When I come to the end of any given year, it’s always interesting to look back through the click-through stats for my weekly newsletter Web Tools Weekly to see which tools got the most attention.
This year wasn’t all that different from previous years. I’ve learned that clicks happen for basically one of two reasons:
Back in 2011, Paul Irish posted his personal list of frontend RSS feeds for front-end web developers. It was a great list, but after some time it needed some refreshing.
In 2014 I published my own list of categorized feeds for front-end developers. I cleaned up Paul’s feed list quite a bit and added some new feeds, while splitting the feed up into manageable categories.
I probably don’t need to tell you that if you want to make it easier marketing yourself as a strong front-end web developer, it’s important to learn React. No, it’s not absolutely crucial, nor is it required. But React is undoubtedly the most important UI library in the front-end landscape in 2019 and it’s not going away anytime soon.
As summer officially approaches, you might find a little down time during a vacation or other weekend getaway to do some reading, watching, or listening — or maybe even take a full-blown online course of some sort in order to pick up a new skill.
In the past, I did the occasional “Learning Tools” issue in my newsletter, where I would list resources like these. But because I have so many regular tools to include, I’ve stopped doing those for now. My list of learning resources is still pretty big, so I thought a roundup here would be appropriate. Enjoy!
Since July 2013, I’ve curated a weekly newsletter called Web Tools Weekly. It’s been my primary side project which, admittedly, has taken time away from this blog. I’m planning to be more active on Impressive Webs again this year, but I felt it was time for a fresh new design for the newsletter. The new design launches in this week’s issue.
The redesign was done by a local friend of mine, Priscilla Di Carlo. Although I could have put something together myself, I don’t consider myself a true designer, so I preferred to pay someone to give it a fresh look. Priscilla is mostly a print designer, but since this is email design, I feel like that’s an advantage more than anything.
If you subscribe to my newsletter then you’re probably aware that in the past couple of years I’ve done a lot of research and writing on DOM-related stuff. I don’t consider myself a JavaScript expert; pretty far from it, actually. But I like the DOM. I think it’s easy to use, and it’s in greater shape today than it was five or so years ago when jQuery was pretty much the only choice for cross-browser DOM manipulation.
As a result of all this recent work (some of which I collected together in a JavaScript/DOM e-book), I was able to put together a presentation that I had the privilege of delivering at two different conferences: CSS Dev Conf 2015 in Long Beach, California in October, and FITC Toronto 2016 on April 18.
The presentation at CSS Dev Conf wasn’t recorded, but the FITC version was (without the Octopus, though!). So below you’ll find the video of my talk, the slides, and links to all the resources and features that I discuss in the presentation. I’ve also included JS Bin demo links for most of the features. Enjoy!
On Tuesday, April 14, I had the privilege of speaking at FITC Toronto 2015, a technology and creativity conference that features events all around the globe, many of them in Canada. It was my second talk ever, and it seemed to go over pretty well. This was a 4-track conference, so it was nice to see a packed room with standing-room only (or so they told me — as you can see from the video below, those lights blind the speaker to what’s going on in the room!).
My talk was focused on the tools explosion that we’ve seen in the front-end development industry in the past 5 years or so. If you’ve been following my tools newsletter for some time, then you would have seen some, if not most, of the stuff in the talk. But I did go in depth on a few of the tools that I featured, so there should be something new in here for most front-end developers.
As many of you know, I publish a weekly newsletter called Web Tools Weekly that’s now gained a pretty nice subscriber base of over 10,000. In addition to the weekly list of categorized tools, each issue usually starts with a brief tutorial or tip, usually something focused on JavaScript and the DOM.
After 80+ issues, I’ve amassed quite a bit of JavaScript- and DOM-focused content. All of that content is available for free in the Web Tools Weekly archives. However, for those who would like to read the tips on a tablet or mobile device, I thought it would be useful to put it together in book form in PDF, EPUB, and MOBI formats. So I’ve just released JavaScript & DOM Tips, Tricks, and Techniques, a collection of 70 tips (125+ pages in PDF), priced at $5.
Lately I’ve been working hard on my weekly newsletter Web Tools Weekly, which focuses on tools for front-end developers.
The newsletter was originally supposed to include design-related tools on occasion, then I changed my mind and kept it mostly developer focused. Unfortunately, this left me with a huge list of useful design, color, and typography related tools that I’ve compiled over the last 6 months or so.
So here is everything I’ve compiled, dumped into one big cheesy post for your artificial browsing pleasure. :)
The team at Smashing Magazine have come a long way. I’m sure many of us remember how they broke ground, paving the way for so many copycat websites. While they still have a place in their hearts for the occasional “round-up” post, they are now focused on publishing the best web design and development related content in the world.
In my opinion, now that they have branched out into print publishing and have drastically improved their review and screening process for authors and articles, I think they have overtaken the previous industry leaders and are now the #1 web development resource in the world. That’s not taking anything away from publishers like A List Apart, SitePoint, or others; those organizations have their niche, and they will continue to be big. But Smashing Magazine has, in my opinion, surpassed them all.
