What articles from the past week have impacted you most?

Do you have any articles from the past week or so that have changed the way you think? That you feel make you a better developer for having read?

What are the top readings from the web that have you excited? Wanting to try a new idea or approach?

Has anything changed the way you work? The way you live? The way you view our profession?

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I'll kick it off with my top three (ok, four, but the last two should be read together and compared for historical value):

• The Architecture No One Needs — Do you ever get the feeling we're re-implementing every web technology in our SPAs? I do. That someone else has felt the pain and can eloquently describe it somehow serves as a salve.

• Combining the Powers of SEM and BIO for Improving CSS — I've been researching CSS a lot since I'm terrible at it. This single article synthesized a lot of things nicely about the approaches from the past decade: OOCSS, SMACSS, BEM, &c.

And in nothing-new-under-the-sun territory, I've witnessed a lot of new CSS (micro)libraries using classless rulesets with just enough classes to create interesting designs with unique visual identities. So, classes or classless? Which is better?

• Challenging CSS Best Practices — Big stylesheets are unmaintainable. Composability is nice, but this approach seems to break encapsulation.
• Classes? Where We're Going, We Don't Need Classes! — We don't need small classes and lots of them. We have preprocessors. CSS is quite elegant when you embrace it. We've already got encapsulation: elements!

Comments

[Ben Halpern]

I really had fun reading through the replies in this thread:

Daily Coding Puzzles - Nov 4th - Nov 9th

Ali Spittel ・ 1 min read

#codingpuzzle #programming #challenge

I don’t tend to seek out these kinds of puzzles on my own, but when they land in my feed it’s a fun treat.

[Ghost]

Thanks @ben , and congrats on the iPhone app release!

EDIT: Also, how do you embed a post instead of linking?

[rhymes]

Using the link liquid tag, check the editor guide, you'll find many more embed tags dev.to/p/editor_guide

[Ghost]

Amazing! Thank you.

[Phillip Smith]

This one is a well written abstract approach to better explaining the fundamental difference between imperative and functional approaches to programming

dev.to/eddroid/teaching-functional...

[Ghost]

Thanks! I've actually just been wondering if there were newsletters or magazines that were critical of different approaches to backend development. Maybe DEV is what I've been looking for. Do you have any favorite tags you follow?

[Phillip Smith]

When I first got the app I selected a few things, but I don't remember exactly what exactly they were :(

I know I am interested in JavaScript, HTML, CSS, Front End, UX, and React. I probably also picked something about functional programming and some DevOps-y stuff like Containerization and Orchestration.

[Ghost]

Thanks! I started following #fp, #oop, #ux, #css, #javascript, #python, #linux, and #docker.

[Jason Weeks]

Something fun that I just can't get out of my head is: til.hashrocket.com/posts/2f488279a...

But in practical terms front-end (optimization techniques with webpack: developers.google.com/web/fundamen... This article was so useful.

[Ghost]

Obvious in retrospect, but mind was blown nonetheless! Emoji are really fascinating. Have you ever tried storing them in a database?

Also, did you know that the family emoji is a ligature? medium.com/making-faces-and-other-...

What specifically about optimization did you find useful? I'm curious because I never really consider optimization until it's necessary. Did you have a feature or are you generally interested in optimization?