Web Development Reading List #153: Slow JavaScript, A Universal Typeface, And Healthy Work Environments

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Coding, Tools, Web Development Reading List
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Anselm is a freelance front-end developer who cares about sustainable front-end experiences and ethical choices in life. He writes the WDRL, and is co-founder … More about Anselm ↬

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What’s going on in the industry? What new techniques have emerged recently? What insights, tools, tips and tricks is the web design community talking about? Anselm Hannemann is collecting everything that popped up over the last week in his web development reading list so that you don’t miss out on anything. The result is a carefully curated list of articles and resources that are worth taking a closer look at.

While I was away on vacation, the web development community stayed consistent, and since I’ve been back, the same well-known, long-running discussions about JavaScript, frameworks, and progressive enhancement are full on again. But on the other hand, we also see great new solutions for CSS, simple but efficient JavaScript libraries, and brave people sharing their personal stories from which we all can learn a lot.

News

I rarely recommend conferences here, but this free online conference might be interesting for some of you: Sustainable UX, with topics on doing meaningful, sustainable work.

Concept & Design

Google and Monotype created a full typeface for all the world’s written and spoken languages: Noto.

Noto font — The open-source typeface Noto is truly universal, supporting every language in the world, living and dead. (Image credit)

Web Performance

Alex Painter wrote about how loading JavaScript can slow down websites, even if it’s asynchronous.

HTML & SVG

This guide to making SVG maps with MapShaper shows where to find geographic map resources, how to modify them, and, finally, how to export and use them as SVG.
Mike Riethmuller shows that SVG has more potential than we tend to think and how it provides clever solutions to everyday use cases.

JavaScript

Hyperform is a complete implementation of the HTML5 form validation API in JavaScript. It replaces or polyfills the browser’s native methods and eases your validation task with custom events and hooks.

CSS/Sass

Heydon Pickering wrote the probably shortest and smallest CSS grid framework possible: Fukol, a Flexbox grid that weighs in at only 93 bytes.
Matt Hinchliffe explains how CSS grid layout will change the way we develop layouts.

CSS Grid Layout — Creating complex website layouts like the one of the Financial Times can be hard. Matt Hinchliffe illustrates how CSS grid layout could change this. (Image credit: Matt Hinchliffe)

Work & Life

I wrote a medium-length piece on how important it is to take proper vacation time regularly to relax your body and mind.
This week is Geek Mental Health Week, and I feel it’s important to listen to the stories that people who suffer from mental problems have to tell. Sarah Parmenter, for example, shares her experience of losing her mum and her grandparents and how she looked for professional help to improve her situation.
Bastian Allgeier shares his thoughts on why you should choose tools that fit best into a project and that you feel confident working with instead of considering frameworks and tools just because they’re cool.
“Why’s that company so big? I could do that in a weekend” is something we tend to say easily when we look at a company’s product and its team. But Dan Luu shares why we think that way and why we’re wrong.

Going Beyond…

Farhad Manjoo sums up how Mailchimp succeeded as a company and how they built a sustainable business model without any venture capital and without following the usual start-up path.

And with that, I’ll close for this week. If you like what I write each week, please support me with a donation or share this resource with other people. You can learn more about the costs of the project here. It’s available via email, RSS, and online.

— Anselm