It's been a little while coming, but the results from the 2019 Front-End Tooling Survey are now here! This year, 3,005 developers answered 27 questions covering a wide range of front-end tools and methodologies. As always, a massive thank you from me to every single person that took the time to fill…

Continue reading the main story Martin Scorsese: I Said Marvel Movies Aren’t Cinema. Let Me Explain. Cinema is an art form that brings you the unexpected. In superhero movies, nothing is at risk, a director says. Mr. Scorsese is an Academy Award-winning director, writer and producer. “It’s a…

Sebastiaan de With Follow Oct 29 · 16 min read Last month, we took a look at what is new in the iPhone 11 and 11 Pro’s camera hardware. You might’ve noticed two things from Apple’s iPhone announcement event and our blog post: the hardware changes seem fairly modest, with more attention directed at…

Christopher McQuarrie: ‘Focus Entirely on Execution and Not on Result’ Christopher McQuarrie: After twenty five years in the craft, I’ve learned the secret tomaking movies is making movies — starting with little movies noone will ever see. The secret to knowledge is doing and failing — often…

Let us celebrate normcore design systems. We’re building another enterprise design system, and we’re super-excited to make it boring. Brad Frost , Dan Mall , and I have just begun helping a big company express and communicate a design system to govern their many web products. The company has two…

I heard some points of criticism to how React deals with reactivity and it's focus on "purity". It's interesting because there are really two approaches evolving. There's a mutable + change tracking approach and there's an immutability + referential equality testing approach. It's difficult to mix…

Hopefully, people will donate, right? I started an Open Collective for it but it made 93$ in 2.5 years. After I tweeted about this, a couple of people said: “well maybe people aren’t using it”. I knew that they were just trying to bring me down, but the analytics were saying something else. 7 to 10…

At a recent happy hour, I struck up a conversation with a product manager. I told him I was a product designer, and he asked “one of the good ones, or one of the bad ones?” A designer on his team — a “bad one” — asked too many questions. Questions like “Why are we building this now?” “Are we sure…

As tech companies grow, the creation of their design system can become a powerful and necessary tool. Typically consisting of a defined set of reusable components and guidelines, design systems make it easy for anyone to create a brand-aligned and cohesive customer experience consistently. At their…

Infrastructure By Katie Sievert and Jon Koon Tuesday, 16 July 2019 To understand the impact of a component-based design and how it enables us to develop faster on the Twitter web codebase, we’ll need to take a step back. Not too long ago when you opened up Twitter it was a lot more “square”, from…

Frontend designers create the HTML, CSS, and presentational JavaScript code that powers web products’ user interfaces. I see frontend design as helpful mortar that bridges the gap between design and development. Of course “frontend designer” may or may not be the right title for it. Some others…

Ah yes, CSS. Hardly a week passes without it being the topic of a heated online discussion. It’s too hard. It’s too simple. It’s unpredictable. It’s outdated. Peter Griffin struggles with blinds dot gif. I don’t know why CSS sparks so many different emotions in developers, but I have a hunch as to…

Lighthouse awards us with the number 100 in a green circle if we did an exceptional job. It’s something you can proudly share with your client or on Twitter. It’s important to measure the quality of our code, but it’s even more important that we interpret the scores automatic testing tools give us…

It’s easy to forget now, but Amazon wasn’t always the king of online shopping. In the fall of 2004, Jeff Bezos’s company was still mostly selling just books and DVDs. That same year, Amazon was under siege from multiple sides. Some of its biggest competitors were brick-and-mortar chains like Best…

My experience of images on the web I use a combination of magnification and screen reader when surfing the web. As a rule of thumb, I use magnification on larger screens and a screen reader on smaller devices. I, like everyone else, come across many images when surfing the web. If I’m using a screen…

Many people know that you can scan your credit card in Mobile Safari. But how many web developers know how to create a form that supports that feature? Not many I’d bet. Auto-Fill Credit Card Forms Using Your iPhone’s Camera in iOS 8 . Used with permission. It doesn’t help that Apple has provided…

When I talk about evaluating technology for front-end development, I like to draw a distinction between two categories of technology. On the one hand, you’ve got the raw materials of the web: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. This is what users will ultimately interact with. On the other hand, you’ve got…

I’ve never really been happy about the way I’ve worked with typography in design systems before. As I’m currently working on another big design system, it seemed time to change that. Common wisdom regarding typography in design systems seems to often include: T-shirt sizing (small, medium, large,…

Posted 19 March 2019 I was trying to make my predictions for the new Formula One season by studying the aerodynamics of the cars, their cornering speeds, their ability to run with different amounts of fuel. Then it hit me: I have no idea what I'm doing. So, I'm going to make my predictions the only…

One of the central themes of my talk on The Lean Web is that we as developers repeatedly take all of the great things the web and browsers give us out-of-the-box, break them, and then re-implement them poorly with JavaScript. This point smacked me in the face hard a few weeks ago after WebAIM…

I did not set out to build tiny progressive web apps. Well, that’s not true; I set out to build PWAs that solve particular problems in my life, which ended up being tiny. Then it just became fun. You see my car, a 2005 Prius, has a terrible glitch in the dashboard where the dash simply doesn’t work.…

Let’s say there is a divide happening in front-end development. I feel it, but it's not just in my bones. Based on an awful lot of written developer sentiment, interviews Dave Rupert and I have done on ShopTalk , and in-person discussion, it’s, as they say... a thing . The divide is between people…

Red Dead Redemption 2 will be available October 26. Photo: Courtesy of Rockstar Games You can’t simply stroll into the Manhattan offices of Rockstar Games. If you make it past the downstairs lobby and up the elevator, a thick metal door blocks your way. After you’re buzzed inside, you’ll need to…

Improving Time-To-Interactive for Netflix.com on Desktop Addy Osmani Nov 5, 2018 · 7 min read tl;dr: There are no silver bullets to web performance. Simple static pages benefit from being server-rendered with minimal JavaScript. Libraries can provide great value for complex pages when used with…

Addy Osmani Oct 8, 2018 · 7 min read If you’re building a web experience and want to stay fast, a performance budget can be critical . For success, embrace performance budgets and learn to live within them. Network & CPU limits on mobile can require asking hard questions like, “what is really…

Five Concepts for Designing Augmented Reality Apps Nathan Gitter Sep 9, 2018 · 5 min read Imagine a future where everyone is wearing “AR glasses”, and digital content isn’t limited to screens. Would that future look like this? Maybe. It raises some questions: If we can display content next to the…