This was originally published in my free weekly newsletter, Dev Finds Friday. It's like having that cool friend who sends you all the best links on the internet (but better).
Onto the the links!
Remote Work Takes Over
Two months into the current crisis, and the walls holding back the big tech companies in Silicon Valley from allowing remote work have started to tumble down.
The first company I read that made the move was Twitter after CEO Jack Dorsey emailed the company telling them they'd be allowed to work from home for forever.
HN discussion of Twitter's move: link.
This week at least two more dominoes have fallen. Coinbase announced that after COVID-19 they'll be a remote-first (!) company, and, then the granddaddy of all the remote announcement,
Facebook said that within 5 years half of all their employees would be remote.
HN discussion on the FB announcement: link.
Which domino will be next to fall?
Weird Wide Webring
The web needs a little more weird. These sites are helping.
I'm a great lover of the personal site. I think we're experiencing a bit of renaissance after having many people abandon their own places on the web for social media.
The Weird Wide Webring is one such group of people helping to fuel the personal site resurgence. It's a collective of sites helping to make the web a bit more weird.
Static Hoisting
The JAMstack has become the thing in the front end world. For good reason, too, there's a lot of great patterns on how to build web applications that have emerged.
In this article Guillermo Rauch uses the analogy of hoisting to describe what makes static sites so special.
A key tenet of static site generators is to pull in content not when it's being requested by a user, but in a build step. A WordPress fetches post content directly from the database when someone hits a post URL.
Something like Gatsby bundles up the post in static HTML when it's published. What this means is that our sites no longer have to exist on one single shared server somewhere in Virginia.
Instead, modern hosts like Netlify and Vercel "hoist" the site to CDN edge locations as close as they can get to visitors.
It's an ahead-of-time approach vs. just-in-time.
“The title ‘Front-End Developer’ is obsolete.”
A CSS-Tricks article expanding on a Twitter thread about how many front-end developers ignore everything outside of JavaScript to the detriment of the user-experience.
The front-end requires not just knowing JS deeply, but know CSS and HTML deeply. It means knowing how to write accessible markup.
It means not solving problems in complex JS that could just as easily be solved with some CSS transitions.
The modern frontend developer is most often than not a 'Jack of all trades' mastering JS (or even just a framework) and barely tolerating HTML/CSS as a necessary evil. That’s understandable. I strongly think it’s a different specialization, and it’s too much for a single person.
Some good discussion (surprisingly) can also be found on Reddit: link.
How to Center in CSS
Less of a how-to guide than a friendly little web app that generates code for you to center things.
Need to center a div of an unknown width and height, and you have to support IE6 (yes, really). This has got you covered.
That's all I've got.
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Much appreciated.
Stay healthy and thanks for reading!
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