Author Michelle Barker

November 22, 2022 — Prioritizing performance when building our web apps improves the user experience and helps ensure they can be used by as many people as possible. In this article, Michelle Barker will walk you through some of the front-end optimization tips to keep our Vue apps as efficient as possible. Read more…

October 11, 2022 — Climate change and sustainability are increasing concerns for digital organizations, as well as individuals working in tech. In this article, we’ll explore some of the ways we can raise awareness and effect change within an organization to create a more positive environmental impact. Read more…

March 1, 2022 — 2022 is shaping up to be a pretty great year for CSS, with a plethora of new features on the horizon. Some are already starting to land in browsers, others are likely to gain widespread browser support in 2022, while for one or two the process may be a little longer. In this article we’ll take a look at a few of them. Read more…

February 3, 2022 — In this article, we’ll look specifically at what we can do to reduce the impact of social media embeds and social sharing widgets — or even some strategies to avoid them altogether. While the spotlight is on reducing the environmental impact, many of these tips will be great for performance too. Read more…

November 17, 2021 — In this article, we’ll take a look at the best ways to handle colors in CSS today, some tips for using them in a design system, and what we can expect from our colors in the not-too-distant future. Read more…

October 21, 2021 — The prefers-reduced-motion media query has excellent support in all modern browsers going back a couple of years. In this article, Michelle Barker explains why there’s no reason not to use it today to make your sites more accessible. Read more…

September 23, 2021 — The new CSS accent-color property makes it quick and easy to roll out our brand colors to certain form inputs by leveraging user agent styles. In this article we’ll take a look at what it does and how to use it alongside color-scheme for simple, accessible checkboxes and radio buttons — and imagine how we might use it in the future. Read more…

September 8, 2021 — In this article, we’ll walk through the process of taking a seemingly simple design for a text-and-media component and deciding how best to translate it into code, keeping in mind the needs of both users and content authors. Read more…

July 13, 2021 — Have you ever needed to build a UI where some component on the page needs to respond to elements as they’re scrolled to a certain threshold within the viewport — or perhaps in and out of the viewport itself? In JavaScript, attaching an event listener to constantly fire a callback on scroll can be performance-intensive, and if used unwisely, can make for a sluggish user experience. But there is a better way with Intersection Observer. Read more…