Hey there and Happy New Year! 👋
Hope you had a wonderful start into what hopefully be the year that brings us somewhat back to normality after *all of this* (waves hands at the pandemic). We had a few days off in the mountains with family and friends, where the picture above is from. I really enjoy the end-of-year days as it’s usually the only time of the year where I am truly logging off. Also, it was great to see family face-to-face for christmas eve, some of which we didn’t see for a full two years.
On a more personal note: We finally got engaged, which – after 15+ years and two kids – you could say was about damn time!
The first week of the new year started quite good with some client work lined up as well as the usual yearly admin stuff. I’m looking forward to what 2022 has in store for us.
Let’s jump into the links.
Frontend Development
👩💻 On the “femininity” of CSS
An interesting take on why some developers still think that CSS is not a programming language. Short answer, btw: it is. But Elaina makes a point in this post, why CSS – for some – is not seen as a “real” programming language because it’s just there to “make things pretty”, and therefore too feminine. I agree with the overall sentiment and especially liked that she mentions that programming is in fact a most feminine profession, men just pushed the women out after they pioneered in it.
Tailwind and the Femininity of CSS
✨ 30 Seconds of Code – CSS
Another nice collection of CSS snippets with various effects for inspiration.
https://www.30secondsofcode.org/css/p/1
✍️ Tool: Fluid Type Scale Calculator
If you want to use a fluid type scale, this tool is for you. Let’s you set all the parameters and then copy & paste the final CSS code. Easy as that.
SEO
💡 SEO Insights by John Mueller
A compilation of 57 insights into how search works by Google’s John Mueller. Most of it is probably quite well-known, but there are some things I learned from this article. For example, I always thought that duplicate content can harm your ranking – which doesn’t seem to be the case, Google just tries to determine and then link to the piece it thinks is the original.
57 SEO Insights From Google’s John Mueller
Other / Random
🤥 Marketers are addicted to bad data
Jacques Corby-Tuech has some thoughts about the bad data marketers are addicted to. I’m more than happy not to be in a marketing role where I have to “prove” my worth in such biased numbers. And even when I had a job in marketing, I had a really great boss who recognized that a lot of marketing is experimentation and gut feeling instead of a hard science, and never forced me to work with magic numbers. I’m completely on board with Jacques’ thoughts, to me this feels like a whole industry cheating and lying to themselves in a perpetual game of “look we did this”. It’s especially funny if you compare it (for example) to facebook’s trial before congress, when they had to split the opposite messages between “we are not capable of changing human behaviour” while selling exactly that to their customers. It’s just a very ridiculous business model.
Marketers are Addicted to Bad Data
🌍 Gary Pendergast on WordPress and web3
A few weeks ago I started writing a draft for a post called something like “I don’t have an opinion about NFTs/web3” in which i tried to make sense of what I understand about this topic, and what not. In it, I concluded that much of what I know about crypto/nft/webn3 is that it is highly polarizing and almost all the voices you hear are either overly enthusiastic or hate it to the core. Just as I was thinking about editing this post again, I stumbled upon this article by Gary Pendergast, which was one of the first articles I’ve read on the topic with a more nuanced opinion. I still haven’t formed an opinion, and maybe I don’t have to, but if you see more articles like these, please send them over.
Gary Pendergast – WordPress and web3
💸 The Case Against Crypto
Another one on the topic of crypto & NFTs, this time by Martin O’Leary, where he argues strongly against using crypto. While he’s clearly taking a stance against crypto, he’s making some very valid points and puts a lot of the (negative) thoughts I had about crypto into words, much better than I could.
Ok, that was it for today. Hope you have a great start into the new year! 🎉