Hey again ✌️
It’s been a while since I posted one of these lists. Shortly after the last one, my motivation & energy kind of tanked and I started to feel burned out and just didn’t feel like it. Fortunately, saying no to almost everything for two months worked wonders to get back on track and I’m feeling much better already.
Now – as I’m sitting in a house up in the mountains and looking out the window into this beautiful winter wonderland – I thought I didn’t want to let this year end without posting another one. So here’s some of the things I’ve been reading in the last few weeks and months.
Side-note: I intentionally left out anything related to the whole Matt vs WPEngine situation, because I don’t feel like I can add anything of value at the moment.
Design / Development
👏 Falsehoods about names
Patrick McKenzie collected a list of things programmers believe about names and it is a very good reminder to never assume too much (or anything, actually), especially when dealing with different cultures and/or languages.
Patrick McKenzie – Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names
✨ New CSS, actually usable in 2024!
It’s hard to keep track of new CSS features, and especially of which ones are actually ready to be used today. Thomas did just that and collected features that are usable in 2024.
Thomasorus – New CSS that can actually be used in 2024
⚓️ Linking to text fragments on a page
Ok, here’s one from the category “WTF, that’s possible?”. I knew and often use anchors to link to ids on a page. But today I learned that you can also link directly to content inside a page, without having to add anchors or anything else on that page. This is very useful.
Ahmad Alfy – Smarter than ‘Ctrl+F’: Linking Directly to Web Page Content
❌ Don’t Fuck With Scroll!
Everyone should read this. And understand this. And then never do it. Ever again.
🙌 JavaScript dos and donts
I really don’t know how we got to the point where ‘frontend development’ – for many at least – means throwing enough JS all over everything, without even trying to understand the basics of the medium we’re working in. Absolutely agree with and love this quote by Mu-An and the analogy to restaurants that cook without knowing their ingredients is spot on:
We have an enterprise of mediocre restaurants that do not know/care to know the ingredients that go into making the food we are serving.
Mu-An Chiou
Mu-An Chiou – JavaScript dos and donts
🤖 AI and Development Fundamentals
Alvaro Montoro wrote about how he thinks AI is going to change web development, and why he sees it as a tool rather than the development itself. Something many people seem to confuse today. I wrote about my initial experience with Claude and would say I agree with him.
Alvaro Montoro – Web Developers, AI, and Development Fundamentals
📊 1 dataset – 100 visualizations
This project took one (very) simple dataset and tried to come up with 100 different visualizations. It’s amazing to see the numerous ways to display that same data, with some being nice but not very practical and others borderline ridiculous. For me #54 is the clear winner of them all.
🚗 Apple Vehicle Motion Cues
Apple displays animated dots on top of your iOS screen, if it detects that you are in a moving vehicle, and apparently this helps with motion sickness. It’s a perfect example of a “simple” design solution.
Marcel Wichmann – Apple’s Vehicle Motion Cues Changed my Life
🤔 Localized Icons, V-Signs and other misinterpretations
Reading this article by Eric W. Bailey was a good reminder that iconology can have very different meanings depending on your culture or language. In the Wikipedia article about the V-Sign I learned that in Australia it is not only considered the equivalent of giving someone “the finger”, but also that photos of V-Signs can be a security risk in some cases, because people’s fingerprints could be identified from them!? You never stop learning.
Eric W. Bailey – Don’t forget to localize your icons
🤩 Design Reviewed
Another great design archive page to bookmark.
WordPress
🔌 Closed Plugin Warnings in WP
It’s a problem that is as old as plugin updates: In WP you can easily see if a new version of a plugin is available. But so far, there was no way of telling if a plugin was closed and no longer available from WP.org, which could be considered a security issue as it gives you a false sense of security. This could change soon, and there’s a feature plugin already to show a warning if a plugin was removed and won’t receive any updates.
Github – Plugin Closure Reasons
🤖 Using ChatGPT to translate a WP Plugin
Zack Katz wrote about how they used GPT to translate their plugin into different languages, and saving a lot of money in the process. I actually think that something like this could be the future for a lot of translations. If it becomes a decisions between having some translations, even if AI-created, or having no translations at all, for many plugins (ours included) the quality can be good enough to be better than nothing.
GravityKit – How we saved over $36,000 translating our plugins using ChatGPT (and how you can too!)
Other / Random
☎️ The Department of Everything
I was probably about 10 years old, when we got our first internet connection at home. Don’t think that makes me a digital native, but I can hardly remember how it felt to get information any other way than off the internet. This article peeks into the world of a “telephone reference desk”, basically a bunch of librarians you could call and ask questions and they would go about looking it up for you. Fascinating.
The Hedgehog Review – The Department of Everything
🤔 Lose the very
If you, like me, are not a native English speaker, chances are you overuse the word “very”. This fun little page gives you some ideas to remove “very” with something better, next time you want to use it.
Wish you all a great 2025 – cheers ✌️