Web Development Reading List #155: On JSPerf, Client Hints, And Keeping The Balance

As people working in front of a screen all day, we often struggle to find the right balance. I’m not talking about work-life balance alone here, but of how our life that is completely virtual during the day often causes us to not take real life into account.

We tend to forget that our bodies need something else than coding all day. And we need to take care of our fellow human beings in real life as well. Just think about this number: The average US person will spend over 9 hours in front of a screen¹ today. Time to become more aware of how we can keep the balance between the virtual and the real world.

News Link

• Do you remember jsPerf²? It has been down for years (due to spam), now it celebrates its revival. Finally a chance to use this great, great tool again.

Concept & Design Link

• When it comes to error messages for mobile, there’s a lot that can go wrong. Prince Pal shares what we need to take into account to design error messages that don’t frustrate users³.

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Tools & Workflows Link

• Automated browser testing usually causes a lot of trouble and custom build solutions. TestCafé⁷ now tries to solve this with a Node.js tool that takes care of all the stages: starting browsers, running tests, gathering test results, and generating reports without the need for a browser extension.

HTML & SVG Link

• Jason Grigsby explains how we can use Client Hints for responsive images⁸. With Client Hints, the browser can tell a server via HTTP headers what types of content it prefers based on information about the device pixel ratio, viewport width, and width of the image element on the page. This allows the server to serve the most appropriate image back to the client.

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JavaScript Link

• It’s easy to think of a collection of DOM elements as a regular JavaScript array, but actually, it’s a bit different. Pawel Grzybek shares how you can loop through a collection of DOM elements in ES6¹¹.

CSS/Sass Link

• In the past months I’ve heard a lot of people question the need for normalize.css¹². But the truth is that normalize.css wasn’t only created to fix browser bugs but also to provide us developers with solid baseline styles. As Harry Roberts now points out, the latest normalize.css with 984 bytes after gzip doesn’t even add much to your existing codebase¹³ — in fact, it makes less than 1.3% of the average CSS project¹⁴.

Work & Life Link

• As developers, do we really need to code all day? Is it necessary to have side projects and participate in open-source? Belén Albeza doesn’t think so. She shares why having a life away from coding matters¹⁵ and why you can be a passionate developer nonetheless. It’s important to have a balance between your computer time and other life activities (to help gathering data on this matter, please fill out this survey ¹⁶), and that’s also the message we have to send across to new developers¹⁷. You can do great coding in a normal workday.
• Tea Ivanova wrote about the common misunderstanding that agile work methods are seen as operational and tactical¹⁸ rather than strategic. A good read for anyone working with agile methods.

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And with that, I’ll close for this week. If you like what I write each week, please support me with a donation²² or share this resource with other people. You can learn more about the costs of the project here²³. It’s available via email, RSS and online.

— Anselm

Footnotes Link

1. 1 https://twitter.com/lukew/status/786605159858049024
2. 2 https://jsperf.com/
3. 3 https://think360studio.com/how-to-design-an-error-message-for-a-mobile-app/
4. 4 https://think360studio.com/how-to-design-an-error-message-for-a-mobile-app/
5. 5 https://think360studio.com/how-to-design-an-error-message-for-a-mobile-app/
6. 6 https://think360studio.com/how-to-design-an-error-message-for-a-mobile-app/
7. 7 https://devexpress.github.io/testcafe/
8. 8 https://cloudfour.com/thinks/responsive-images-201-client-hints/
9. 9 https://cloudfour.com/thinks/responsive-images-201-client-hints/
10. 10 https://cloudfour.com/thinks/responsive-images-201-client-hints/
11. 11 https://pawelgrzybek.com/loop-through-a-collection-of-dom-elements/
12. 12 http://nicolasgallagher.com/about-normalize-css/
13. 13 http://csswizardry.com/2016/10/continue-normalising-your-css/
14. 14 http://httparchive.org/interesting.php#bytesperpage
15. 15 https://belenalbeza.com/top-developers-can-have-a-life-outside-coding/
16. 16 https://brizk.typeform.com/to/ByT0Ml
17. 17 https://twitter.com/i/moments/789042973392658432
18. 18 http://clearleft.com/thinks/408
19. 19 https://belenalbeza.com/top-developers-can-have-a-life-outside-coding/
20. 20 https://belenalbeza.com/top-developers-can-have-a-life-outside-coding/
21. 21 https://twitter.com/i/moments/789042973392658432
22. 22 https://wdrl.info/donate
23. 23 https://wdrl.info/costs/

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