books Books I Love: The Kingkiller Chronicle Series It’s no exaggeration to say that Patrick Rothfuss’ The Name of the Wind might be my favorite book of all time. It’s in competition with heavy hitters like Hitchhiker’s Guide,
css What is Modular CSS? Modular CSS is a collection of principles for writing code that is performant and maintainable at scale.
books Books I Love: The Expanse Series Set in a near future where we’ve settled the solar system, but simmering tension between Earth, Mars, and the Asteroid Belt could boil over into war at any moment, and a cosmic wild card threatens to destroy everything.
books Books I Love: The Gentleman Bastards Series I have difficulty expressing how much I love Scott Lynch’s The Lies of Locke Lamora and all the other books in the Gentleman Bastards series. They’re fantastically well-constructed and funny heist stories.
books Books I Love: The Culture Series The Culture is a post-scarcity socialist utopia. Banks described them as “hippy commies with hyper-weapons and a deep distrust of both Marketolatry and Greedism.”
design Do Siegel’s Seven Deadly Sins Hold Up? In 1996, David Siegel’s book Creating Killer Web Sites was at the top of the charts on Amazon, and it quickly became the gold standard of web design books. Siegel may not
quotes Great Programming Quotes “If you put in the wrong figures, will the right answers come out?” …I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
movies How to Export Movie Ratings from Netflix and Import into IMDb When Netflix switched from a 5-star rating scheme to a thumbs up/down model, I realized I was sitting on more than a decade of ratings, and worried they would disappear. I started
css Front-End Newsletters A friend recently asked me how I keep up-to-date on what's happening in the front-end community. It's a great question. It used to be that RSS feeds were the way to go. I'd
satire Pointing and Shouting Your Way to Better Code Time and again we turn to the Japanese for inspiration to improve process and efficiency. Toyota's lean manufacturing processes gave us the concept of kaizen (continuous improvement), as well as the kanban scheduling
mobile What’s the Mobile Use Case? I recently worked on a project to dramatically improve mobile access for an app. At least twice during the proposal process, I was asked “What’s the mobile use case?” I was caught
css How to Define CSS Standards for a Team We’re going through a major redesign of our app and every page is given to one person on the team to complete from end-to-end, including creating the HTML structure and styling, and
job hunting Looking for Work SUCKS Looking for work is an intensely stressful experience. It’s also insidious, because it doesn’t feel like it should be stressful. During a job hunt, I often find myself overwhelmed by the
editors My Sublime Text Setup I've put a bit of work into customizing my Sublime Text setup. It's mostly based on a set of tips from Wes Bos, who literally wrote the book on becoming a Sublime Text
css Code Verbosity Recently I was refactoring some CSS, and I found something like this code snippet: body { font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.4; } h1 { font-family: serif; font-size: 36px; font-weight: bold; } Ugh, I thought, why
programming Falsehoods Programmers Believe I'm in love with these lists of "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About X." In case you haven't had pleasure, I've collected all the ones I know of here. If I missed any,
css What IS Flexbox? An elegant layout method for a more civilized age. Flexbox is a new layout mode in CSS3. The previous version of CSS defined four layout modes: block layout for laying out documents inline
job hunting What I value in a job The three main things I look for in a company are: Competitive pay Work/Life balance Understand the value of specialists Location I only consider work in downtown Portland, Oregon, or with a
job hunting Finding Your Door “Hey! I heard you got a new door. How is it?” “Oh, it’s pretty good. When my last door broke unexpectedly, I had to find a new door pretty quick, and I
css The Many Exciting CSS Limits of Internet Explorer Internet Explorer has a number of limits in the way it loads CSS, which can cause some of your styles not to be applied if you unknowingly exceed them. IE9 and lower: A
design Trust Your Designer, But Review Their Code It can be awkward when your designer says they want to work directly in code. You want to protect the high quality of your front-end layer, but you don’t want to seem
ghost How to use Ghost Pro with a custom domain and keep your email When I switched my blog to a hosted Ghost Pro plan, I ran into some difficulty getting the proper DNS configuration. I'm not a networking guru, so I figured there might be others who could benefit from what I learned.
writing Cleaning House When I started blogging 15 years ago, one of the things that drew me to it was the idea of speaking to an audience. The concept of “democratizing” publishing so that anyone could
css How to use @font-face to avoid faux-italic and bold browser styles Did you know that if you declare a custom font using @font-face, the browser will try to fake the bold and italic styles if it can't find them? This is a clever little
css How to avoid paragraph gaps when using superscript and subscript Frequently, when I see a webpage with superscript or subscript text, I see associated gaps in the paragraph. This is caused because the default way browsers render super and subscript text is to
