Edition 312 by Anselm Hannemann

Hey,

it’s been a while again since my last edition. Spring and summer here are always a busy season for me, splitting my available time into two jobs: Web work (or currently project management) and my garden. I’ll try to catch up more regularly now again, so maybe another edition will follow soon.

I’m learning to value my market garden nursery more and more. It forces me to be in a passive, listening and watching mode, and only interfere if I have a proper plan to make an impact. When you do things improperly, you may end up having twice the work. Or even worse, your plants suffer and you get less crop.

With software development it’s often very similar. We can push forwards and run behind latest trends and technologies but without a proper plan, you end up having these endless projects. Being a Scrum Master in my current project I need to remind that the main goal is to listen to my team, understanding their goals, their struggles and then acting as guidance to get more effective (=unblock people).

UI/UX

Tooling

Security

Web Performance

JavaScript

CSS

• So while this looks simple, I like the examination to build a complete modern layout with the latest technologies available. It’s a nice exercise for mentoring sessions, internal team workshops or ourselves to level up our knowledge.
• Stefanie Eckles shares how to produce truly responsive typography, regardless of context with Container queries, CSS calc functions, modern selectors and applying this with a native CSS mixin using Custom properties.
• Why do we define CSS Custom Properties at :root level? Matthias Ott digs deeper into this matter and explains why generically this is a good idea but you can use on different levels individually and use this feature for you.
• Some discoveries on how the CSS Grid gap property operates when hiding items in grid-template and grid-auto layouts, by Ryan Mulligan.
• CSS Anchor positioning might be one of the most exciting features coming to CSS. While it’s experimental currently, this article by Roman Komarov shows how important that is for annotations, context-based content like images or sidebars.
• We’re close to getting scroll animations in CSS only, and if needed with a proper API to JavaScript. That’d be pretty nice and, most importantly, reduce the number of implementations that really hurt performance and UX.

Work & Life

If you liked it, please contribute any custom amount here. Thank you!

Anselm