Hello 👋
We arrived back home in Switzerland last weekend, after what has been an amazing month in Greece, where I first attended WordCamp Europe and then we went on to Naxos and Paros for some vacation with family and some close friends. But I didn’t just sit around during this month and we also shipped quite a few things. I’m especially happy that we finally managed to merge our picu Pro modules into one instead of eight(!) separate plugins, which will make everything so much easier not only for us but also for our customers. We also did some progress on the marketing side of things and I generally feel pretty motivated and energized to get shit done this second half of the year.
This weekend, summer finally hit Switzerland with temperatures of up to 35° Celcius, which means this afternoon I won’t be doing much besides finding some water to jump into ✌️
Frontend Development
🎨 DHH on using Figma for Webdesign
In this post Daniel Heinemeier Hansson argues that no matter what you do, Figma will always be an abstraction for the real product when used in Webdesign. And that designers should be working as directly in and with the real “Material” – HTML, CSS, JavaScript etc. – as possible. I’m certainly not in tune with all of his opinions recently, but I guess I found one I can fully agree with. For me, quickly getting an idea “on paper” usually involves a tool (Sketch in my case), but then I try to move into the browser as soon as possible and iterate from there.
David Heinemeier Hansson – Design for the web without Figma
🧐 Is it time to drop Sass?
This is a question I often asked myself in the past few months, as CSS has become better and better and implemented a ton of functionality that was only possible with Sass in the past. As I am using hardly any of the more complex stuff that Sass provides, I guess it soon could be the time for me to switch most projects over to Vanilla CSS.
GoMakeThings – Is it time to drop Sass?
WordPress
🚌 Humans Get Hit by Buses
Tim Nash advocates for automated updating and testing because we humans tend to be too unreliable compared to an automated system. He’s absolutely right, and it’s definitely the direction we want to move to as well, with our own client maintenance services as well as introducing better testing in our plugin development.
Tim Nash – Humans Get Hit by Buses
🤝 Real-Time Collaboration in WordPress
The next phase of WordPress development will include some real time collaboration features inside the block editor and the first few mockups look pretty amazing.
make.wordpress.org – Real-Time Collaboration
Other
📸 Paragraphica – AI Camera
Paragraphica is an AI “camera” that generates a picture from where you are when you press the button. Instead of using light, it uses a bunch of parameters like your geolocation, the date/weather and nearby placed and combines those into a prompt which is then used to generate the picture. I love funny experiments like these.
☀️ Happy weekend everyone