Not A Newsletter #1
Newsletters are very popular right now and I was toying with the idea of starting one because I too like to read a couple of Newsletters which regularly arrive in my inbox. Only that they are not really arriving in my email inbox anymore because I subscribe to Newsletters with my RSS Reader Feedbin like I would subscribe to blogs. Sooo why not just use the platform I already have, blogs are cool, right?
At this moment I don’t have a clear vision for how regularly these posts will occur and what exactly will be in them but I plan to have them come up somewhat regularly and share interesting things I find online or maybe even offline. 99% will be somehow connected to Web Development I’m pretty sure.
I’m a freelancer and I do frontend web development. But as many of you probably know, frontend development can take two very different forms. I remember a while back there was this idea in our community that there is a backend of the frontend, which focuses more on programming application code with Javascript. Think of React, Vue.js and the like. On the other hand there is more visual, frontend focused frontend work which has a lot to do with HTML, CSS and probably some JavaScript to help out with visual and interactive things. Sliders, animations and the like.
I definitely feel very much at home in the latter camp, but I feel like I have to develop my skillset further, which means I have to decide whether I want to get more into actual JavaScript programming or branch out in another direction.
I have decided I want to further develop my skills in another area: Accessibility, Inclusiveness, Sustainability, Performance and everything that’s kind of in that camp. If I want to be a frontend specialist focusing solely on HTML, CSS and some visual and interactive JavaScript I have to go deeper with these technologies and concepts to really add value to the projects I’m part of.
This was a rather long intro but it should set the tone for the links I want to share in this first installment. I hope you find a useful thing or two in there.
- Webwaste
- Website Carbon Calculator, How is your website impacting the planet?
- Sustainable Web Design, A Book Apart
- Is Progressive Enhancement Dead Yet?
- Flexbox holy albatross, Patterns Day 2019, Heydon Pickering
- Native CSS Masonry Layout In CSS Grid
- Everything I Have Done to Make CSS Wizardry Fast, Harry Roberts
And I want to leave you with a quote from Tom MacWright’s blogpost How to blog I keep thinking about since I’ve read it:
For me, burnout is caused by doing something I usually love at a time when I don’t love it.
I have not thought about it this way before but it resonates a lot with me.