Reading List #7

Hey there

This week, we got our first small-ish client-project of the year almost finished, made some progress on new blogposts for picu as well as our own company blog.

Apart from that, I read through most of “Complete Guide to Absolutely Everything”, a brilliant book by Hannah Fry and Adam Rutherford, and I love it so far.

Here’s some of the things I was reading this week.

Frontend Development

๐Ÿ”ฅ Writing Better CSS

Modern CSS is getting better and better. Alexandr does a great job in explaining some of the cool new features we have at our disposal. Actually, he managed to untangle some of the knots I still had in understanding things like the :is & :where selectors and especially clamp(). If you work with CSS, you should read this post.

Alexandr Hovhannisyan โ€“ Writing Better CSS

๐ŸŽ› CSS Variables in inline styles

When I started using CSS Custom Properties much more, it always bugged me that you have to put them inline, for example if you want to pass a variable from PHP to CSS. Matthias explains why this is much better (not only in terms of accessibility) than direct inline styles would be and has some good examples to illustrate this.

CSSence โ€“ CSS Variables in Style Attributes

๐Ÿ“ You can use the browsers’ aspect ratio in a media query

Did you know you can use aspect-ratio in a media query ( @media (min-aspect-ratio: 16/9) { ... } ) to react to the proportions of your browser window? I didn’t, but I could imagine a few occasions were this would have come in handy.

Chip Cullen โ€“ A little known Media Query: Aspect Ratio


web3/NFT/crypto

๐ŸŒ A not so gentle intro to web3

Another take on the whole web3 discussion. Koos’ opionion is fairly negative, but I think he also backs up his opinions with valid criticism. Apart from the ecological problems, the countless get-rich-quick pyramid schemes and grifters involved, I see one of the core questions blockchain/web3 needs to address is “does it actually solve a real problem, which a database wouldn’t”. And this is not as clear as it seems. For example: if blockchains should solve (or rather remove altogether) “trust” in a digital age but we still need to trust someone, namely the one who’s putting something onto the blockchain, then what’s the benefit of it all? Or, how Benedict Evans put it so eloquently: “The blockchain can’t lie, but you can lie to the blockchain”. Well said.

Koos Looijesteijn โ€“ A not so gentle intro to web3

๐Ÿง Does web3 make the web more centralized?

And yet another one, which focuses on the centralization / decentralization aspects of web3. Wesley argues that the web actually is and always was decentralized and that blockchains like Ethereum even make the web3 more centralized. I’d love to see projects that truly leverage blockchain technology to succeed, but it’s hard to argue about some of the technical aspects they mention in the article.

Wesley Aptekar-Cassels โ€“ web3 centralized

Other / Random

๐Ÿฆ How Florian uses twitter

Florian wrote down how he uses twitter, and โ€“ even though we have been working together closely for about seven years now โ€“ it still amazes me how completely different we manage things like email or in this case our twitter accounts. While he’s minimalistic and organized, I’m completely chaotic. Maybe that’s why we work together quite well. He’s so damn organized he even “cleares” his timeline on twitter, how crazy is that? Right? I try to get my mails down to mailbox zero, at least from time to time. I read books from cover to cover, if they are any good. But twitter really is just this neverending waterfall of tweets, and if I miss some, the good ones will pop up from retweets of others anyway. And if not, I don’t really care. Always interesting to see how different other people use things.

Florian Ziegler โ€“ How I Use Twitter


Ok, that’s a wrap.

Have a nice weekend โœจ

Made with โค๏ธ in Switzerland