The second and final episode of Dev Interrupted‘s two- part series with Senior Google Staff Engineers Hyrum Wright and Titus Winters has premiered.
If you haven’t listened to their first episode, I highly recommend checking it out. Both guests bring a deep understanding of software engineering to the show: Hyrum is semi-famous as the « Hyrum » of Hyrum’s Law; while Titus is responsible for managing 250 million lines of code and over 12,000 developers.
The first-ever RT-Thread IoT OS Global Tech Conference will be held from September 16–17,2021 features embedded technologies, new projects showcase, community contributors track. We welcome embedded developers from across different countries to come together to exchange ideas, showcase projects, identify solutions, discuss future strategies, and provide mutual learning opportunities on a wide variety of topics, let’s exploring embedded technologies.
Register for free here!
RT-Thread is an embedded real-time operating system, with its rich middle-tier components and great hardware & software ecosystem delivered great support for the Internet of Things (IoT) industry. Born in 2006, till now, RT-Thread has powered 1 billion devices, applied in Wearable Devices, Smart Home Appliances, Energy, Automotive Electronics, Medical Electronics, Consumer Electronics, and many other industries.
At a previous job (I won’t tell you which), I had responsibility for a platform of 250,000 lines of C# code and 6 developers as the main architect. Our system was built in its entirety around Azure Functions and Cosmos DB. This was a huge company, with some 30,000 employees around the world, and our CEO got a deal with AWS. At that point we were paying 8,000 EUROs per month for our development environment – Seriously!
Our CEO was smart though, and struck a deal with AWS, probably due to that the company as a whole (I can only imagine) paid millions of EUROs per month for their cloud services in total, and was able to significantly reduce this number by porting « everything » to AWS. At this point we started pondering how to « port » our Azure Functions and Cosmos DB to something we could run in AWS. And yes, we even considered running the Azure Function debugger executable locally in servers inside of AWS – Needless to say, but this was simply suicide, and the whole idea was canned, the project had to be scrapped, and a « brand new AWS lockin project » was initiated – The irony … :/
With the widespread acceptance of web standards, and the resulting deprecation of browser prefixes, there has been a noticeable change in the browser market. Where once browser manufacturers would try to lure users in with promises of feature support, now the focus is on privacy, speed, and developer tools.
When it comes to web development, you should really be testing on every browser and device you can lay your hands on; you’re probably already doing so using an app like LambdaTest, or BrowserStack.
When quality assurance testing, you probably work by market share: starting with Safari on mobile, Chrome on desktop, and working your way down to Opera and (if you’re a glutton for punishment) Yandax; naturally, when testing, it’s the largest number of users that concerns us the most.
But before you reach the QA stage, there are a number of browsers designed to assist development. Browsers that offer tools, especially for front-end developers, that assist with code and speed up development. Here are the best browsers for web development in 2021:
LT Browser is an app for web developers from LambdaTest. Like many of the apps in this class, it offers side-by-side comparisons of a site in different viewports. Additionally, LT Browser has a number of features that make it stand out.
As well as previewing web pages, LT Browser offers developer tools to rival Chrome, which is handy if you want to see how changes across different devices affect your Lighthouse scores. LT Browser also supports hot-reloading, which means when you make a change to your code, you don’t have to hit ‘refresh,’ the viewports simply reload — it’s surprising how much of a time-saver that simple addition is.
LT Browser requires a LambdaTest account, there is a free plan, and paid plans start at $15/month.
The best conventional browser for web development in 2021 is the developer edition of Mozilla’s Firefox.
The standard edition of Firefox is an excellent browser, packed with features, and privacy-focused. The developer edition adds to this with a suite of tools aimed at developers. The CSS and JavaScript debugging tools are superb, and the Grid tools are unparalleled for coding layouts with CSS Grid.
Firefox Developer is free to download.
Polypane is one of the new generation of web browsers that are firmly intended as development aids rather than browsers. Polypane allows you to compare different viewports and platforms by placing them side by side. Interactions like scrolling are synced.
Polypane takes a step further than many browser apps in this class by showing social media previews. It even has a suite of accessibility tools, including some handy color blindness simulators.
Polypane has a 14-day free trial, and plans start at $8/month.
Blisk is another browser for developers that allows you to line up a collection of viewports in a single app. URL and scrolling are synced, making testing interactions and animations effortless.
Blisk is awesome fun to play with and delivers a great preview of a responsive design. But be warned, synced viewports can be addictive, and it’s easy to line up browsers and become hypnotized by the synchronized movement; you’ll need a very large screen to get the most out of Blisk.
Blisk plans start at $9.99/month.
Sizzy is another app that allows you to view multiple viewports at once. It also has synchronized interactions, and like many competing apps, Sizzy allows you to screenshot different views.
Sizzy also includes a very clever synchronized inspect tool, so you can focus on individual elements across different viewports. It’s an excellent option for debugging, particularly if you’re digging into someone else’s code.
Sizzy has a 14-day free trial, and paid plans start at $7.15/month.
Brave is a privacy-focused browser that runs up to three times faster than Chrome. If you’re someone who balks at rendering speeds on most sites, Brave could be for you.
Brave’s main benefit for developers is that it supports Chrome extensions while maintaining privacy — it can even access the Web using Tor if simple privacy mode isn’t enough for you. There are hundreds of useful Chrome extensions, and if you avoid Chrome due to privacy concerns, then Brave solves your problem.
Brave is also pioneering a new system for monetizing site revenue, allowing viewers to tip sites, and soon, to control how advertising revenue is distributed.
Brave is free to download.
Boring it may be, but Chrome is still the world’s most popular browser from the US to mainland China. Where once sites were “best viewed in IE,” Chrome is now the Web’s default.
No matter the site you’re designing, it has to work well in Chrome, and no simulator is as good as the real thing.
In addition to being the benchmark for page rendering, Chrome developer tools are the simplest way to access your Lighthouse scores, which helps you track down issues that may be holding you back in Google’s search results.
Chrome is free to download.
The post 7 Best Browsers for Developers in 2021 first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
It’s fair to say that AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) is a controversial topic among web developers.
AMP is a Google-guided technology that strips down web pages to a limited sub-set of tags to serve pages faster. It was developed as a web-based rival to native news apps from vendors like Apple.
The controversy first arose when it was clear how much influence Google had over the conventions, essentially creating a tiered Web overseen by a single entity. The clamor didn’t calm when it became clear that Google prioritized AMP pages for mobile search results. Developers were left in a difficult position: stand by best practices supporting a platform-agnostic Web, or do what’s right for their clients by building the most competitive mobile site possible.
But that was 2015, six years is a lifetime for a web technology, and things are about to change.
Hidden among the announcements about the much-delayed Core Web Vitals update — it’s finally rolling out, a year after originally planned, but don’t expect to see much impact until the end of August — is the news that Google mobile search will no longer prioritize AMP pages.
Beginning immediately (from the 17th June onwards) and completing sometime before the end of August, AMP will cease to be a factor in mobile site ranking. The AMP badge on mobile search results will disappear, and AMP is not required to have your site included on Google’s news app.
This significant move is due to the fact that the Core Web Vitals update from Google will expect the same speed and usability as AMP from non-AMP pages. Google still expects the same optimized user experience; it simply isn’t offering a cheat sheet on how to achieve it.
You can continue to use AMP, but there’s no automatic benefit to doing so, and the housekeeping involved in maintaining multiple front-ends means it’s far simpler to optimize your base site. Without a solid purpose, AMP ceases to fill a need. And just like that, one of the most controversial technologies of recent years slips away.
Featured image via Unsplash.
The post Poll: Is AMP Dead, and Do We Care? first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
In most companies the single largest cost is human resources. However, by leveraging Open Source intelligently, you can significantly reduce this cost, by literally having the entirety of GitHub’s user base, working for « free » for your company. This of course is a bit like what investors refers to as « China math », but GitHub has 65 million registered user accounts, most of whom we must assume are developers one way or another. If you intelligently structure your organisation around GitHub, there is literally nothing preventing you from using every single one of these developers as your own company’s resource, making you a million times more productive than mega corporations such as Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft – For a millionth of the cost these mega corporations are paying. But first let’s illustrate the problem, such that the solution becomes clear …
In one of my previous jobs somebody had cloned an open source git repository, then added its code to our own private corporate cloud’s git repositories, for then to start modifying the thing (the horror!) 2 years later it took one of my developers 6 weeks to update the thing to use the latest version as created by its main developer on GitHub, trying to keep as many of our own customisations as possible in the process. Needless to say, but I was furious about the original decision, due to having responsibilities for code quality at this company.
This month’s new tools and resources collection is a mixed bag of elements for designers and developers. From fun little divots to tools that can speed up development, you are sure to find something usable here.
Here’s what new for designers this month:
Codewell is a service to help you learn, practice, and improve HTML and CSS skills with real templates. The benefit here is pretty obvious. When working with real templates, you can see the result of actions and changes. The tool includes free and premium options with new templates to work on weekly. Everything works in a responsive environment, and free plans have access to free challenges and a Slack community; a paid plan also includes source files and premium challenges. You need a Github login to get started.
LoomSDK is an easy and reliable way to add video messaging to your product – and it’s free. The SDK enables your users to record, embed, and view with Loom videos directly within web apps – adding clarity and context to any workflow.
Pinter New Image turns photos into funky and fun line images. Upload an image with plenty of contrast, use the controls to set the look you want to achieve, and download. The new images are available as PNG or SVG. Maybe use it to create your next profile photos for social media or a nifty avatar.
Terms & Conditions Apply is a game that explains all those little pop-ups that you accept to enter and interact with websites. You are tasked with a mission to start the game: Do not accept terms and conditions, say no to notifications, and opt-out of cookies. Can you do it?
Khroma uses artificial intelligence (via personalized algorithm) to learn what colors you love and create palettes for you to discover, search, and save for use in projects. The beta tool is easy to get started with, although you do have a little color-picking homework to get started.
Mmm is a different type of website builder. The tool, which is still in alpha, allows users to create drag and drop websites in a simple manner. It works almost like making a digital collage. Users can get a custom URL, and every page is responsive. The interface is designed so that you can even build yours on a phone. And here’s the other feature – they encourage messy designs.
LightGallery is a lightweight, modular, JavaScript image and video lightbox gallery plugin. It works with React.js, Vue.js, Angular, and TypeScript. It includes plenty of demos and documentation to help you make the most of this gallery tool.
Vandal is a nifty browser extension for Firefox or Chrome that allows you to navigate back in time without changing tabs. The utility of Vandal is to allow quick and easy access to all the archived snapshots for a URL, and it supports navigation to a snapshot as well.
The CSS Layout Generator is a tool for creating the CSS for layout components. It is also a learning tool for teaching what is possible in CSS for positioning elements in the browser. Tweak specifications to see how it impacts the layout, CSS, and HTML.
Alpaca Data API is an easy-to-use feed that allows you to bring in stock market data for modeling and backtesting. (it includes free and premium options based on your needs.)
Mobile Palette Generator is a color-picking tool that will help you select the best hues for mobile design projects. It then shows you all the specs for primary, secondary, and accent colors.
Iconoir is an open-source icon repository with more than 900 SVG icons. Search icons, browse by category or poke around for what you are looking for. Everything is ready to use without signups or forms to fill out.
Pmndrs Market has a collection of more than 300 three-dimensional elements and drawings of things for use in projects. Model renders are in a rough style with a realistic feel.
Boring Avatars is a fun collection of semi-customizable avatars without faces, hence the name. It’s a fun playground that puts a new twist on something that you might not expect to do differently.
Spark is a free download with three different website design starters. The hero images are ready to build from and are made for Figma.
Venus Design System is a premium UI kit packed with more than 2,000 components and states that allow you to design fast. There’s also a demo version for you to test before you buy.
ReadyUI contains more than 200 blocks and designs for agencies, developers, startups, and more. Everything is production-ready using Bootstrap and Figma files. Choose from light or dark themes and search for a design that works for your project.
Creative Generative SVG Characters is a marriage of JavaScript and SVG that creates fun characters derived from drawings. Using shapes and a little code, you can see how to draw smooth lines, create polygons, and add other shapes for a fun feel. There’s a full demo on Codepen.
5 Steps to Faster Web Fonts helps you remove some of the bulk from popular typography options. Iain Bean explains a set of methods you can deploy to ensure that load times are quick with some applicable code snippets. Here’s a preview: Tip 1 is to use the most modern file formats (WOFF2).
The Perfect Link walks you through some accessibility checks from the A11Y Collective for linking best practices. Some of the things you think are the “right way” may be challenged here. The information goes through everything from design to semantics and is wonderfully thorough. It’s a must-read.
Readsom is a curated collection of newsletters and emails that you can read online or sign up for. Its catchphrase is to “discover content you’ll want to read.” It is a good way to find newsletters that interest you, including plenty of design and development options that you might not otherwise know about.
Famous First Websites isn’t a tutorial per se, but it does provide a good place to do some visual learning. See what your favorite websites looked like when they launched and the evolution of the designs.
The post 22 Exciting New Tools For Designers, June 2021 first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
In most cases, you aren’t the only person working on the same project or codebase. That means that other people get to read your code and have to understand it. That’s also true for the code comments you leave behind. Developers often write ‘quick and dirty’ comments without much context, leaving other developers clueless about what you’re trying to say. It’s a bad practice that creates only more confusion than clarifies things.
So, yes – you should be bothered with writing meaningful code comments to help other developers. A code comment that describes the function, the reasoning behind the function, and its input and output will speed up the learning process of other developers. Especially for junior developers, this information comes in handy when learning the code.
Every day design fans submit incredible industry stories to our sister-site, Webdesigner News. Our colleagues sift through it, selecting the very best stories from the design, UX, tech, and development worlds and posting them live on the site.
The best way to keep up with the most important stories for web professionals is to subscribe to Webdesigner News or check out the site regularly. However, in case you missed a day this week, here’s a handy compilation of the top curated stories from the last seven days. Enjoy!
The post Popular Design News of the Week: May 31 2021 – June 6, 2021 first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
HTML is one of the foundational building blocks of the Web. But just as web design best practices and techniques change over time, so does the code we use. As HTML evolves, some of its older markup has been deprecated while other parts have been repurposed.
Does that create more problems for us, though? Would we be better off starting over so we can make sure we’re all working from the same language rather than trying to edit out the bits we don’t want or need?
Let’s take a look at what happens when we amend the rules of HTML over time and how it impacts the Web:
Whether certain features have become outdated and need to go, or browsers have stopped supporting certain tags altogether, deprecated code eventually becomes a problem.
You’ll find a long list of deprecated HTML on the HTML.com website:
For many of these, HTML tags and attributes have been replaced by more efficient CSS styling. There are also examples of HTML deprecation because the features have become outdated (like frames).
Yet, there are still websites out there that contain deprecated HTML.
In some cases, the HTML sits silently on the other side of the website. If there’s enough of this errant code hanging around, though, those extra characters and directives could slow down your server’s processing time and render pages more slowly than usual.
In other cases, the HTML breaks features on the front-end of a website. Take, for instance, this warning from Mozilla regarding the <nobr> tag:
Using deprecated code can create inconsistent and poor experiences on the front-end. And when all browsers finally get on board and decide not to support an HTML tag anymore, all visitors will be left with a broken UI.
So, while it’s great that HTML5 has deprecated legacy HTML that’s no longer useful or necessary, that’s not to stop everyone from using it or leaving it behind on older websites.
As I mentioned, a lot of deprecated HTML has been phased out and replaced by CSS styling. And that’s a good thing.
Let me give you a simple example of this…
My favorite book is <i>The Stand</i> by Stephen King. The first time I read it, I didn’t sleep for <i>three days</i>. Thankfully, when I revisit it every year, I have fewer nightmares and can more greatly appreciate the storytelling aspect of it.
In the above paragraph, I’ve used the <i> tag to italicize several words.
In the early days of HTML,<i> stood for “italics” (the way<b> stood for “bold”). With HTML5, however,<i> will still render as italics, but its semantic meaning isn’t as broad. It’s been repurposed to indicate a stylistic change, which is important for things like book and film names, foreign words, and so on. To express emphasis, we use the <em> tag instead.
Keeping the legacy <i> and <b> tags can lead to issues, though.
In the statement above, I’ve italicized the name of the book (The Stand) as well as the number of sleepless nights I had (three days) with<i>. Whether the designer decides today, tomorrow or ten months down the road that they want to change the way literary or cinematic references are styled, my choice of HTML will stand in their way.
Because all of my italic text is indicated by <i>, styles can’t universally be applied to specific content (like book references). Instead, the designer would have to go through and clean up my code so that it looks like this:
My favorite book is <i>The Stand</i> by Stephen King. The first time I read it, I didn’t sleep for <em>three days</em>. Thankfully, when I inevitably revisit it every year, I have fewer nightmares and can more greatly appreciate the storytelling aspect of it.
This would then allow the semantically italicized content to remain intact while the designer or developer adjusts the styles of the book title here and across the site. (Though, really, the first italicized phrase should be surrounded by <cite> as it would be more semantically accurate.)
While it’s great that we’ve created guidelines for using legacy HTML today, keeping old code around can confuse writers, designers, and others who are familiar with the previous way of formatting content. By resetting HTML, throwing out old styles, and creating one language we use consistently across the web, we won’t create more work for ourselves later on.
Another big reason why repurposed and deprecated HTML is a problem is because of accessibility.
For starters, when you leave deprecated and unsupported code behind, it’s likely to cause issues for screen readers, search engines, and browsers that use HTML for clues about the content.
Header tags (e.g.<h1>, <h2>, <h3>), for instance, aren’t just used to visibly break up large chunks of text. Header tags and, more specifically their hierarchy, present important information about the relationship between subjects on a page — and this is the kind of thing that screen readers and search engines pick up on.
That’s why we need to be very careful about the code we leave behind the scenes, even if readers on the front end can’t visibly see it. Let’s look at an example of how this can affect accessibility:
Is there an <i>à la carte</i> menu or is it just <i>prix fixe</i> tonight?
If a screen reader were to read over this sentence, the French phrases would be said with the same emphasis as any other italicized words on the page.
This is why HTML5 encourages semantic coding instead of purely stylistic.
The proper way to write HTML in the line above would be:
Is there an <i lang="fr">à la carte</i> menu or is it just <i lang="fr">prix fixe</i> tonight?
There are two reasons to do this:
Semantic coding is essential for designers that work on multilingual websites.
As the World Wide Web Consortium explains, languages like Japanese don’t use italicization or bolding for emphasis — at least not the way English speakers do.
So, to properly translate a page from English, a Japanese designer would need to remove the italics or bolding and add surrounding brackets to the words. However, if everything is coded with <i> and <b>, or there’s a mix of <i> and <em> and<b> and <strong>, it’s going to be really difficult to Find-and-Replace the correct HTML with ease.
So, if accessibility or internationalization are concerns for you at all, getting clear on the HTML you write with is going to be really important.
The fact of the matter is, it requires a lot of work to have the rules of HTML rewritten. So while it would be great to reset HTML, I don’t know that it’s all that practical.
All we can really do is stay abreast of what’s happening with the language, edit out legacy code from our websites the second it becomes deprecated, and always use tags and attributes that are supported. By playing around with deprecated or repurposed code, we only put the website visitors’ experience in jeopardy, so it’s best to take the time to clear out the old any chance we get.
If we can all get on the same page about this, problematic legacy HTML will eventually disappear from our websites and memories.
Featured image via Unsplash.
The post Is It Time to Reset HTML? first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
