I’m not a person who creates CSS “art” (as in drawings), but I do like messing about with CSS gradients and seeing what comes up. I think the first time I became aware that you could create some pretty cool effects with CSS gradients was Lea Verou’s CSS3 Patterns Gallery.
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Recently I wrote about the COP28 climate summit’s website, which featured a low-carbon toggle that did precisely nothing. The post captured the interest of a few people, and I was contacted by ABC News Australia, who published a story on it, inviting me and web sustainability consultant Fershad Irani to comment.
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Today I learned from Amy Hupe that November is National Blog Posting Month, or #NaBloPoMo, if you will. I’ve always liked the idea of posting one thing a day (blog post, tip, sketch, photo, whatever), even while secretly thinking that people who commit to that must have a few screws loose. There’s a sense of achievement that comes from forcing myself to generate some sort of creative output regularly though.
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This past year I’ve been thinking a lot about meaningful work, trying to square my own work as a web developer with my personal values and the impact I want to have on the world.
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It’s important to reflect on the environmental impact of our work and do what we can to reduce it. Don’t know where to start? This article for MDN introduces some ways in which developers can improve the efficiency of the website we build and take steps to make our work more sustainable.
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You might notice on some websites you visit that external links display a little icon next to them. This is super helpful for users, as it lets them know that the link is going to take them somewhere off-site.
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Update (28th October 2023): Since this post was published the COP28 website has undergone some changes. Many of the images are now better optimised, and the low-carbon toggle actually prevents them from loading. Much more could be done to optimise the site, however, and many of the points still stand.
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The Sustainable Web Design Community Group has just launched a draft set of guidelines for designing and developing sustainable web applications. Covering design, UX, front and back end development, and business strategies, these guidelines have been months in the making, with contributions from experts and breakout groups from across the industry.
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When we talk about the concept of reactivity in Javascript, we generally mean a variable in our code responding to an event or change in state somewhere else in our code. Perhaps we need a button to respond to a 'click' event, or maybe we need to update the DOM in response to new data. The Vue docs have a great explanation of reactivity.
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Chris Brandrick at Frontend Focus asked me to share five tools, libraries or packages that I love for the latest issue of the newsletter. It was hard to narrow it down to just five! So I thought I’d share the full long-list with you here, in no particular order.
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An animation is about more than just moving things from one place to another. How something moves (or changes in some way) is just as important for conveying a sense of purpose.
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It’s been great to see digital sustainability become more of a mainstream topic in recent months. With most of Europe baking in a deadly heatwave with unprecedated temperature, the need for action on climate change is more pressing than ever. If you’re not sure what action you, as a developer, can take, my talk from All Day Hey conference provides some facts, figures and starting points for thinking about sustainability in the context of web development.
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