Web Development Reading List #164: Enjoy The End Of 2016, It Wasn’t The Worst

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About The Author

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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Welcome to the last reading list of the year. I’m happy to still have you as a reader and very grateful to all the people who value and support my work. I hope you’ll be on vacation for the upcoming days or can relax a bit from your daily work. Remind to take care of yourself, and see you next year!

Concept & Design

• Sarah Drasner on why it’s important to properly describe and document animations in a design system.
• Francis Storr explains why front-end developers are Information Architects, too.

Security

• Matthew Bryant found a DNS vulnerability in AWS, Google Cloud, Rackspace and Digital Ocean which would basically allow him to take over 120.000 domains and it’s likely that other DNS providers are vulnerable as well.

Web Performance

• Vitaly Friedman put together a great Front-End Performance Checklist 2017 for your next projects, with PDF and Apple Pages files so you can tick it off point by point.
• Sebastiaan Deckers on how to get the real performance benefit from HTTP/2 by solving the Cache Invalidation problem.
• Zach Leatherman says “No @font-face syntax will ever be bulletproof, nor should it be”. This is followed by Bram Stein’s “Loading Web Fonts asynchronously”.

CSS/Sass

• Nick Salloum shows how to achieve multi-line padded text with the CSS box-decoration-break property.

Work & Life

• New year’s resolutions — you know it, they’re hard to reach. James Clear on why it’s easier to use recurring systems instead of setting goals.
• Ezekiel Buchheit’s “No, I have no side code projects to show you” is a great read for everyone interviewing folks for a job position.
• Jordan Scales on what he found out about using a Pomodoro timer to quantify “off” days.

Going Beyond…

• We like to say “2016 was the worst”, and I don’t like this. Angus Hervey shares 99 good news stories that we probably didn’t hear about in 2016. Don’t let you be fooled by the all negative news and instead embrace the good things that happened as well. Despite some bad news, 2016 was quite a good year. Enjoy its last days!
• The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) published a first draft guide for how tech can achieve ethical Artificial Intelligence (AI) design.

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

Further Reading

• Getting Ready For HTTP/2: A Guide For Web Designers And Developers
• How To Prepare For A Front-End Job Interview
• How Functional Animation Helps Improve User Experience
• The @Font-Face Rule And Useful Web Font Tricks

(mrn)