APIs allow us to leverage a 3rd party’s computing power and features, programmatically. In simple terms, we send some input data to a certain endpoint and receive a processed result back. An API can provide us with a variety of possibilities, from simple text processing to building out entire websites. This is the standard way of creating a communication channel between us and a 3rd party. In this article, we’re going to learn what an API is and how to use them.
You’ve probably seen by now applications and websites that use content placeholders before the actual content loads. These are simple mockups of the content that’s going to be displayed. Implementing this technique lets a user know what to expect, it makes your page appear more ‘reliable’ because it removes sizing glitches that happen when the content doesn’t load instantly, and, also, it replaces the boring loading screens. Some people refer to this as “Skeleton CSS.”
Did you ever wish you could get more out of CSS?! Maybe to be able to nest your selectors as opposed to rewriting them over and over. Or to have some functions that take care of the repetitive properties. Or maybe to just having the ability to set variables. Well, you can leverage that, and more, by using a CSS compiler, and in this tutorial, we’re going to talk about how to do this. Continue reading…
You’ve probably heard of asset compilers like Webpack or Gulp. They’re a way of using cutting-edge features of JavaScript in the browser, without breaking backward-compatibility with older browsers. But that’s not all that they can do. They also allow you to use language extensions likes SASS, LESS, CoffeeScript, Jade, etc. Using them, you will save precious development time and you will get your projects more organized. Continue reading…
You’ve probably noticed by now that the site’s theme includes a table of contents for each post. You might be wondering if I actually spend time creating that table of contents myself. Well, sorry to disappoint, but the answer is: No. It is in fact generated automatically based on the headings inside the article. I think it’s pretty slick, so I decided to share with you how it’s done.
Git is a version control system designed for tracking file changes. It was created for allowing multiple people to work on the same project in a non-linear fashion. However, nowadays it is used for much more than that. Some use it as a simple tool to keep their data intact and backed up. Some use it to deploy their projects from their local environments to production since it’s faster and overall more reliable than FTP. Others use it to distribute code through sites like GitHub, and so on.
DevTools is the single best thing that the browsers have to offer to a web designer or developer. Whilst, at the same time, the biggest surprise as a browser feature. In other words, nobody saw it coming, but we all loved it when it arrived. Nowadays, if you refuse to use it, you’ll probably make your life harder. It’s both a very easy way to manipulate HTML and CSS, as well as an advanced tool for inspecting HTTP requests, certificates, debug JavaScript, and more. Continue reading…
Contrast is the state of each and every design element in relation to its neighbors. A lot of designers ignore it or simply take it for granted. Most people think of it only as it applies to colors, but contrast applies to all types of design elements. Contrast is important because everything gets its value from its relative elements. Nothing has value by itself, hence, controlling the level of contrast, we can increase or decrease the value of any particular element. Continue reading…
Have you ever spent a bunch of time working on something, based entirely on written or spoken instructions from your client or boss, only for them to realize at the end that it wasn’t what they had in mind? Of course, you did, we all did. It’s very frustrating, and, most of the times, it wastes everybody’s time completely unnecessarily. But don’t worry, wireframing can solve this! Continue reading…
Regex or Regexp, short for regular expressions, is a special string used to define search patterns, typically used on larger texts.
If you’re aware of wildcards, you can think of this as being a similar thing, but a lot more powerful. For example, with wildcards, you’d use *.log to match all the file names that end in the log extension.
