This week’s edition of the newsletter is a little on the short side - I managed to come down with an illness halfway through Thursday and it got in the way of finishing out the newsletter. Sorry about that! Next week we should be back up to normal.

This week I want to particularly call out another newsletter. As someone for whom keeping up with everything that’s going on in the world of tech is important, I’ve been recently finding the TLDR newsletter to be incredibly helpful for keeping myself up to date with a quick morning snapshot of what’s happened in the tech industry.

More on that down below, along with our usual helpings of CSS, JavaScript, and other great web-related articles.

Best,
KBall from ZenDev

CSS & SCSS

Concise Media Queries with CSS Grid

Short and sweet, makes it clear how big of a step forward CSS Grid is for creating responsive layouts. The ability to create template areas and reorder them in a single simple media query takes us leaps and bounds above prior solutions to responsivity.


From Ordinary to Extraordinary with CSS Animations

I dunno if this lives up to the title, but it does have some useful techniques I hadn’t seen before and some pretty cool examples.


Gradient Shapes

This reminds me of another recent post on making shapes with CSS, but this examples is ALL shapes that can be created with gradients on the background. Super cool!


The CSS Working Group At TPAC: What’s New In CSS?

Interested in what’s coming down the road in CSS? This writeup both gives a bit of a behind-the-scenes look at how the CSS Working Group works, but also highlights a set of upcoming features.


JavaScript

Getting Started with React Hooks

React Hooks are a recently announced new feature (still only available in pre-release versions of React) that have taken the JavaScript world by storm. There’s been a ton of buzz going around twitter, and Evan You has already implemented a proof of concept equivalent for Vue. This article is a nice introduction to what these things are and how to use them.


How to Handle Monetary Values in JavaScript

A surprisingly tricky topic; money doesn’t naively behave like any of our primitive types. Luckily, there’s a well established pattern out there for dealing with it, and this article introduces both the pattern and a specific library implementing it.


Understanding Higher-Order Functions in JavaScript

This is a great article not only about JavaScript, but about functional programming and the concept of higher order functions in general.


Other Awesomeness

Newsletter: TLDR

This newsletter has quickly become my go-to morning read to make sure I didn’t miss any big tech industry news. It goes out every morning early, so it’s always there when I wake up, and gives the quick punches on news in the industry from the day before. There’s enough context I actually usually don’t even bother to click through to the underlying articles; I can get a sense of important happenings just by scanning.


Preventing Suicide with UX: A Case Study on Google Search

I love a few things about this. One, it’s highlighting that design & technology decisions should never be divorced from their human consequences. If we make it easier to find information on how to kill one’s self, we have a responsibility to provide guard rails and help to catch people in their dark moments and guide them to help. Two, I love that folks are thinking more about specifically mental health and what we in technology can do to help. Three, the thought processes here and in the referenced inspiration post are just fascinating to see.