CategoryTechniques

November 17, 2016 — Front-end fatigue is very real.  Technology is evolving so rapidly, that it can be overwhelming. The worst thing you can do is reach the edge and become fully burnt out because once you are, it’s very hard to regain that passion you had for what you do and why you started doing it in the first place. In this article, David Berner shares advice on how to avoid fatigue and stop your head from exploding. Once you’re fully burnt out, it’s very hard to regain that passion you had for what you do and why you started doing it in the first place. Read more…

November 1, 2016 — In this article, David Catuhe will help you understand how shaders work and even experiment with their inner power in an easy way, thanks to Babylon.js. Before experimenting, David will show you how things work internally. When dealing with hardware-accelerated 3D, you will have to deal with two CPUs: the main CPU and the GPU. The GPU is a kind of extremely specialized CPU. Once all of the states are set, the CPU can define what to render: the geometry. The final step for the CPU is to define how to render the geometry. Shaders are pieces of code that the GPU will execute for each of the vertices and pixels it has to render. Read more…

October 2, 2016 — When it comes to elections, we are each given a choice in how to express our opinions and beliefs. Some designers and developers use their skills to further articulate their choice in one person. Here’s a glimpse into how Topple Trump!, an interactive responsive quiz game, was designed and built — combined with some valuable lessons learned along the way. This article is about techniques and strategies, so please avoid political flame in the comments. Read more…

September 5, 2016 — Not enough people know about the major advantages of web apps. They can replace all of the functions of native apps and websites at once. In this article, Ada Rose Cannon will show you some do’s and dont’s on how to make a progressive web app, as well as resources for further research. She’ll also go into the various components and support issues surrounding web apps. Although not every browser is friendly to them, there are still some compelling reasons to learn more about this technology. Read more…

August 25, 2016 — With so many amazing designers creating such beautiful animations, any developer would naturally want to recreate them in their own projects. Now, CSS does provide some presets for transition-timing-function, which add some level of smoothness and realism, but they are very generic, aren’t they? Motion curves are primarily used by animators to create advanced, realistic animations. In this article, Nash Vail will show you how motion curves work. Let’s begin! Read more…

June 28, 2016 — Redux is a predictable state container for JavaScript apps. It’s an application data-flow architecture, rather than a traditional library or a framework like Underscore.js and AngularJS. It is used mostly for application state management. To summarize it, Redux maintains the state of an entire application in a single immutable state tree (object), which can’t be changed directly. When something changes, a new object is created (using actions and reducers). Today, Alex Bachuk will go over the core concepts in detail. Read more…

May 25, 2016 — Stylelint is a powerful style sheet linter. It brings clarity to code and saves you from errors. It’s useful for everyone. Once you start using it, you will hear no more comments like, “You forgot to remove it there.” in this article, Aleks Hudochenkov will show you why linting a style sheet matters, how stylelint brings order to a style sheet and how we can avoid errors. Happy developing, and may you have a peaceful code review. Read more…

May 19, 2016 — Microsoft Edge has evolved over the past year — from being announced as a brand new browser, with Microsoft moving away from Trident (or MSHTML) to EdgeHTML, to the browser usage share increase curve similar to the one Google experienced when Chrome was first introduced in 2008. This article is part of the web development series from our tech evangelists and engineers on JavaScript skills, community projects and best practices including Microsoft Edge browser and the new EdgeHTML rendering engine. Read more…

April 20, 2016 — Containerization will start a revolution in open source similar to what Git did, by making it much simpler to take any code and start compiling it right away. In this first part, Daniel Demmel gives a bit of background to help you understand the concepts behind Docker through some metaphors. But if you just want to get started with the tutorial, skip to the “Time to Play!” section. By the end, you should have a basic understanding of Docker and have it working on your computer! Read more…

March 24, 2016 — Houdini is a new W3C task force that introduces a new set of APIs that will give developers the power to extend CSS itself, and the tools to hook into the styling and layout process of a browser’s rendering engine. In this article, Philip Walton is going to talk about how Houdini will solve CSS feature problems and list some of the more exciting features currently in development. He’ll also offer some concrete things you as web developers can do today to help make Houdini a reality. Read more…