Hope you’re enjoying your holiday season! As a multicultural household, we’ve just wrapped up celebrating Hanukkah and are winding up for Christmas. With all of the craziness going on in the world, it is nice to take a few moments to focus in on family and connect back to our roots and traditions. I hope you’re able to do so as well.

This week’s newsletter will be a bit more terse than normal as I’m slipping it in between childcare, present wrapping and all sorts of other family activities. Enjoy!

Happy Friday!
KBall from ZenDev

P.S. I’ll still be publishing over the next couple weeks, but we may run a few fewer links each week while life is crazy with holidays, and I may be a bit slower to respond to any questions. Enjoy the season, and we’ll be back to 100% in the new year!

CSS & SCSS

How should we resolve percentage margins and padding on grid and flex items?

Not only informative, but the chance to be heard! The CSS Working Group is tackling a challenging issue of how to deal with percentage margins & padding, and wants your opinion!


CSS Transitions explained

As always, Zell does an excellent job of taking a subject and breaking it down to make it super simple to understand. Check out this article on using CSS Transitions for animation.


11 Things I Learned Reading the CSS Grid Specification

Wonderful in-depth walkthrough of some of the unique aspects of CSS Grid. Highlights a number of interesting edge cases.


My journey with pure CSS images

This is one of those “Oh my gosh” examples… just go take a look through it. As I was doing so my jaw dropped at what the author had accomplished with pure HTML and CSS. Wow.


Notes on vertical writing and CSS grid

As someone who’s only spoken English & romance languages (Spanish and French), vertical writing makes my head hurt, but this is important functionality for many Asian languages, and this articles hows just how simple it is to implement well with CSS Grid.


JavaScript

The Importance Of Abstraction in JS

Simple but powerful, a walkthrough of the value of creating abstraction layers around the libraries and utilities you use in JavaScript.


Is jQuery still relevant?

A glance through the (continued) dominance of jQuery on the web. It’s easy to think jQuery is dead, with all of these new incredibly powerful frameworks available for us, but I believe in matching tools to the problem, and for simple websites (not web apps) jQuery is still king.


npm vs Yarn – Which Package Manager Should You Use?

Walkthrough of the pros and cons of npm vs Yarn. Hint: Yarn is winning! If you’re not using it yet maybe this will convince you.


11 Vue.js Component Libraries You Should Know In 2018

I’m personally getting sucked further and further down the Vue.js wormhole, using it for more and more projects. If you’re in the same boat, this is likely to be a super useful resource for you.


JavaScript — Map vs. ForEach

I was recently working with a junior engineer who was struggling to understand exactly the difference between these two methods. Wrapping your head around functional transformations like map is key for improving your code skills. This article does a nice breakdown.


Other Awesomeness

Using SVG to Create a Duotone Effect on Images

I love SVG. Check out this great article on how to use SVG to create those super cool duotone images that have taken over the web.


Service Workers: Going beyond the page

Microsoft’s new Edge release turns on service workers by default, joining Firefox, Chrome, and the Safari Technology Preview in supporting this key functionality for creating progressive web applications (PWAs).


Frontend in 2017: The important parts

Nice roundup of all of the progress and change that has happened in the Frontend world over the last year.


The Future of Web: Gotta Go Fast

Speed is (almost) everything on the web, especially with the rise of the mobile internet. Check out how much benefit you can get simply by switching over to HTTP2.


HTML 5.2 IS DONE, HTML 5.3 IS COMING

The W3C has released the HTML 5.2 spec as an official recommendation, integrating new awesomeness like the web payments API and the dialog element, and obsoleting the venerable plugin system.