Hello 👋
I finally managed to get our company’s paperwork out of my way these past weeks, which is always way more exhausting than it should be and mostly feels like a distraction from my “real work”. Maybe I should just accept that I am not the right person for this kind of work and delegate it to someone else who is.
In other news, we booked a hotel for our trip to Thailand, which is getting closer and closer. Looking forward to the warmer temperatures and some new adventures with the family!
And now on to the things I’ve read an found interesting in the last two weeks:
Frontend Development
📝 Antialiasing and -webkit-font-smoothing
I just stumbled upon this while refactoring some code and trying to match the look of the fonts to the way they looked previously. Everything was set the same but the fonts kept looking just slightly different and it took me a while to realize that we switched a CSS-reset and the new one we used, was using -webkit-font-smoothing *on everything*. This post explains how font smoothing works, and why this is a bad idea.
usabilitypost – Please Stop “Fixing” Font Smoothing
✌️ About JS Libraries and doing the right things
In this twitter thread, Scott Jehl writes about his thoughts about JS frameworks/libraries. This sums it up perfectly:
The job of a tool is to make doing the right thing the default.
Scott Jehl
Scott Jehl – Thread about JS libraries
🤝 W3C TAG Ethical Web Principles
The W3C Technical Architecture Group is a working group within the W3C, tasked to document and create the principles of Web architecture. The Ethical Web Principles are definitely worth a read for everyone working on the web.
W3C – TAG Ethical Web Principles
🐥 1kB Club
After creating the 1MB Club, which collects websites that manage to keep their footprint under 1MB, creator Bradley Taunt did create the 1kB Club, which collects websites under 1kB. It’s a fun experiment and not really meant to be taken too serious, but some of the examples and practices are interesting and worth looking into.
tdarb – Making a Website Under 1kB
⌨️ Dear Console…
A great little collection of scripts you can use in the browser console to achieve certain tasks.
Business
🐻 50% Coding / 50% Marketing
We often struggle to find enough time to spend on marketing as well, and usually we end up spending way too little. To fix that, we started to run some “focus weeks” ever so often, where we focus all our energy on one thing for a full week, be it a new feature, bugfixing/testing, writing a newsletter or other marketing activities. It’s hard to stick to it, especially if it is a side-gig next to your other projects. But a hard 50/50 split still sounds totally reasonable and maybe we should give something like this a try as well.
Other / Random
🧨 “We” crashed a satellite into and asteroid
I’ve mentioned this story in my very first reading list post, back when the satellite was launched into space. Last week, the time had come for DART to be blown up into an asteroid. Fun times.
Washington Post – NASA’s DART mission
🔥 Have a good weekend!