Earlier today, I read an interesting article speculating about the code quality of Facebook. There is also a Reddit thread discussing the article with some insights from current and former Facebook employees. Most of the comments agree with the article's conclusions, and I myself know the pain of working with bad code all too well. But still, there was one comment from ”barry” against the popular opinion, which I also can't disagree with...
About three months ago I held a talk about Google AMP at the local stahlstadt.js meet up. Since then AMP has gained a lot of traction. Today most of my Google search results for news on mobile have this little lightning bolt which marks them as valid (and cached) AMP pages...
There are currently three huge trends in the web development world: reactive JavaScript frameworks, progressive web apps, and static website generators. Especially static website generators are currently getting a lot of attention. With smashingmagazine.com one of the most well-known web design blogs has just announced to make the switch from WordPress to a static website generator...
Two weeks ago, I had this idea for an app. I decided this was the perfect opportunity to give Ionic a try. Long story short – I quickly realized it would be too much work to build the app I had in mind. But I found the technologies used by Ionic 2 pretty interesting...
With CSS Grid Layout around the corner and Flexbox being broadly supported, it seems that the importance of grid frameworks is declining. Some people even say that Flexbox made grid frameworks obsolete. I disagree...
In the last couple of days, I felt like I was running out of steam. Following my daily routine of committing at least two enhancements to one or more open source projects (mostly my own) felt very exhausting. Yesterday I finally took the time to think about why I'm losing my motivation...
One of my favorite CSS architecture topics has been discussed over the last few days: styling things in the context of other things. It all started with a tweet from Dave Rupert. He asked whether the style...
This is a pattern to write JavaScript modules which are fully testable by unit tests but also easy to use without the overhead of directly using a factory function. You might use this pattern when you want to use unit tests but you do not want to give up on the flexibility of a modular, dependency based approach of structuring your code...
For a long time testing and test-driven development (TDD) was a magical thing for me. I didn't really know what it meant and it seemed to be something only “real” developers can do correctly. Many developers suffer from imposter syndrome and so did (sometimes even today do) I and I was too scared to get into this magical thing called TDD. Two or three years ago I started to work...
For a recent project I had to work a lot with the express Node.js framework. Abbreviations are used everywhere in the express documentation: req, res, err, etc. As I copied code snippets from the documentation into my project and kept changing the abbreviations into the words they stand for, I figured I could write an article on the subject...