I saw this article by Jeff Sandberg railing against Tailwind. I’m no fan of Tailwind myself, but the article reeked of elitism and gatekeeping. I don’t think Jeff (or anyone else railing against Tailwind) is doing this on purpose, so I will try to counter with my own arguments: developers are throwing away decades of carefully wrought systems for...
I’ve been learning Rust lately. Rust is one of the most loved languages out there, is fast, and has an amazing community. Rust invented the concept of ownership as a solution memory management issues without resorting to something slower like Garbage Collection or Reference Counting. But, when you don’t need to be quite as low level, it gives...
I was going to write an article about how Shadow DOM has been a horrible idea and here comes Manuel Matuzovic with an article that lays out exactly what’s wrong with it. The article is balanced and well considered, so I’m going to feel free to be more unhinged and not mince my words when I say that Shadow DOM has been actively harmful to the web....
A trend I have seen recently is that people are making some extremely flawed arguments against React. And then, these same people hype up web components and their only argument is favour of Web Components is that “it’s the platform”, as if implying that Web Components can somehow replace React or a similar UI framework. One day I’m going to write...
Back in 2020, I wrote an article titled “Features CSS Needs” I wanted to revisit it since so much of it has already come true, and to update my list for 2023. A More Powerful calc # Support for dividing units has been part of the official specification for years now, yet no browser has implemented it. calc(100% / 100px) still doesn’t work. This...
Any mention of using Flow in the year 2023 causes strange reactions for web developers everywhere. Why would you do that!? The tradeoffs won’t make sense for everyone, but there are actually some very compelling reasons to choose Flow instead of Typescript. Let’s start with the things that Typescript is undeniably better at. Typescript has much...
While the work on Houdini continues, I think it makes sense to prioritise a few simple features that would make life much easier for developers trying to build the most common things we need on the web. I have carefully chosen the following features to fulfil two requirements: They enable new functionality that was previously impossible or very...
Disclaimers: I’m not trying to start a flame-war. Both Typescript and Flow are great. I’m not a Typescript expert so feel free to correct me on Twitter (@naman34) I’m assuming Typescript >2.0 which includes non-nullable types (because nullbale-types === ?) If you haven’t noticed, there are two popular ways of adding types to your Javascript code...
I’m primarily a Javascript developer. I’ve written servers in Node.js for years, made small and big front-end apps, (mostly in React.js, of course) and written plugins for Atom and Visual Studio Code. Yet, even after living and breathing Javascript for years now, I’ve never been quite content. I’ve always wanted something a little more...
Forget everything you know about Gulp. Welcome to Gulp 4. If you’re a front-end developer you surely have a build process in place. You maybe using Grunt, Gulp, Broccoli, NPM scripts etc. If everything works for you and you understand everything in your build process, you should stop reading now and focus your energy elsewhere. If, however,...