The distributed team structure is known to offer many benefits for a company and its employees; however, this sort of work model also comes with its own unique set of obstacles. In 2018, Owl Labs found that 56% of the participating companies in their study adopted or allowed for some form of remote arrangement for its employees. While this organizational approach has revolutionized the way we perform our job functions, it’s also paved the way for new patterns to emerge in the way we interact with each other across the distance. In this article, Randy Tolentino will review how “remote soft-skills” can help with the challenge of building authentic connections with your distributed co-workers.
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Do you know the impact unused CSS has on performance? Spoiler: It’s a lot! In this article, Luke Harrison will explore a Sass-oriented solution for dealing with unused CSS, avoiding the need for complicated Node.js dependencies involving headless browsers, and DOM emulation. He will then touch upon some existing solution for removing it from stylesheets.
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It’s hard to capture the experience of being at a SmashingConf, however, Rachel Andrew brings you the videos from our Toronto event. They are available so that everyone can learn from the insights our speakers shared — many of them coding live on stage.
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In this third instalment of Inspired Design Decisions, Andy Clarke will teach you how to use frameworks to create layouts as engaging as in the well-known Ernest Journal. All it takes is an understanding of layout design and imagination. Curiosity keeps a creative mind open to new possibilities, and that’s what Ernest Journal magazine — the inspiration for this issue — is all about. Ernest Journal’s design is successful because although each article has its own distinctive elements which connect the visual style with the content, those articles use a consistent grid system and foundation styles.
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React developers can get the advantages of Ionic to build hybrid mobile apps and progressive web apps. In this tutorial, Ahmed Bouchefra will use both Ionic and React to build a simple mobile application that fetches and displays news data from a third-party API using the Axios client. You will also see how to use hooks in React — namely, the useState() and useEffect() hooks — to create state and perform side effects inside React function components. With Ionic, we’ll see how easy it is to generate a project based on React and how you can theme the application using the color attributes of components.
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The support of multiple writing modes is key to the way that our new layout methods of Flexbox and Grid Layout have been designed. An understanding of CSS Writing Modes is useful if you want to work with vertical scripts, or change writing mode for creative reasons. However, they also underpin our new layout methods, and those ideas are increasingly being applied across all of CSS. In this article, find out why Rachel Andrew believes understanding writing modes is so important.
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Customers’ loyalty does not come for free. While it would be nice if they were satisfied with a high-quality product with some extra bells-and-whistles thrown in, sometimes what’s needed to seal the deal is a rewards system. But when a client asks you to design the mechanism for their loyalty program, how do you decide which format it should take? In this article, Suzanne Scacca shows you what you need to know about designing mobile loyalty programs.
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The feast or famine merry-go-round of freelancing can certainly be damaging to our bank accounts but more importantly it can deeply affect our self worth and mental health. This happens to everyone at some point or another. Even people who we assume are constantly over booked with work. Speak to people and be open and honest. It’s important to let people know you’re available for work. In this article, Liz Elcoate brings you some strategies she learnt the hard way to combat the quiet times.
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Text-to-speech can help you create more versatile, accessible content. You could purchase recording equipment and spend hours recording and editing each narration, but if you want most of the benefit for only a couple of minutes and a few pennies per post, consider using AWS instead. In this article, Philip Kiely will demonstrate how to use Amazon Polly to narrate your content. In the next article, he will embark on the return journey, from speech-to-text, and consider the accuracy of these transcriptions by sending various samples through a round-trip translation.
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Until now, the designer-developer handoff has been fraught with inefficiencies. It’s not that software teams don’t know how to collaborate or communicate well with one another. It’s just that disparate platforms (namely, Sketch and Visual Studio Code) and incompatible workflows created tons of issues in how design was translated into code. In this article, Suzanne Scacca will show you Indigo.Design, which offers a simple solution to fix this costly and time-consuming problem for software teams.
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