but-unstaged filesMove back to masterPull master to make sure it’s up to dateCut a new branch from masterMove to th..

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TypeScript is a wonderful tool for writing JavaScript that scales. It’s more or less the de facto standard for the web when it comes to large JavaScript projects. As outstanding as it is, there are some tricky pieces for the unaccustomed. One such area is TypeScript discriminated unions. Specifically, given this code: interface Cat { weight: number; whiskers: number; } interface Dog { weight: number; friendly: boolean; } let animal: Dog | Cat; …many devel..

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(This is a sponsored post.) Design systems are an entire job these days. Agencies are hired to create them. In-house teams are formed to handle them, shipping them so that other teams can use them and helping ensure they do. Design systems aren’t a fad, they are a positive evolution of how digital design is done. Backlight is the ultimate all-in-one development tool for design systems. I think it’s interesting to start thinking about this at the end. What’s the best-..

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