Web Development Reading List #183: Comedy In Design, Security Checklist And The Life As A Nobody

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Tools, Coding, 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.

When was the last time you took some time to reflect? Constantly surrounded by news and notifications to keep up with and in a rush to get things done more efficiently, it’s important that we take a step back from time to time to reflect our actions and opinions.

Reflect if you are working the way you want to work, reflect if you live your life as you want it to be, but also everyday matters. Do you really need that one particular app or service, for example, or could you live without it? Sometimes less is more and efficiency isn’t everything. What counts is how you use your time.

News

The Safari Technology Preview Release 30 is ready and, along with a couple of additions and deprecations, it comes with support for Sub Resource Integrity (SRI).

General

Don Williamson shares how he replaced Disqus comments with Github Comments to save requests, improve his site’s performance, and protect the privacy of users.
Nick Gauthier explains in a recent case study why they didn’t use a framework to build MeetSpace, a video conferencing tool for distributed teams. An interesting read in times where everyone seems to only write about building things with a framework.

Concept & Design

Espen Brunborg gave a great talk at this year’s Beyond Tellerrand conference about “The Secret Life of Comedy.” Worth watching.

The Secret Life Of Comedy — In his Beyond Tellerand talk, Espen Brunborg unveils how adding a pinch of comedy can make a real difference in web design. (Image credit)

Tools & Workflows

Lea Verou introduced Mavo this week, a library that turns your HTML-based markup (which contains some special attributes) into an interactive web application. An interesting project that is worth following.

Security

Michael O’Brien shares a security checklist for web developers so that you don’t forget anything crucial in your next projects.

Accessibility

The WebKit team recently implemented reduced motion media queries and now shares how you can use them.

CSS/Sass

Scott O’Hara published an introduction to the new CSS :focus-within pseudo-class that is part of CSS Selectors Level 4 and now supported in Firefox, Safari, and, soon, in Chrome. It’s a great addition to :focus and solves common issues with focus styling relatively easily.

Work & Life

Zat Rana wrote an interesting article in which he concludes that the purpose of life is to be a nobody. And while it sounds stupid at first glance, the article makes some very valid points to back up this bold statement.

Going Beyond…

After taking a quiz that the New York Times published about which tech giant you would drop if you had to decide, Jeena pointed out how dependent we are on Apple, Alphabet, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon. I also summarized my personal results, and if you have a different opinion, why not share it with the world by publishing them as well?
Facebook published their environmental footprint report, and it contains a lot of interesting insights. It’s nice to see another big player finally showing the sustainability advances they realized. Looking at the increased travel costs, I just wonder if allowing more remote work would help to reduce the impact traveling has on the environment?

Thanks for reading this. If you like it, consider supporting my work.

—Anselm