A summary of articles I’ve found recently

This week I don’t have a specific topic to cover. I am falling short by not planning ahead and sometimes I am just lucky to discover something at the last moment that I can quickly write about. Not that there is nothing to write about. It’s quite the opposite and that’s overwhelming at times.

Will I write about some old piece of work? Or should I write about some new cutting edge features, frameworks, ideas? Writing about old work might not be relevant or interesting, but in order to write about new stuff I need to try and learn them first. Either way, it just takes time to put a piece together that would be understandable and a joy to read. And I ain’t no writer.

Anyway, I am going to share a few links with you that you can open and read at a time that best suits you. Please enjoy the categorized list below.

Photo by XPS on Unsplash

CSS

**aspect-ratio CSS property** New aspect-ratio property is coming to the browsers and we won’t have to calculate it and applying it to padding-top as we used to. We would simply write:

aspect-ratio: 16 / 9;

instead of:

padding-top: 56.25%;

**Fluid typography with CSS clamp *This tutorial uses clamp to generate a little fluid type system that can be configured using [CSS Custom Properties](developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/--). Custom properties is another thing I’d like to incorporate more in the projects. There are also some suggestions for handling more complex typography scenarios using other libraries.

Javascript

**The Import On Interaction Pattern** Lazy-load non-critical resources when a user interacts with UI using dynamic import(). There’s a lot of good stuff in this one. You can also find there examples for React (React.lazy and Suspend) and Vue for example.

**Svelte — Cybernetically enhanced web apps** Have you heard of this one? Yeah, it’s another framework born to JS family.

Whereas traditional frameworks like React and Vue do the bulk of their work in the browser, Svelte shifts that work into a compile step that happens when you build your app.

Bundlers/Builders

There are all kind of starters ready for you to build the apps, but sometimes you may need to set up just something simple yourself and these bundlers can help:

Snowpack — The faster frontend build tool.

esbuild — An extremely fast JavaScript bundler

Parcel — Blazing fast, zero configuration web application bundler

CryptoArt

If you are interested in cryptocurrencies and CryptoArt, I’ve got also a few links for you that got my attention recently. I recommend some reading on NFT (non fungible tokens) first.

ZoraOS — is suite of developer tools for building on the Zora Protocol. You can read about the protocol in this whitepaper or start by reading Zora manifesto first to get an idea what is it all about.

The Unreasonable Ecological Cost of #CryptoArt (Part 1) This article talks about a huge ecological footprint that is caused by minting NFTs. Several platforms and people involved in CryptoArt are trying to tackle these challenges though.

How do you stay up to date? Are you listening to podcasts, reading articles and books, getting the newsletters, watching videos or following courses? I combine all these things but the pace of progress and development is staggering and there are so many areas of frontend to explore.

One simply cannot learn everything but it’s important to follow new trends and adapt new techniques.

I think the balance between specializing in one technology and being an early adopter of everything is needed to keep the curiosity ignited and avoiding burn out. That’s what I will try to do. How do you approach it?