#only i get to say that though. anti glitch folk do not interact with this post
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Anti Theory Thesis
I’m mainly a lurker and this probably just going to be me word vomiting here... So don’t mind me. :D
Also shout out to all you wonderful folks and your kick ass selves in the JSE community. Going to tag some people in here that posted some stuff that resonated with me. Hope you guys don’t mind.
I remember in a Q&A, don’t remember which one, Jack said that we don’t have to make every single thing into an ego. I know he was mainly referring the thumbnail pic that spawned “Rob Zombie” but it kind of supports the theory that Anti was in disguise and that this dapper Jack fellow, I’ve seen multiple names for him, isn’t a new ego. To me, either Anti is a savage and hardcore mothatrucka that ripped a dude’s mustache off. (Violent AF btw, no chill, P.S I know it isn’t a real mustache but let’s pretend it is for the sake of the “new ego” debate.) OR It was Anti providing evidence that he was, in fact, in disguise. I only bring up the Q&A point because I feel like if that’s Jack’s mindset about the egos and us creating multitudes of them already...? Then he wouldn’t readily give us another character to build. It just feels like he is trying to throw us off and miss the fact that Anti is indeed in control and in disguise. It’s supposed to be Jack in a costume but he cracks after cutting himself, or convincing Jack to cut himself. OR it’s Jack manipulating us, DUN DUN DUN!!
@booperdoopcr posted a great detail that fuels this theory. Anti winks just like The Dapper Gentleman does. Though, that little detail in that sea of awesome theory may be a coincidence. But come on, who in this fandom believes in that?
I will say though, Anti is looking like a dashing gentleman is quite exquisite.
@hawkeye221b Posted a sick theory for some Anti lore. MMMMMMMM! As a d&d fan I have to suggest you read it. So good and a cool idea/inspiration. Seeing the text “Run” upside down kind of gave me a D&D and Stranger Things vibe with the whole “upside down” or “Vale of Shadows” theme. As if Jack and the other egos are trapped somewhere. That somewhere being where Anti is from? Born? Summoned somehow from? Dunno. :D BUT IT EXCITES ME.
The zalgo text situation. I’d like to point out we have time traveled into the past. Or at least we think we have. Zalgo is more of a modern, computer era, code based form of writing/typing out characters that make up words. It seems a bit advanced for what would be present in the era of the video. It wouldn’t make sense if it was still zalgo in this time period/theme. So I wouldn’t say he is more powerful because he doesn’t need to use it anymore. I’d say it’s more of Anti’s modern flare. Kind of like his knife size getting bigger and bigger. XD
I will agree that this video having no zalgo text does, to some degree, suggest he is strong but perhaps not stronger because of the lack of it. On top of the time traveling business, to be able to manipulate any era of media or the world around you, is impressive. As for the actual messages that we do see. Things like “Run, Smile, Puppets.” I kind of agree that it may not all be Anti. There are several different fonts/scripts being used. That plays into the multiple egos bit quite well. Each having their own personality and handwriting. If it IS Anti in disguise, then most of the messages in the beginning and very end would be Anti. Things like “Not to worry! He’s already dead! Didn’t feel a thing!” Therefore, when he cuts himself and begins to crack, the other egos surge for power and the different small fonts could be in fact Jack and the other egos, not Anti.
Did anyone notice the mention of “doc”. I’m sure you clever cats did, nothing gets by you guys. Well when Jack/Anti/New Ego cut themselves and begin to wrap their bloodied fingers in the cloth. At 5:28. He smiles and seems to be talking to himself. To me it felt like it was ze good doctor taking care of Jack. Easing his worry or pain. Kind of like. “Oh Jackie boi. Zis is okay. Just a boo boo.” You’ll notice Anti doesn’t stay for long in the video. A minor wound, an easily tended to wound, a short amount of time. A slit to the throat? A mortal wound, he stays longer.
Now that we have discussed all of that it brings us to the time traveling dilemma that seems to be prevalent in all the theories I’ve just drooled out. Oooo boy do I love some time travel theories. If this pumpkin carving video provides more than it just being a kick ass theme and a play on words to surprise us. Then I am super hyped about the prospects and theories this opens the Anti fandom up to. Firstly, his neck isn’t slit. Obvious is obvious, I know. However, this detail seems to have people thinking Anti is getting stronger. AKA he is having an easier time not glitching as much and keeping up disguises. (Though I believed he glitched fabulously and fittingly for an old timely film.) AKA he is having an easier time “Playing Pretend”. Which may be true and doesn’t sound so far fetched to me but I feel like it shows that this is a time before he has actually “killed” or “harmed” Jack by slitting his throat.
@corruptedmetadata posted something that intrigued me and gave me a thought. What if they aren’t in order? It’s a bit far fetched and probably the wonkiest idea I’ve spit in this thesis but what if some of the more modern looking videos is older than the old timey ones? I know I’m kind of contradicting myself here but we are talking about time travel and all it’s possibilities, paradoxes, alternate timelines and such. What if Jack has been dead for a long time and there really is nothing we can do. “He’s already won.” Jack really is gone, forgotten, and replaced. If Anti can disguise as him, and manipulate time, how would we know the Jack we are seeing today is actually from today. Any number of his videos could be from any point or just not him at all.
It all makes me wonder what Anti’s intentions are. I know we all have our ideas and some more concrete than others but the time manipulation changes it a bit doesn’t it? Gives Anti more of a motive to the why’s and how’s. Stuck in time, losing time, a need to have control. Is he using Jack and us to gain power to get out? To gain more power over our world or timeline? To trick us into switching spots with him? I’m curious what all of your opinions are on his motives now that we have a little more light shed on Anti.
Ahhh. I love theories. If you made it this far. I appreciate ya. I really love this kind of interaction with you guys and Jack. This is one of the only things that has really brought me out of my shell when it comes to interacting with this community more. Anyway. I bid you guys a goodnight and feel free to point out anything that may seemed too much of a stretch or flawed. I’d love to hear what you guys think. :D
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Is the key to saving Jack from Anti saving Dr. Schneeplestein?
I forgot to take my phone to work with me last night, and business was absolutely dead. My boss left at 5:30 and I was alone until closing at 9:30 by myself, so for upwards of three hours I spent time ruminating on the whole Anti ordeal and thinking about some of the theories I’d seen. Personally, although I have my own theories and thoughts about what other people are posting, I never really took the time to sit down and actually think through what we already know on my own. But given that I had about four hours last night to do exactly that, and that I’ve been going back and watching old videos featuring the egos, I figured I’d present you guys with my thoughts!! Heads up that this post is going to be a VERY long one, I ended up writing a university-worthy five page essay on what I think is going on behind the scenes, so please stick with it until the end!! I think you might find it interesting if you’re a lore detective like me haha
And who knows, maybe @therealjacksepticeye could share his own thoughts on some of this stuff!
I WOULD ALSO LIKE TO POINT OUT: This theory hinges on the speculation that the good doctor didn’t die at the end of the August 3rd video. I strongly believe he wasn’t killed: there wasn’t any evidence of his dying at the end, and the footage just cuts out. There isn’t any struggle, no signs that there’s anything wrong with Schneeplestein other than losing his patient. So I operate under the assumption that he is still alive.
This whole brainstorm session of mine started with one question: what IS Anti? Some people seem to think he might be a demon, others a sort of computer virus. Considering the fact that, so the story goes, the more you talk about him the stronger he gets, I’d long considered him a sort of ghost/entity. There’s a sort of poltergeist or spirit that functions much the same way, and although the name escapes me, I’d associated him with that sort of thing. But then someone in the tag brought up the RGB lighting, and Anti himself seemed to think that was “clever” (link). I’d been scribbling notes into my sketchbook while writing all these thoughts down, which is what I’m typing up right now into something more cohesive. In my notes, though, I’d written things like “is Anti a separate entity with Jack’s face? Probably not,” or “a (computer) virus? Infection?” I left these thoughts to stew and moved on. Whatever you choose to believe Anti is, the important part is that he is able to do two things, or interact with the other egos (and Jack) in two stages: corruption/control, and possession. Of the two, corrupting or controlling another ego would take the lesser amount of effort. If he acts like a type of virus, for example, corrupting another ego allows him to influence them. However, they still remain in control of their own bodies for the most part. I would like to think that his sort of behaviour manifests in the way the screen glitches when Anti isn’t visible, or when one of the other egos says or does something slightly out of character, reminiscent of Anti (for example, in Dream Daddy when Brian mentions “anti-jokes” and Jack looks at the camera, and deadpan emphasizes Anti, or the recent set of Instagram photos in which Dr. Schneeplestein is featured with a bleeding eye). The second of the two takes significantly more manpower from Anti: possession. Once another ego is corrupted and can be influenced, Anti then shares a link with that ego. Over time, he is able to push his way into the other ego and take control (like we see happen in the August 3rd BIO INC REDEMPTION video, when Dr. Schneeplestein starts to wrap the cord around his own neck, etc. Anti begins taking possession of the Doctor at around 7:45, and becomes increasingly in control. In this case, he was able to fight Anti off temporarily, but in the end Anti pushed through successfully. And of course, the main and most important instance of this type of possession is the SAY GOODBYE video in which Anti makes Jack slit his own throat (and “kills” him).
Now that these main points are established, I’d like to jump a little to another point: Dr. Schneeplestein seems to be a very important lynchpin this time around. Up until this point in time, I never really took Dr. Schneeplestein seriously. Throughout the episodes of Surgeon Simulator, he’s careless and acts unlike any doctor I’ve ever encountered before in my life. His poor patients can’t possibly have ever survived a single one of his operations. Everything is sure to go awry when Schneeplestein enters the room. But then I thought to myself, what if Schneeplestein is, in actuality, much smarter than I’ve given him credit for? What if his interactions with Peter are just plain horsing around? Perhaps we’ve never really seen him take something seriously, which I believe is supported by the way he spoke about his friends in the BIO INC REDEMPTION video. He seemed genuinely distressed to see “Jack’s” systems failing. Seemed pretty serious to me. Now, let’s take for fact, just for the sake of argument, that Schneeplestein is truly a great doctor when it counts. He mentions saving Jack, and gets so incredibly distressed when the systems all start failing: “I will not have you die… not again! I will not lose you. I almost lost you once before” (6:46). We see that he truly cares about Jack and is trying everything in his power to help him, even though clearly we know that this isn’t the real Jack, Schneeplestein gets increasingly agitated and anxious (“Tell me what to do, my friend!” (7:00)). Once Anti starts to take control, it gets increasingly harder and harder for Schneeplestein to fight Anti off, and he goes on to make multiple references to Anti through medications such as antidepressants and anticoagulants as Jack’s systems begin to fail one after another (“Antidepressants… Anti-Anti… we have to get him out of there.” (8:04) and “Yes. ANTI-coagulants.” (8:24))
So, we know that Schneeplestein has saved Jack once before, presumably when Anti slit his throat in the SAY GOODBYE video. I’d like to call to attention the phrasing that Schneeplestein uses. It’s very interesting to note that he says not again, as if implying that Jack died at that time. I’ll address this again in a moment, but there is certainly some ambiguity here. Did Jack really die, or was Schneeplestein over exaggerating? What are the implications if this is true, that Jack was dead and brought back to life? Does he simply mean that Jack flat-lined on the table and that Schneeplestein was able to bring him back? Perhaps the ambiguity is designed to keep us guessing, but based on what I’ve gathered, I’d be more inclined to believe that Jack didn’t actually die after the encounter with Anti, but that he was close to death when Schneeplestein saved him (again, supported by the second half of that quote: “I almost lost you once before!” - Almost).
Next, we also know that Schneeplestein saved Chase. He says as much in BIO INC REDEMPTION: “I saved Peter from the brink. I saved my very good friend Chase, Chase Brody. He went back, saw his family. Did they take him back? We may never know” (4:16). However, I don’t think this is exactly what it seems. When I first heard him say he saved Chase, I immediately thought back to the insanely morbid last few seconds of the Bro Average video, in which Chase seems to shoot himself in the head. Now, I did a little research, and according to this article (link) surviving a bullet to the brain requires a lot of conditions to be met, and even then when the patient survives, it isn’t without a significant amount of damage. According to the article, “a person’s chances of surviving such a trauma to the brain depend on the areas of the brain that are struck, the velocity of the bullet and whether the bullet exits the brain.” Looking at the video, Chase shoots himself at the side of his head, above the ear. The bullet would have passed through both halves of the brain, which would have caused more damage than if the bullet had only affected one of the hemispheres. Not to mention that if the bullet had stayed inside the head, there would again, be a lot more damage done. If he’d hit the thalamus or brainstem, which according to the article “are crucial to consciousness and basic functions such as controlling breathing and the heartbeat,” then his chances of surviving would have been extremely low. So the moral of this little study is this: there is almost no way in hell Schneeplestein could have saved Chase if he’d really shot himself in the head, unless the Doctor was there immediately after the incident and was able to provide a Level 1 Trauma Center’s equipment to deal with the injury. And Schneeplestein isn’t even a neurosurgeon!! And even if we play devil’s advocate and say that Chase did indeed get shot, and Schneeplestein DID save him, then that leads me to question the part of the BIO INC REDEMPTION video in which the good doctor says “I saved Peter from the brink. I saved my very good friend Chase, Chase Brody. He went back, saw his family. Did they take him back? We may never know” (4:16). After a brain injury and subsequent surgery such as this, I’ll be damned if Chase actually went to see his family. We’re talking MAJOR recovery time. I’d also like to point out that just before this point in the video, we see the “Drive-By,” in which Chase seems to be shooting some folks. Are we meant to assume that he shoots at Stacy because she’s divorcing him and taking his kids? Is he shooting at random passers-by? Is it even a real gun? It clearly states “Nerf Edition” below. And if it WAS meant to be a real gun, he went back to see his family so clearly it wasn’t them he shot at, and clearly is wasn’t anyone else since the boy isn’t in jail. Y’know, where he WOULD BE if we took it to be a real drive-by. In either of these cases, his family sure as hell wouldn’t let him come back to see them. Also taking into account that Chase then uses the exact same gun in the “Stacy, I love you, please don’t go” shot. So if it isn’t meant to be a real gun, like I heavily suspect it isn’t, Schneeplestein wouldn’t have any cause to operate or to “save Chase” because nothing happened. So then why does he say he saved Chase? My guess is that something happened off-camera that we didn’t see. The most plausible idea would be that, considering his divorce and his inability to see his kids, Chase fell into a bout of situational depression, which may have hit him hard enough to cause suicidal tendencies. If he mimed killing himself once, he may have actually tried to do so off-camera. If this is where Schneeplestein actually saved him, then perhaps he got Chase the help he needed. Then again, Anti could very well have tried to get to Chase as well, prompting Schneeplestein to have to save him, but we haven’t seen anything like that on screen, or had hints about anything like this dropped. We’d need more video and/or textual proof to really understand why and how Schneeplestein saved Chase. The point of the matter is that, even if Schneeplestein DIDN’T bring the two of them back to life, he’s still a major contender in Anti’s way. The good doctor certain is as his name implies, a good doctor. Just shy of resurrecting egos, he provides them with life-saving medical attention.
Next on the agenda is an interesting little something: Anti needs Dr. Schneeplestein. We saw in Anti’s captions that he was “stitched together,” following a picture posted of the doctor. Clearly Schneeplestein was a necessity, a good choice given the aforementioned detail of administering life-saving medical attention to different egos, as well as the man in charge – Jack. He seems to be the only person who can properly treat Anti. And actually, interestingly, that same photo of the doctor is the one where we see him bleeding from the eye. He’s been corrupted by Anti, influenced by him perhaps, in order for Anti to get him to stitch his neck up. This would explain why Anti hasn’t simply killed the doctor, but instead corrupted him. Also taking into account that Schneeplestein calls Jack his friend on multiple occasions in the BIO INC REDEMPTION video, we know that he would never voluntarily betray Jack. Therefore the only way for Anti to get what he wanted would be to turn Schneeplestein to his side, however briefly. One might argue that this briefness is a result of Schneeplestein’s profession. If, like I mentioned earlier, Anti acts like a disease, an illness, or a virus – computer or otherwise – Schneeplestein has the upper hand. He’s a doctor, and doctors fight viruses and infections. Although Anti eventually manages to take control, Schneeplestein isn’t easily controlled. But then, we also have to take into account that Schneeplestein says “I have never seen something attack a system like this before” (7:30), which would account for how much he has to struggle to keep Anti out (and his subsequent loss of ability to keep Anti from possessing him).
But then it begs the question: why didn’t Anti simply kill the good doctor after having his neck stitched up? My guess is that Anti continuously needs the doctor’s support. If you look back to Anti’s appearance in BIO INC REDEMPTION, his neck is bleeding again. Why would Anti post a photo of a stitched up neck, only to then show up bleeding again? I think that Anti is in constant need of medical attention, and that Schneeplestein is the only one who can give it to him. Perhaps, no matter what he does, the neck wound keeps opening up again and again, time after time. Let’s think about it this way: why does Anti even have that neck wound to begin with? Wasn’t it Jack who slit his own throat? My theory is that any injuries he sustained while inside Jack’s body would remain with him when eventually he came back out of Jack’s body. He tells us in the BIO INC REDEMPTION video that he was in control this entire time, but I’d be willing to bet my left leg that he only said that to make himself sound more powerful than he really is. But in fact, he was not in control the whole time, and he wasn’t in Jack’s body at all. He was weak and suffering and in need of a doctor. Schneeplestein even boasts of his own medical prowess as Anti tries to possess him: “When something gets inside your body and it wants to destroy you from the inside out, there is only one way to deal with it. And that is SCHNEEPLESTEIN” (5:03). Given, he IS talking about expelling Anti from one’s system, and although that would prove to be detrimental to Anti who is trying to take Schneeplestein’s body, it is precisely his skill as a doctor that Anti is in need of.
So then, if Anti is in constant need of medical attention, and has been corrupting Schneeplestein in order to get that medical attention, would it not be detrimental to himself to kill the doctor? So then why would it be our job to save Schneeplestein, if Anti doesn’t even want to kill him? Simple. While it’s true that Anti needs the doctor’s attention to keep stitching up that neck wound of his, it is quite possible that if Jack dies, Anti can simply take over his body permanently and become strong enough to exist on his own without any medical assistance. If he can only corrupt Schneeplestein for short periods of time before the doctor starts to fight back, this means that eventually Schneeplestein will heal whatever harm Anti tries to inflict on Jack. So then, the only way to successfully make the transition from some sort of entity without a body of his own to fully taking over a host body (Jack’s) is to quickly kill the doctor so that he is unable to heal Jack again, and then to deal with Jack before time is up. In this scenario, KILLING THE DOCTOR IS THE CATALYST THAT WOULD LEAD, IN THE END, TO JACK’S (PERMANENT) DEATH.
Given the desperation to Anti’s most recent video appearance, I’d say he’s just desperate enough to go for it. When he first appeared in SAY GOODBYE, Anti was rather calm. Although aggressive with his insistence that we let this happen, he was cocky and self-assured. He was convincing and manipulative. He believed that he was in control, after what he assumed to be a successful attempt to put an end to Jack’s life. He tells us that “his body was weak,” which I could very easily be persuaded to take to mean that Jack was weak, and that with Anti now inhabiting the body, he will be strong. Inside Jack’s body, while possessing him, he forced Jack to slit his own throat (and thus retained the injury when he was pushed from Jack’s body when he was saved by Dr. Schneeplestein). In comparison, this most recent video appearance by Anti is erratic and agitated. Before, he was cocky and comfortable. He thought Jack was dead, defeated, and he was feeling triumphant. But then Schneeplestein fixed Jack and Anti wasn’t able to hold his place in Jack’s body, and was consequently expelled from the body once again. There is significantly more glitching going on, Anti paces back and forth constantly. He seems genuinely angry. He proclaims that we’ve been seeing him all along, that it’s been him in control, when frankly it’s all been a crock of shit. Anti isn’t stronger than ever, he isn’t even in control. He’s desperate, and he knows he’s being pushed aside. He knows we mock him with Glitch Bitch, and it makes him absolutely downright furious. And as a result, he makes bold claims and sweeping grandiose gestures, trying much too aggressively to convince us that he still has the upper hand, to compensate for his uncertainty, when in actuality he’s slipping from his hold more and more.
The long and the short of it is that Anti is weak. He’s getting cagey and we’ve got him on his toes. If we keep Schneeplestein alive, we keep the rest of them alive. It’s quite possible that he keep threatening the other egos, Chase and Marvin, so that the audience is continuously set ablaze. The more agitated we get, the more we talk about Anti, and the stronger he becomes again. Perhaps if we stop reacting, stop giving him the satisfaction, eventually he’ll simply become what he fears the most: nothing.
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2018 Staff Favorites
Last year, the team here at CSS-Tricks compiled a list of our favorite posts, trends, topics, and resources from around the world of front-end development. We had a blast doing it and found it to be a nice recap of the industry as we saw it over the course of the year. Well, we're doing it again this year!
With that, here's everything that Sarah, Robin, Chris and I saw and enjoyed over the past year.
Sarah
Good code review
There are a few themes that cross languages, and one of them is good code review. Even though Nina Zakharenko gives talks and makes resources about Python, her talk about code review skills is especially notable because it applies across many disciplines. She’s got a great arc to this talk and I think her deck is an excellent resource, but you can take this a step even further and think critically about your own team, what works for it, and what practices might need to be reconsidered.
I also enjoyed this sarcastic tweet that brings up a good point:
When reviewing a PR, it’s essential that you leave a comment. Any comment. Even the PR looks great and you have no substantial feedback, find something trivial to nitpick or question. This communicates intelligence and mastery, and is widely appreciated by your colleagues.
— Andrew Clark (@acdlite) May 19, 2018
I've been guilty myself of commenting on a really clean pull request just to say something, and it’s healthy for us as a community to revisit why we do things like this.
Sophie Alpert, manager of the React core team, also wrote a great post along these lines right at the end of the year called Why Review Code. It’s a good resource to turn to when you'd like to explain the need for code reviews in the development process.
The year of (creative) code
So many wonderful creative coding resources were made this year. Creative coding projects might seem frivolous but you can actually learn a ton from making and playing with them. Matt DesLauriers recently taught a course called Creative Coding with Canvas & WebGL for Frontend Masters that serves as a good example.
CodePen is always one of my favorite places to check out creative work because it provides a way to reverse-engineer the work of other people and learn from their source code. CodePen has also started coding challenges adding yet another way to motivate creative experiments and collective learning opportunities. Marie Mosley did a lot of work to make that happen and her work on CodePen's great newsletter is equally awesome.
You should also consider checking out Monica Dinculescu's work because she has been sharing some amazing work. There's not one, not two, but three (!) that use machine learning alone. Go see all of her Glitch projects. And, for what it's worth, Glitch is a great place to explore creative code and remix your own as well.
GitHub Actions
I think hands-down one of the most game-changing developments this year is GitHub Actions. The fact that you can manage all of your testing, deployments, and project issues as containers chained in a unified workflow is quite amazing.
Containers are a great for actions because of their flexibility — you’re not limited to a single kind of compute and so much is possible! I did a writeup about GitHub Actions covering the feature in full. And, if you're digging into containers, you might find the dive repo helpful because it provides a way to explore a docker image and layer contents.
Actions are still in beta but you can request access — they’re slowly rolling out now.
UI property generators
I really like that we’re automating some of the code that we need to make beautiful front-end experiences these days. In terms of color there’s color by Adobe, coolors, and uiGradients. There are even generators for other things, like gradients, clip-path, font pairings, and box-shadow. I am very much here for all for this. These are the kind of tools that speed up development and allow us to use advanced effects, no matter the skill level.
Robin
Ire Aderinokun’s blog
Ire has been writing a near constant stream of wondrous articles about front-end development on her blog, Bits of Code, over the past year, and it’s been super exciting to keep up with her work. It seems like she's posting something I find useful almost every day, from basic stuff like when hover, focus and active states apply to accessibility tips like the aria-live attribute.
"The All Powerful Front-end Developer"
Chris gave a talk this year about the ways the role of front-end development are changing... and for the better. It was perhaps the most inspiring talk I saw this year. Talks about front-end stuff are sometimes pretty dry, but Chris does something else here. He covers a host of new tools we can use today to do things that previously required a ton of back-end skills. Chris even made a website all about these new tools which are often categorized as "Serverless."
Even if none of these tools excite you, I would recommend checking out the talk – Chris’s enthusiasm is electric and made me want to pull up my sleeves and get to work on something fun, weird and exciting.
youtube
Future Fonts
The Future Fonts marketplace turned out to be a great place to find new and experimental typefaces this year. Obviously is a good example of that. But the difference between Future Fonts and other marketplaces is that you can buy fonts that are in beta and still currently under development. If you get in on the ground floor and buy a font for $10, then that shows the developer the interest in a particular font which may spur more features for it, like new weights, widths or even OpenType features.
It’s a great way to support type designers while getting a ton of neat and experimental typefaces at the same time.
React Conf 2018
The talks from React Conf 2018 will get you up to speed with the latest React news. It’s interesting to see how React Hooks let you "use state and other React features without writing a class."
youtube
It's also worth calling out that a lot of folks really improved our Guide to React here on CSS-Tricks so that it now contains a ton of advice about how to get started and how to level up on both basic and advanced practices.
The Victorian Internet
This is a weird recommendation because The Victorian Internet is a book and it wasn’t published this year. But! It’s certainly the best book I've read this year, even if it’s only tangentially related to web stuff. It made me realize that the internet we’re building today is one that’s much older than I first expected. The book focuses on the laying of the Transatlantic submarine cables, the design of codes and the codebreakers, fraudsters that used the telegraph to find their marks, and those that used it to find the person they’d marry. I really can’t recommend this book enough.
amzn_assoc_tracking_id = "csstricks-20"; amzn_assoc_ad_mode = "manual"; amzn_assoc_ad_type = "smart"; amzn_assoc_marketplace = "amazon"; amzn_assoc_region = "US"; amzn_assoc_design = "enhanced_links"; amzn_assoc_asins = "B07JW5WQSR"; amzn_assoc_placement = "adunit"; amzn_assoc_linkid = "162040592X";
Figma
The browser-based design tool Figma continued to release a wave of new features that makes building design systems and UI kits easier than ever before. I’ve been doing a ton of experiments with it to see how it helps designers communicate, as well as how to build more resilient components. It’s super impressive to see how much the tools have improved over the past year and I’m excited to see it improve in the new year, too.
Geoff
Buzz about third party scripts
It seems there was a lot of chatter this year about the impact of third party scripts. Whether it’s the growing ubiquity of all-things-JavaScript or whatever, this topic covers a wide and interesting ground, including performance, security and even hard costs, to name a few.
My personal favorite post about this was Paulo Mioni’s deep dive into the anatomy of a malicious script. Sure, the technical bits are a great learning opportunity, but what really makes this piece is the way it reads like a true crime novel.
Gutenberg, Gutenberg and more Gutenberg
There was so much noise leading up to the new WordPress editor that the release of WordPress 5.0 containing it felt anti-climactic. No one was hurt or injured amid plenty of concerns, though there is indeed room for improvement.
Lara Schneck and Andy Bell teamed up for a hefty seven-party series aimed at getting developers like us primed for the changes and it’s incredible. No stone is left unturned and it perfectly suitable for beginners and experts alike.
Solving real life issues with UX
I like to think that I care a lot about users in the work I do and that I do my best to empathize so that I can anticipate needs or feelings as they interact with the site or app. That said, my mind was blown away by a study Lucas Chae did on the search engine experience of people looking for a way to kill themselves. I mean, depression and suicide are topics that are near and dear to my heart, but I never thought about finding a practical solution for handling it in an online experience.
So, thanks for that, Lucas. It inspired me to piggyback on his recommendations with a few of my own. Hopefully, this is a conversation that goes well beyond 2018 and sparks meaningful change in this department.
The growing gig economy
Freelancing is one of my favorite things to talk about at great length with anyone and everyone who is willing to talk shop and that’s largely because I’ve learned a lot about it in the five years I’ve been in it.
But if you take my experience and quadruple it, then you get a treasure trove of wisdom like Adam Coti shared in his collection of freelancing lessons learned over 20 years of service.
Freelancing isn’t for everyone. Neither is remote work. Adam’s advice is what I wish I had going into this five years ago.
Browser ecology
I absolutely love the way Rachel Nabors likens web browsers to a biological ecosystem. It’s a stellar analogy and leads into the long and winding history of browser evolution.
Speaking of history, Jason Hoffman’s telling of the history about browsers and web standards is equally interesting and a good chunk of context to carry in your back pocket.
These posts were timely because this year saw a lot of movement in the browser landscape. Microsoft is dropping EdgeHTML for Blink and Google ramped up its AMP product. 2018 felt like a dizzying year of significant changes for industry giants!
Chris
All the best buzzwords: JAMstack, Serverless, & Headless
"Don’t tell me how to build a front end!" we, front-end developers, cry out. We are very powerful now. We like to bring our own front-end stack, then use your back-end data and APIs. As this is happening, we’re seeing healthy things happen like content management systems evolving to headless frameworks and focus on what they are best at: content management. We’re seeing performance and security improvements through the power of static and CDN-backed hosting. We’re seeing hosting and server usage cost reductions.
But we’re also seeing unhealthy things we need to work through, like front-end developers being spread too thin. We have JavaScript-focused engineers failing to write clean, extensible, performant, accessible markup and styles, and, on the flip side, we have UX-focused engineers feeling left out, left behind, or asked to do development work suddenly quite far away from their current expertise.
GraphQL
Speaking of powerful front-end developers, giving us front-end developers a well-oiled GraphQL setup is extremely empowering. No longer do we need to be roadblocked by waiting for an API to be finished or data to be massaged into some needed format. All the data you want is available at your fingertips, so go get and use it as you will. This makes building and iterating on the front end faster, easier, and more fun, which will lead us to building better products. Apollo GraphQL is the thing to look at here.
While front-end is having a massive love affair with JavaScript, there are plenty of front-end developers happily focused elsewhere
This is what I was getting at in my first section. There is a divide happening. It’s always been there, but with JavaScript being absolutely enormous right now and showing no signs of slowing down, people are starting to fall through the schism. Can I still be a front-end developer if I’m not deep into JavaScript? Of course. I’m not going to tell you that you shouldn’t learn JavaScript, because it’s pretty cool and powerful and you just might love it, but if you’re focused on UX, UI, animation, accessibility, semantics, layout, architecture, design patterns, illustration, copywriting, and any combination of that and whatever else, you’re still awesome and useful and always will be. Hugs. 🤗
Just look at the book Refactoring UI or the course Learn UI Design as proof there is lots to know about UI design and being great at it requires a lot of training, practice, and skill just like any other aspect of front-end development.
Shamelessly using grid and custom properties everywhere
I remember when I first learned flexbox, it was all I reached for to make layouts. I still love flexbox, but now that we have grid and the browser support is nearly just as good, I find myself reaching for grid even more. Not that it’s a competition; they are different tools useful in different situations. But admittedly, there were things I would have used flexbox for a year ago that I use grid for now and grid feels more intuitive and more like the right tool.
I'm still swooning over the amazing illustrations Lynn Fisher did for both our grid and flexbox guides.
Massive discussions around CSS-in-JS and approaches, like Tailwind
These discussions can get quite heated, but there is no ignoring the fact that the landscape of CSS-in-JS is huge, has a lot of fans, and seems to be hitting the right notes for a lot of folks. But it’s far from settled down. Libraries like Vue and Angular have their own framework-prescribed way of handling it, whereas React has literally dozens of options and a fast-moving landscape with libraries popping up and popular ones spinning down in favor of others. It does seem like the feature set is starting to settle down a little, so this next year will be interesting to watch.
Then there is the concept of atomic CSS on the other side of the spectrum, and interesting in that doesn’t seem to have slowed down at all either. Tailwind CSS is perhaps the hottest framework out there, gaining enough traction that Adam is going full time on it.
What could really shake this up is if the web platform itself decides to get into solving some of the problems that gave rise to these solutions. The shadow DOM already exists in Web Components Land, so perhaps there are answers there? Maybe the return of <style scoped>? Maybe new best practices will evolve that employ a single-stylesheet-per-component? Who knows.
Design systems becoming a core deliverable
There are whole conferences around them now!
youtube
I’ve heard of multiple agencies where design systems are literally what they make for their clients. Not websites, design systems. I get it. If you give a team a really powerful and flexible toolbox to build their own site with, they will do just that. Giving them some finished pages, as polished as they might be, leaves them needing to dissect those themselves and figure out how to extend and build upon them when that need inevitably arrives. I think it makes sense for agencies, or special teams, to focus on extensible component-driven libraries that are used to build sites.
Machine Learning
Stuff like this blows me away:
I made a music sequencer! In JavaScript! It even uses Machine Learning to try to match drums to a synth melody you create!
✨🎧 https://t.co/FGlCxF3W9p pic.twitter.com/TTdPk8PAwP
— Monica Dinculescu (@notwaldorf) June 28, 2018
Having open source libraries that help with machine learning and that are actually accessible for regular ol’ developers to use is a big deal.
Stuff like this will have real world-bettering implications:
🔥 I think I used machine learning to be nice to people! In this proof of concept, I’m creating dynamic alt text for screenreaders with Azure’s Computer Vision API. 💫https://t.co/Y21AHbRT4Y pic.twitter.com/KDfPZ4Sue0
— Sarah Drasner (@sarah_edo) November 13, 2017
And this!
Well that's impressive and dang useful. https://t.co/99tspvk4lo Cool URL too.
(Remove Image Background 100% automatically – in 5 seconds – without a single click) pic.twitter.com/k9JTHK91ff
— CSS-Tricks (@css) December 17, 2018
OK, OK. One more
You gotta check out the Unicode Pattern work (more) that Yuan Chuan does. He even shared some of his work and how he does it right here on CSS-Tricks. And follow that name link to CodePen for even more. This <css-doodle> thing they have created is fantastic.
See the Pen Seeding by yuanchuan (@yuanchuan) on CodePen.
The post 2018 Staff Favorites appeared first on CSS-Tricks.
2018 Staff Favorites published first on https://deskbysnafu.tumblr.com/
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Text
2018 Staff Favorites
Last year, the team here at CSS-Tricks compiled a list of our favorite posts, trends, topics, and resources from around the world of front-end development. We had a blast doing it and found it to be a nice recap of the industry as we saw it over the course of the year. Well, we're doing it again this year!
With that, here's everything that Sarah, Robin, Chris and I saw and enjoyed over the past year.
Sarah
Good code review
There are a few themes that cross languages, and one of them is good code review. Even though Nina Zakharenko gives talks and makes resources about Python, her talk about code review skills is especially notable because it applies across many disciplines. She’s got a great arc to this talk and I think her deck is an excellent resource, but you can take this a step even further and think critically about your own team, what works for it, and what practices might need to be reconsidered.
I also enjoyed this sarcastic tweet that brings up a good point:
When reviewing a PR, it’s essential that you leave a comment. Any comment. Even the PR looks great and you have no substantial feedback, find something trivial to nitpick or question. This communicates intelligence and mastery, and is widely appreciated by your colleagues.
— Andrew Clark (@acdlite) May 19, 2018
I've been guilty myself of commenting on a really clean pull request just to say something, and it’s healthy for us as a community to revisit why we do things like this.
Sophie Alpert, manager of the React core team, also wrote a great post along these lines right at the end of the year called Why Review Code. It’s a good resource to turn to when you'd like to explain the need for code reviews in the development process.
The year of (creative) code
So many wonderful creative coding resources were made this year. Creative coding projects might seem frivolous but you can actually learn a ton from making and playing with them. Matt DesLauriers recently taught a course called Creative Coding with Canvas & WebGL for Frontend Masters that serves as a good example.
CodePen is always one of my favorite places to check out creative work because it provides a way to reverse-engineer the work of other people and learn from their source code. CodePen has also started coding challenges adding yet another way to motivate creative experiments and collective learning opportunities. Marie Mosley did a lot of work to make that happen and her work on CodePen's great newsletter is equally awesome.
You should also consider checking out Monica Dinculescu's work because she has been sharing some amazing work. There's not one, not two, but three (!) that use machine learning alone. Go see all of her Glitch projects. And, for what it's worth, Glitch is a great place to explore creative code and remix your own as well.
GitHub Actions
I think hands-down one of the most game-changing developments this year is GitHub Actions. The fact that you can manage all of your testing, deployments, and project issues as containers chained in a unified workflow is quite amazing.
Containers are a great for actions because of their flexibility — you’re not limited to a single kind of compute and so much is possible! I did a writeup about GitHub Actions covering the feature in full. And, if you're digging into containers, you might find the dive repo helpful because it provides a way to explore a docker image and layer contents.
Actions are still in beta but you can request access — they’re slowly rolling out now.
UI property generators
I really like that we’re automating some of the code that we need to make beautiful front-end experiences these days. In terms of color there’s color by Adobe, coolors, and uiGradients. There are even generators for other things, like gradients, clip-path, font pairings, and box-shadow. I am very much all for this. These are the kind of tools that speed up development and allow us to use advanced effects, no matter the skill level.
Robin
Ire Aderinokun’s blog
Ire has been writing a near constant stream of wondrous articles about front-end development on her blog, Bits of Code, over the past year, and it’s been super exciting to keep up with her work. It seems like she's posting something I find useful almost every day, from basic stuff like when hover, focus and active states apply to accessibility tips like the aria-live attribute.
"The All Powerful Front-end Developer"
Chris gave a talk this year about the ways the role of front-end development are changing... and for the better. It was perhaps the most inspiring talk I saw this year. Talks about front-end stuff are sometimes pretty dry, but Chris does something else here. He covers a host of new tools we can use today to do things that previously required a ton of back-end skills. Chris even made a website all about these new tools which are often categorized as "Serverless."
Even if none of these tools excite you, I would recommend checking out the talk – Chris’s enthusiasm is electric and made me want to pull up my sleeves and get to work on something fun, weird and exciting.
youtube
Future Fonts
The Future Fonts marketplace turned out to be a great place to find new and experimental typefaces this year. Obviously is a good example of that. But the difference between Future Fonts and other marketplaces is that you can buy fonts that are in beta and still currently under development. If you get in on the ground floor and buy a font for $10, then that shows the developer the interest in a particular font which may spur more features for it, like new weights, widths or even OpenType features.
It’s a great way to support type designers while getting a ton of neat and experimental typefaces at the same time.
React Conf 2018
The talks from React Conf 2018 will get you up to speed with the latest React news. It’s interesting to see how React Hooks let you "use state and other React features without writing a class."
youtube
It's also worth calling out that a lot of folks really improved our Guide to React here on CSS-Tricks so that it now contains a ton of advice about how to get started and how to level up on both basic and advanced practices.
The Victorian Internet
This is a weird recommendation because The Victorian Internet is a book and it wasn’t published this year. But! It’s certainly the best book I've read this year, even if it’s only tangentially related to web stuff. It made me realize that the internet we’re building today is one that’s much older than I first expected. The book focuses on the laying of the Transatlantic submarine cables, the design of codes and the codebreakers, fraudsters that used the telegraph to find their marks, and those that used it to find the person they’d marry. I really can’t recommend this book enough.
amzn_assoc_tracking_id = "csstricks-20"; amzn_assoc_ad_mode = "manual"; amzn_assoc_ad_type = "smart"; amzn_assoc_marketplace = "amazon"; amzn_assoc_region = "US"; amzn_assoc_design = "enhanced_links"; amzn_assoc_asins = "B07JW5WQSR"; amzn_assoc_placement = "adunit"; amzn_assoc_linkid = "162040592X";
Figma
The browser-based design tool Figma continued to release a wave of new features that makes building design systems and UI kits easier than ever before. I’ve been doing a ton of experiments with it to see how it helps designers communicate, as well as how to build more resilient components. It’s super impressive to see how much the tools have improved over the past year and I’m excited to see it improve in the new year, too.
Geoff
Buzz about third party scripts
It seems there was a lot of chatter this year about the impact of third party scripts. Whether it’s the growing ubiquity of all-things-JavaScript or whatever, this topic covers a wide and interesting ground, including performance, security and even hard costs, to name a few.
My personal favorite post about this was Paulo Mioni’s deep dive into the anatomy of a malicious script. Sure, the technical bits are a great learning opportunity, but what really makes this piece is the way it reads like a true crime novel.
Gutenberg, Gutenberg and more Gutenberg
There was so much noise leading up to the new WordPress editor that the release of WordPress 5.0 containing it felt anti-climactic. No one was hurt or injured amid plenty of concerns, though there is indeed room for improvement.
Lara Schneck and Andy Bell teamed up for a hefty seven-party series aimed at getting developers like us primed for the changes and it’s incredible. No stone is left unturned and it perfectly suitable for beginners and experts alike.
Solving real life issues with UX
I like to think that I care a lot about users in the work I do and that I do my best to empathize so that I can anticipate needs or feelings as they interact with the site or app. That said, my mind was blown away by a study Lucas Chae did on the search engine experience of people looking for a way to kill themselves. I mean, depression and suicide are topics that are near and dear to my heart, but I never thought about finding a practical solution for handling it in an online experience.
So, thanks for that, Lucas. It inspired me to piggyback on his recommendations with a few of my own. Hopefully, this is a conversation that goes well beyond 2018 and sparks meaningful change in this department.
The growing gig economy
Freelancing is one of my favorite things to talk about at great length with anyone and everyone who is willing to talk shop and that’s largely because I’ve learned a lot about it in the five years I’ve been in it.
But if you take my experience and quadruple it, then you get a treasure trove of wisdom like Adam Coti shared in his collection of freelancing lessons learned over 20 years of service.
Freelancing isn’t for everyone. Neither is remote work. Adam’s advice is what I wish I had going into this five years ago.
Browser ecology
I absolutely love the way Rachel Nabors likens web browsers to a biological ecosystem. It’s a stellar analogy and leads into the long and winding history of browser evolution.
Speaking of history, Jason Hoffman’s telling of the history about browsers and web standards is equally interesting and a good chunk of context to carry in your back pocket.
These posts were timely because this year saw a lot of movement in the browser landscape. Microsoft is dropping EdgeHTML for Blink and Google ramped up its AMP product. 2018 felt like a dizzying year of significant changes for industry giants!
Chris
All the best buzzwords: JAMstack, Serverless, & Headless
"Don’t tell me how to build a front end!" we, front-end developers, cry out. We are very powerful now. We like to bring our own front-end stack, then use your back-end data and APIs. As this is happening, we’re seeing healthy things happen like content management systems evolving to headless frameworks and focus on what they are best at: content management. We’re seeing performance and security improvements through the power of static and CDN-backed hosting. We’re seeing hosting and server usage cost reductions.
But we’re also seeing unhealthy things we need to work through, like front-end developers being spread too thin. We have JavaScript-focused engineers failing to write clean, extensible, performant, accessible markup and styles, and, on the flip side, we have UX-focused engineers feeling left out, left behind, or asked to do development work suddenly quite far away from their current expertise.
GraphQL
Speaking of powerful front-end developers, giving us front-end developers a well-oiled GraphQL setup is extremely empowering. No longer do we need to be roadblocked by waiting for an API to be finished or data to be massaged into some needed format. All the data you want is available at your fingertips, so go get and use it as you will. This makes building and iterating on the front end faster, easier, and more fun, which will lead us to building better products. Apollo GraphQL is the thing to look at here.
While front-end is having a massive love affair with JavaScript, there are plenty of front-end developers happily focused elsewhere
This is what I was getting at in my first section. There is a divide happening. It’s always been there, but with JavaScript being absolutely enormous right now and showing no signs of slowing down, people are starting to fall through the schism. Can I still be a front-end developer if I’m not deep into JavaScript? Of course. I’m not going to tell you that you shouldn’t learn JavaScript, because it’s pretty cool and powerful and you just might love it, but if you’re focused on UX, UI, animation, accessibility, semantics, layout, architecture, design patterns, illustration, copywriting, and any combination of that and whatever else, you’re still awesome and useful and always will be. Hugs. 🤗
Just look at the book Refactoring UI or the course Learn UI Design as proof there is lots to know about UI design and being great at it requires a lot of training, practice, and skill just like any other aspect of front-end development.
Shamelessly using grid and custom properties everywhere
I remember when I first learned flexbox, it was all I reached for to make layouts. I still love flexbox, but now that we have grid and the browser support is nearly just as good, I find myself reaching for grid even more. Not that it’s a competition; they are different tools useful in different situations. But admittedly, there were things I would have used flexbox for a year ago that I use grid for now and grid feels more intuitive and more like the right tool.
I'm still swooning over the amazing illustrations Lynn Fisher did for both our grid and flexbox guides.
Massive discussions around CSS-in-JS and approaches, like Tailwind
These discussions can get quite heated, but there is no ignoring the fact that the landscape of CSS-in-JS is huge, has a lot of fans, and seems to be hitting the right notes for a lot of folks. But it’s far from settled down. Libraries like Vue and Angular have their own framework-prescribed way of handling it, whereas React has literally dozens of options and a fast-moving landscape with libraries popping up and popular ones spinning down in favor of others. It does seem like the feature set is starting to settle down a little, so this next year will be interesting to watch.
Then there is the concept of atomic CSS on the other side of the spectrum, and interesting in that doesn’t seem to have slowed down at all either. Tailwind CSS is perhaps the hottest framework out there, gaining enough traction that Adam is going full time on it.
What could really shake this up is if the web platform itself decides to get into solving some of the problems that gave rise to these solutions. The shadow DOM already exists in Web Components Land, so perhaps there are answers there? Maybe the return of <style scoped>? Maybe new best practices will evolve that employ a single-stylesheet-per-component? Who knows.
Design systems becoming a core deliverable
There are whole conferences around them now!
youtube
I’ve heard of multiple agencies where design systems are literally what they make for their clients. Not websites, design systems. I get it. If you give a team a really powerful and flexible toolbox to build their own site with, they will do just that. Giving them some finished pages, as polished as they might be, leaves them needing to dissect those themselves and figure out how to extend and build upon them when that need inevitably arrives. I think it makes sense for agencies, or special teams, to focus on extensible component-driven libraries that are used to build sites.
Machine Learning
Stuff like this blows me away:
I made a music sequencer! In JavaScript! It even uses Machine Learning to try to match drums to a synth melody you create!
✨🎧 https://t.co/FGlCxF3W9p pic.twitter.com/TTdPk8PAwP
— Monica Dinculescu (@notwaldorf) June 28, 2018
Having open source libraries that help with machine learning and that are actually accessible for regular ol’ developers to use is a big deal.
Stuff like this will have real world-bettering implications:
🔥 I think I used machine learning to be nice to people! In this proof of concept, I’m creating dynamic alt text for screenreaders with Azure’s Computer Vision API. 💫https://t.co/Y21AHbRT4Y pic.twitter.com/KDfPZ4Sue0
— Sarah Drasner (@sarah_edo) November 13, 2017
And this!
Well that's impressive and dang useful. https://t.co/99tspvk4lo Cool URL too.
(Remove Image Background 100% automatically – in 5 seconds – without a single click) pic.twitter.com/k9JTHK91ff
— CSS-Tricks (@css) December 17, 2018
OK, OK. One more
You gotta check out the Unicode Pattern work (more) that Yuan Chuan does. He even shared some of his work and how he does it right here on CSS-Tricks. And follow that name link to CodePen for even more. This <css-doodle> thing they have created is fantastic.
See the Pen Seeding by yuanchuan (@yuanchuan) on CodePen.
The post 2018 Staff Favorites appeared first on CSS-Tricks.
😉SiliconWebX | 🌐CSS-Tricks
0 notes
Text
2018 Staff Favorites
Last year, the team here at CSS-Tricks compiled a list of our favorite posts, trends, topics, and resources from around the world of front-end development. We had a blast doing it and found it to be a nice recap of the industry as we saw it over the course of the year. Well, we're doing it again this year!
With that, here's everything that Sarah, Robin, Chris and I saw and enjoyed over the past year.
Sarah
Good code review
There are a few themes that cross languages, and one of them is good code review. Even though Nina Zakharenko gives talks and makes resources about Python, her talk about code review skills is especially notable because it applies across many disciplines. She’s got a great arc to this talk and I think her deck is an excellent resource, but you can take this a step even further and think critically about your own team, what works for it, and what practices might need to be reconsidered.
I also enjoyed this sarcastic tweet that brings up a good point:
When reviewing a PR, it’s essential that you leave a comment. Any comment. Even the PR looks great and you have no substantial feedback, find something trivial to nitpick or question. This communicates intelligence and mastery, and is widely appreciated by your colleagues.
— Andrew Clark (@acdlite) May 19, 2018
I've been guilty myself of commenting on a really clean pull request just to say something, and it’s healthy for us as a community to revisit why we do things like this.
Sophie Alpert, manager of the React core team, also wrote a great post along these lines right at the end of the year called Why Review Code. It’s a good resource to turn to when you'd like to explain the need for code reviews in the development process.
The year of (creative) code
So many wonderful creative coding resources were made this year. Creative coding projects might seem frivolous but you can actually learn a ton from making and playing with them. Matt DesLauriers recently taught a course called Creative Coding with Canvas & WebGL for Frontend Masters that serves as a good example.
CodePen is always one of my favorite places to check out creative work because it provides a way to reverse-engineer the work of other people and learn from their source code. CodePen has also started coding challenges adding yet another way to motivate creative experiments and collective learning opportunities. Marie Mosley did a lot of work to make that happen and her work on CodePen's great newsletter is equally awesome.
You should also consider checking out Monica Dinculescu's work because she has been sharing some amazing work. There's not one, not two, but three (!) that use machine learning alone. Go see all of her Glitch projects. And, for what it's worth, Glitch is a great place to explore creative code and remix your own as well.
GitHub Actions
I think hands-down one of the most game-changing developments this year is GitHub Actions. The fact that you can manage all of your testing, deployments, and project issues as containers chained in a unified workflow is quite amazing.
Containers are a great for actions because of their flexibility — you’re not limited to a single kind of compute and so much is possible! I did a writeup about GitHub Actions covering the feature in full. And, if you're digging into containers, you might find the dive repo helpful because it provides a way to explore a docker image and layer contents.
Actions are still in beta but you can request access — they’re slowly rolling out now.
UI property generators
I really like that we’re automating some of the code that we need to make beautiful front-end experiences these days. In terms of color there’s color by Adobe, coolors, and uiGradients. There are even generators for other things, like gradients, clip-path, font pairings, and box-shadow. I am very much all for this. These are the kind of tools that speed up development and allow us to use advanced effects, no matter the skill level.
Robin
Ire Aderinokun’s blog
Ire has been writing a near constant stream of wondrous articles about front-end development on her blog, Bits of Code, over the past year, and it’s been super exciting to keep up with her work. It seems like she's posting something I find useful almost every day, from basic stuff like when hover, focus and active states apply to accessibility tips like the aria-live attribute.
"The All Powerful Front-end Developer"
Chris gave a talk this year about the ways the role of front-end development are changing... and for the better. It was perhaps the most inspiring talk I saw this year. Talks about front-end stuff are sometimes pretty dry, but Chris does something else here. He covers a host of new tools we can use today to do things that previously required a ton of back-end skills. Chris even made a website all about these new tools which are often categorized as "Serverless."
Even if none of these tools excite you, I would recommend checking out the talk – Chris’s enthusiasm is electric and made me want to pull up my sleeves and get to work on something fun, weird and exciting.
youtube
Future Fonts
The Future Fonts marketplace turned out to be a great place to find new and experimental typefaces this year. Obviously is a good example of that. But the difference between Future Fonts and other marketplaces is that you can buy fonts that are in beta and still currently under development. If you get in on the ground floor and buy a font for $10, then that shows the developer the interest in a particular font which may spur more features for it, like new weights, widths or even OpenType features.
It’s a great way to support type designers while getting a ton of neat and experimental typefaces at the same time.
React Conf 2018
The talks from React Conf 2018 will get you up to speed with the latest React news. It’s interesting to see how React Hooks let you "use state and other React features without writing a class."
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It's also worth calling out that a lot of folks really improved our Guide to React here on CSS-Tricks so that it now contains a ton of advice about how to get started and how to level up on both basic and advanced practices.
The Victorian Internet
This is a weird recommendation because The Victorian Internet is a book and it wasn’t published this year. But! It’s certainly the best book I've read this year, even if it’s only tangentially related to web stuff. It made me realize that the internet we’re building today is one that’s much older than I first expected. The book focuses on the laying of the Transatlantic submarine cables, the design of codes and the codebreakers, fraudsters that used the telegraph to find their marks, and those that used it to find the person they’d marry. I really can’t recommend this book enough.
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Figma
The browser-based design tool Figma continued to release a wave of new features that makes building design systems and UI kits easier than ever before. I’ve been doing a ton of experiments with it to see how it helps designers communicate, as well as how to build more resilient components. It’s super impressive to see how much the tools have improved over the past year and I’m excited to see it improve in the new year, too.
Geoff
Buzz about third party scripts
It seems there was a lot of chatter this year about the impact of third party scripts. Whether it’s the growing ubiquity of all-things-JavaScript or whatever, this topic covers a wide and interesting ground, including performance, security and even hard costs, to name a few.
My personal favorite post about this was Paulo Mioni’s deep dive into the anatomy of a malicious script. Sure, the technical bits are a great learning opportunity, but what really makes this piece is the way it reads like a true crime novel.
Gutenberg, Gutenberg and more Gutenberg
There was so much noise leading up to the new WordPress editor that the release of WordPress 5.0 containing it felt anti-climactic. No one was hurt or injured amid plenty of concerns, though there is indeed room for improvement.
Lara Schneck and Andy Bell teamed up for a hefty seven-party series aimed at getting developers like us primed for the changes and it’s incredible. No stone is left unturned and it perfectly suitable for beginners and experts alike.
Solving real life issues with UX
I like to think that I care a lot about users in the work I do and that I do my best to empathize so that I can anticipate needs or feelings as they interact with the site or app. That said, my mind was blown away by a study Lucas Chae did on the search engine experience of people looking for a way to kill themselves. I mean, depression and suicide are topics that are near and dear to my heart, but I never thought about finding a practical solution for handling it in an online experience.
So, thanks for that, Lucas. It inspired me to piggyback on his recommendations with a few of my own. Hopefully, this is a conversation that goes well beyond 2018 and sparks meaningful change in this department.
The growing gig economy
Freelancing is one of my favorite things to talk about at great length with anyone and everyone who is willing to talk shop and that’s largely because I’ve learned a lot about it in the five years I’ve been in it.
But if you take my experience and quadruple it, then you get a treasure trove of wisdom like Adam Coti shared in his collection of freelancing lessons learned over 20 years of service.
Freelancing isn’t for everyone. Neither is remote work. Adam’s advice is what I wish I had going into this five years ago.
Browser ecology
I absolutely love the way Rachel Nabors likens web browsers to a biological ecosystem. It’s a stellar analogy and leads into the long and winding history of browser evolution.
Speaking of history, Jason Hoffman’s telling of the history about browsers and web standards is equally interesting and a good chunk of context to carry in your back pocket.
These posts were timely because this year saw a lot of movement in the browser landscape. Microsoft is dropping EdgeHTML for Blink and Google ramped up its AMP product. 2018 felt like a dizzying year of significant changes for industry giants!
Chris
All the best buzzwords: JAMstack, Serverless, & Headless
"Don’t tell me how to build a front end!" we, front-end developers, cry out. We are very powerful now. We like to bring our own front-end stack, then use your back-end data and APIs. As this is happening, we’re seeing healthy things happen like content management systems evolving to headless frameworks and focus on what they are best at: content management. We’re seeing performance and security improvements through the power of static and CDN-backed hosting. We’re seeing hosting and server usage cost reductions.
But we’re also seeing unhealthy things we need to work through, like front-end developers being spread too thin. We have JavaScript-focused engineers failing to write clean, extensible, performant, accessible markup and styles, and, on the flip side, we have UX-focused engineers feeling left out, left behind, or asked to do development work suddenly quite far away from their current expertise.
GraphQL
Speaking of powerful front-end developers, giving us front-end developers a well-oiled GraphQL setup is extremely empowering. No longer do we need to be roadblocked by waiting for an API to be finished or data to be massaged into some needed format. All the data you want is available at your fingertips, so go get and use it as you will. This makes building and iterating on the front end faster, easier, and more fun, which will lead us to building better products. Apollo GraphQL is the thing to look at here.
While front-end is having a massive love affair with JavaScript, there are plenty of front-end developers happily focused elsewhere
This is what I was getting at in my first section. There is a divide happening. It’s always been there, but with JavaScript being absolutely enormous right now and showing no signs of slowing down, people are starting to fall through the schism. Can I still be a front-end developer if I’m not deep into JavaScript? Of course. I’m not going to tell you that you shouldn’t learn JavaScript, because it’s pretty cool and powerful and you just might love it, but if you’re focused on UX, UI, animation, accessibility, semantics, layout, architecture, design patterns, illustration, copywriting, and any combination of that and whatever else, you’re still awesome and useful and always will be. Hugs. 🤗
Just look at the book Refactoring UI or the course Learn UI Design as proof there is lots to know about UI design and being great at it requires a lot of training, practice, and skill just like any other aspect of front-end development.
Shamelessly using grid and custom properties everywhere
I remember when I first learned flexbox, it was all I reached for to make layouts. I still love flexbox, but now that we have grid and the browser support is nearly just as good, I find myself reaching for grid even more. Not that it’s a competition; they are different tools useful in different situations. But admittedly, there were things I would have used flexbox for a year ago that I use grid for now and grid feels more intuitive and more like the right tool.
I'm still swooning over the amazing illustrations Lynn Fisher did for both our grid and flexbox guides.
Massive discussions around CSS-in-JS and approaches, like Tailwind
These discussions can get quite heated, but there is no ignoring the fact that the landscape of CSS-in-JS is huge, has a lot of fans, and seems to be hitting the right notes for a lot of folks. But it’s far from settled down. Libraries like Vue and Angular have their own framework-prescribed way of handling it, whereas React has literally dozens of options and a fast-moving landscape with libraries popping up and popular ones spinning down in favor of others. It does seem like the feature set is starting to settle down a little, so this next year will be interesting to watch.
Then there is the concept of atomic CSS on the other side of the spectrum, and interesting in that doesn’t seem to have slowed down at all either. Tailwind CSS is perhaps the hottest framework out there, gaining enough traction that Adam is going full time on it.
What could really shake this up is if the web platform itself decides to get into solving some of the problems that gave rise to these solutions. The shadow DOM already exists in Web Components Land, so perhaps there are answers there? Maybe the return of <style scoped>? Maybe new best practices will evolve that employ a single-stylesheet-per-component? Who knows.
Design systems becoming a core deliverable
There are whole conferences around them now!
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I’ve heard of multiple agencies where design systems are literally what they make for their clients. Not websites, design systems. I get it. If you give a team a really powerful and flexible toolbox to build their own site with, they will do just that. Giving them some finished pages, as polished as they might be, leaves them needing to dissect those themselves and figure out how to extend and build upon them when that need inevitably arrives. I think it makes sense for agencies, or special teams, to focus on extensible component-driven libraries that are used to build sites.
Machine Learning
Stuff like this blows me away:
I made a music sequencer! In JavaScript! It even uses Machine Learning to try to match drums to a synth melody you create!
✨🎧 https://t.co/FGlCxF3W9p pic.twitter.com/TTdPk8PAwP
— Monica Dinculescu (@notwaldorf) June 28, 2018
Having open source libraries that help with machine learning and that are actually accessible for regular ol’ developers to use is a big deal.
Stuff like this will have real world-bettering implications:
🔥 I think I used machine learning to be nice to people! In this proof of concept, I’m creating dynamic alt text for screenreaders with Azure’s Computer Vision API. 💫https://t.co/Y21AHbRT4Y pic.twitter.com/KDfPZ4Sue0
— Sarah Drasner (@sarah_edo) November 13, 2017
And this!
Well that's impressive and dang useful. https://t.co/99tspvk4lo Cool URL too.
(Remove Image Background 100% automatically – in 5 seconds – without a single click) pic.twitter.com/k9JTHK91ff
— CSS-Tricks (@css) December 17, 2018
OK, OK. One more
You gotta check out the Unicode Pattern work (more) that Yuan Chuan does. He even shared some of his work and how he does it right here on CSS-Tricks. And follow that name link to CodePen for even more. This <css-doodle> thing they have created is fantastic.
See the Pen Seeding by yuanchuan (@yuanchuan) on CodePen.
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2018 Staff Favorites published first on https://deskbysnafu.tumblr.com/
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