Archive

What’s the best way to progressively enhance a traditional server-rendered application with client-side JavaScript in 2023? Despite their glacial adoption, web components remain the closest we have to a platform-native solution.

A more ergonomic solution to stubbing out multiple GraphQL responses using Playwright.

Revisiting old solutions for preventing background scrolling from within modal dialogs & overlays.

In many statically typed languages, once we accept a generalised interface as a parameter we lose the ability to retrieve concrete values from our return type. Not so in TypeScript.

What is an integration test? Everyone uses the term, but few seem to agree on the definition. Does the awkward filling of the testing pyramid still have value today, or is it too murky to be of real value?

A language-agnostic guide on how to write maintainable, loosely-coupled unit tests which provide confidence and reduce fragility.

Thoughts on what we might see in the coming year, including the return of micro-frontends, functional JavaScript & the demise of the Jamstack as we know it.

Using two SVGs and shape-outside to wrap text inside a shape.

A more ergonomic solution to stubbing out multiple GraphQL responses using Cypress.

Fighting blocking resources and the fabled flash-of-unstyled-text with Adobe Fonts.

Mocking concrete dependencies is a code-smell.

Spend less time trying to fix things, and more time trying to understand them.

Creating a button with a notch cut out using composited CSS masks.

A resilient take on a flag-like media object.

A modern attempt at creating a CSS-only aspect-ratio box that fills its wrapper.

Since Hooks have just been introduced into the latest stable build of React, it’s a great time to play around with them and think about how previous component structures and paradigms (including classes and HOC’s) can fit within them.

A really common pattern on the web is adding an icon or indicator using a pseudo element so it appears before or after an element, such as an external link indicator.

I recently discovered ES6 proxies, essentially a means to intercept properties accessors and methods and either override or extend them.

Starting the design process nowadays is overwhelming. There are dozens of methodologies and hundreds of ‘best-practices’.

Modular design methodologies, such as Brad Frost’s Atomic Design, offer consistency and maintainability. But do they also foster fragmentation?

Peter’s trick involves leveraging SVG’s support for masking to provide JPEGs with a means to transparency, and therefore the best of both worlds.

Print often encourages us to design around everyman data, while the web forces us to do the opposite.

MengTo’s article on how designers approach code made me wonder about how my coding affects the way I design.

At Responsive Day Out Oliver Reichenstein introduced the Container Model, a new means of information architecture that recalls the origins of the web.

Good design, UX and otherwise, has always been about improving the content’s accessibility. The difference is that in designing a box to fit any object we have failed to design anything at all.