The Art of Comments | CSS-Tricks

Herman: Automated Pattern Libraries | OddBird

A lightweight style guide generator. This one uses SassDoc to parse out the documentation for colours, type, etc.

Starting a React-Powered Comment Form | CSS-Tricks

This is a really great screencast on getting started with React. I think it works well for a few reasons:

• Sarah and Chris aren’t necessarily experts yet in React—that’s good; it means they know from experience what “gotchas” people will encounter.
• They use a practical use-case (a comment form) that’s suited to the technology.
• By doing it all in CodePen, they avoid the disheartening slog of installation and build tools—compare it to this introduction to React.
• They make mistakes. There’s so much to be learned from people sharing “Oh, I thought it would work like that, but it actually works like this.”

There’s a little bit of “here’s one I prepared earlier” but, on the whole, it’s a great step-by-step approach, and one I’ll be returning to if and when I dip my toes into React.

HTML Is Actually a Programming Language. Fight Me | WIRED

When haters deny HTML’s status as a programming language, they’re showing they don’t understand what a language really is. Language is not instructing an interlocutor what to do in a way that leaves no room for other interpretations; it is better and richer than that. Like human language, HTML is conversational. It is remarkably adept at adapting to context. It can take a different shape on any machine, from a desktop browser or an e-reader screen to a mobile app or a screen reader for the blind (so long as that device is built to present hypertext).

Hell, yeah!

Ultimately, even as HTML has become the province of professionals, it cannot be gatekept. This is what makes so many programmers so anxious about the web, and sometimes pathetically desperate to maintain the all-too-real walls they’ve erected between software engineers and web developers.

Hell, yeeeeaaaaahhh!!!

What other programmers might say dismissively is something HTML lovers embrace: Anyone can do it. Whether we’re using complex frameworks or very simple tools, HTML’s promise is that we can build, make, code, and do anything we want.

I don’t have time to learn React - Keith Cirkel

React is a non-transferable skill.

React proponents might claim that React will teach you modern UI, but from what I’ve seen it barely copes with modern UI. autofocus is broken, custom elements don’t work in all but the experimental version, using any “modern” features like dialog or popovers requires useEffect, and the synthetic event system teaches you so little about how DOM actually works. This isn’t modern UI, it’s UI from 2013 at its inception. I don’t have the time left in my career to pick up UI paradigms that haven’t evolved much beyond from when Barack Obama was in office.

When I mentor early career developers and they ask me what they should learn, I can’t say React, they don’t have time. I mean sure, pick up enough React to land you the inevitable job doing it, but it’s not going to level up your career.

The goal isn’t to write less code | Go Make Things

The goal isn’t to write less code.

It’s to ship less code to users. Better code. Faster code. More resilient code.

THIS!

Sooooo many front-end developers don’t grasp this fundamental principle: it’s not about you!