December 2, 2019 — Development workflows can easily get out of hand and start causing confusion and friction within teams — especially as they get bigger in size. There have been too many times when our code review was just about noticing that missing comma or the failing tests that never run before pushing to a remote repository. Thankfully, there are tools that can take this friction away, make developers’ workflows more straightforward and help us concentrate on the things that actually matter the most. Thanks to git and the hooks it provides, we have a great variety of automation with which we can set our development workflow and make our lives easier. Read more…

November 30, 2019 — December is here and with it a new collection of desktop wallpapers to celebrate the beginning of the month. Designed by creatives from all across the globe and available in versions with and without a calendar. This month’s wallpapers post is a little reminder to treat yourself to some quiet moments like these in the midst of this end of the year rush. To refuel your batteries and gather some fresh inspiration. The wallpapers in this collection might be a good start. Read more…

November 29, 2019 — Rather than do a round-up of the best deals available this Black Friday, we decided to do a round-up of the best independent products and makers. If you have money to spend, why not send some of this to folk creating great stuff in our community. We asked the Smashing community for their suggestions, and so here, Rachel Andrew brings you a list covering pretty much every kind of product you can imagine. We hope you can find something you need in these, and help support these hard-working folks. Read more…

November 28, 2019 — Setting-up a CMS-agnostic architecture for our application can be a painful endeavor. Making our code CMS-agnostic, as much as possible, enables us to easily port our application to another CMS if the need arises. In this article, Leonardo Losoviz will show you how to abstract a WordPress application, making its code readily available for other frameworks or CMSs. Read more…

November 27, 2019 — Arguably the worst way to teach the fundamentals of programming, is to describe what something is, without mention of how or when to use it. In this article, Ryan M. Kay discusses three core concepts in OOP in the least ambiguous terms so that you may never again wonder when to use inheritance, interfaces, or abstract classes. Code examples provided are in Java with some references to Android, but only basic knowledge of Java is required to follow along. Read more…

November 26, 2019 — oEmbed is a very elegant solution to a very specific problem. Many sites have hosted media and content that can be shared elsewhere by the use of some HTML embed code. What happens if you just have the URL of the item and need to find an embeddable version of the media without human intervention? That is where oEmbed comes in. In this article, Drew McLellan will tell you everything about it! Read more…

November 25, 2019 — Many developers get to a point in their careers in which they’ve achieved many of their goals and wonder about the future. Although some are confident continuing down the same road, others might feel the urge to explore different options in which their skills can be used to have a broader impact on the projects we work on and the teams we work with. I explored some of the different directions we can take and the complementary skills that can help us throughout our journey. Read more…

November 22, 2019 — A basic introduction to the backend web application development process with Express — discussing bleeding edge ES6+ JavaScript features, the Factory Design Pattern, MongoDB CRUD Operations, servers and ports, and the future with enterprise n-tier architectural patterns for TypeScript projects. Read more…

November 21, 2019 — You may have heard that FOMO is harmful for consumers. There’s even research that supports it. That said, what if we removed “fear” from the “fear of missing out” and put the good parts of this marketing strategy to use in web and app design? It’s possible to do and in this article, Suzanna Scacca will unpack four ways you can more delicately and ethically use (F)OMO when designing digital experiences. Read more…

November 20, 2019 — In this article, Saravanan V aims to be a primer on iOS animations exhaustively covering different ways of doing so. We start off by understanding the basics of animations, move to the Core Frameworks building a single example using the different methods offered and finally looking at ways to tune performance. The goal is to educate the reader with a set of choices to add animations to his/ her iOS app. Read more…