books Books I Loved in 2018 I read 25 books this year [https://www.goodreads.com/user_challenges/10213246]. Many were good, but the following three series stood heads and tails above everything else. I devoured them all and enjoyed every word. It’s not often I find series that I’m happy to recommend without
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, The Lord of the Rings, and Ringworld. Books I come back to time and again, re-reading compulsively,
css Featured 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 have been the first to write about spacer gifs, slicing images, and table-based layouts, but he certainly
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.
books Books I Loved in 2017 I read 28 books in 2017 [https://www.goodreads.com/user_challenges/8351170]. These are the ones I would happily recommend. Not a ton of new books to recommend this year, because I also was finishing reading the Harry Potter series with my daughter, and re-reading The Lies of Locke
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 [https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/16/14952434/netflix-five-star-ratings-going-away-thumbs-up-down] model, I realized I was sitting on more than a decade of ratings, and worried they would disappear. I started rating movies on Netflix because back then, ratings
frontend 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 subscribe to the feeds from my favorite developers, and get their updates. Sadly, many people don't post
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 [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_manufacturing] processes gave us the concept of kaizen [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaizen] (continuous improvement), as well as the kanban [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
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 a bit flat-footed by this question, because the answer has been clear in our analytics for some
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 everyone is doing everything their own way. Do you have tips/tricks/blog posts/books that you’
books Books I Loved in 2016 Growing up, my dad was a voracious reader. Our house was always filled with piles of dog-eared science fiction and fantasy novels. Even before I was old enough to start reading them myself, I found them fascinating. I remember vividly being on time-out once and studying the designs on the
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 whole process. Part of me wants to give up and go back to bed. Another part questions
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 [http://wesbos.github.io/Sublime-Text-Power-User-Talk/] from Wes Bos, who literally wrote the book [https://sublimetextbook.com/] on becoming a Sublime Text power user. Material Theme [https://packagecontrol.io/packages/Material%
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 so many lines? Let's use the shorthand syntax! So I refactored many instances of this code through
books Books I Loved in 2015 I have a terrible memory about books I’ve read. Often, all I can tell you is that I’m a fan of an author or a particular book, but not any details about it, or why I liked it. In 2015 I switched to reading entirely on the Kindle.
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, let me know! Falsehoods programmers believe about names [http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/] * People's names do
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 layout for laying out text * table layout for laying 2D tabular data * positioned layout for explicit positioning
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 fully-distributed company. I'm not interested in working at a company with only a handful of remote workers
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 worried I may have made the decision too quickly. I like the color and the doorknob, but
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 stylesheet may contain up to 4095 selectors [http://codepen.io/spaceninja/full/gbyMLv/] * A document may load
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 territorial or untrusting. You fear saying yes, at the risk of watching your carefully organized files fill
