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as Article In the past few days I’ve been analysing a couple of web apps and websites to check if tools can really help identify whether a website is accessible. I’ve tested Lighthouse, Claude, ARCToolkit, axe DevTools and did a quick manual check myself (<3mins) as comparison. The conclusion: They can be helpful but are not complete and I was almost always more reliable and significantly faster … -
as Article I recently started to write about why freelancers are a vital part of companies to be successful and effective. Here are some insights on how it feels to be a freelancer in the web development industry.Change, change, change = experience. One of the most important factors to hire a freelancer as a company is to get experience from real world scenarios. As a freelancer changing my projects over …Inside being a freelancer in web development
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as Note Today I read a LinkedIn post by Dan Neciu about XSS still being a real-world problem. That’s one perfect case to show why you either need to: check what AI generates for you and know how to review code properly yourself (you’re at least senior-level then) have real senior developers in your company who actually know about such problems and detect or directly avoid them have automated checks for …On seniority and understanding the Web vs. knowing how to use Frameworks
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as Article Freelancers are often no great marketing people. In a call with my friend Tobias, we realized we've been part of the problem. We found out one of the reasons why freelancers are challenged more and more to get jobs over the past years: We failed to share the value of Freelancers to our customers. The employee vs. the freelancer There’s a fundamental difference between most employees in a company …The Secret Value of Freelancers for Companies
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as Note Within CSS you now can do so many things that were the subject for using a pre- and postprocessor like Sass, Less or PostCSS. The latter is still useful in many cases today but the former are less and less important for these reasons: People use some sort of CSS-in-JavaScript anyways and what they write (not produce!) is not CSS anymore 😏 Nesting is natively available in CSS ✅ BEM and similar …4 Reasons to stop using CSS Preprocessors
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as Note ✈️ I rarely find good analogies but this one I think is spot on: The Autopilot Paradox Most of the time, commercial planes fly themselves. Autopilot can handle take-off, cruising, and even landing. But would you board a plane if told there were no pilots in the cockpit? Probably not. Because a pilot’s job isn’t just to move a joystick or push buttons. Their mission is to take responsibility when …Have your experts as a backup in the new AI world
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as Note I do like code reviews. If my customer and teams let me spend time on it, I’m able to see issues in automation workflows, code quality and knowledge gaps in the teams or workflow issues in general. You can quickly see in code reviews if automated checks catched typos, code style or linting issues. You can find out the code quality level in the team and if your team members have equal knowledge or …Code Reviews to uncover team improvements
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as Article As a freelancer helping larger companies achieve their goals, I’ve gained a lot of insights into how people work. And I know many people — including me — have said this for over a decade but it bears repeating: We have fantastic JavaScript (TypeScript included) developers who can build impressive solutions to complex problems. But there are still very few frontend developers today who truly know …Know your HTML (yes, TSX included)
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as Article There are countless articles why developers should not focus on Frameworks too much and instead learn to understand the underlying languages. But I think rarely we can find good reasons except that Frameworks come and go. To me, the main reason is different: You won’t be a master at frontend development if you don’t understand underlying mechanisms of a language. A usual stack today is React …Knowing CSS is mastery to Frontend Development
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as Note Developers are not paid to write code. People get hired to make wise, solid and effective decisions. It sets a long-lasting relationship with the company, the product, team members, or even customers. We are part of what we build: Effective solutions or just some product. For effective solutions, we need to discuss in the team, bring up problems and ideas, verify them and find creative ways to …What makes a great person at work (and in life)
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as Note A good team is formed of trust, willingness to improve and agility to adapt plans and try out new things: For a long time I believed that a strong team is made of stars — extraordinary world-class individuals who can generate and execute ideas at a level no one else can. These days, I feel that a strong team is the one that feels more like a close family than a constellation of stars. A family …What makes a great team
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as Article As humans we think in silos. Scrum Masters often don’t know what an Engineering Manager is, Engineering Managers don’t care about Scrum Masters. But both have their own focus, their very own strengths to create a resilient team. See how important it is to stay open minded enough to see the benefits of other roles, no matter the job title. The concepts of a Scrum Master and an Engineering Manager …Engineering Managers, Scrum Masters & Teams
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as Note The fun part of being someone with two jobs in completely different areas. Nearly all of the algorithms of these fancy platforms backed with billions of money don’t work. LinkedIn for example is smart enough to realize both of my work categories (web development, agriculture/gardening) but fails to provide a proper feed, a mixture of network recommendations, etc. The world cannot be put in one …I have two jobs, and all the social algorithms fail
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as Note Today I learned that the CSS :empty selector is implemented to look for child content (think of innerText/innerHTML). This means it reports empty for filled form elements which are self-closing elements. Findings :empty reports empty for all form input elements because they have their values as attributes, not as inner content :empty works for <textarea> elements depending on how they’re …[TIL] CSS :empty isn’t applicable on form fields
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as Note Today I learned that the CSS readonly attribute for form fields does only work with input modes that allow variable user input that’s not “type-safe”: The attribute is not supported or relevant to <select> or <input> types that are already not mutable, such as checkbox and radio or cannot, by definition, start with a value, such as the file input type. range and color, as both have default …[TIL] CSS :readonly is not for select fields
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as Article We all know these endless lines of CSS selectors before the real CSS rules start in the stylesheet. And while it’s not entirely new anymore, I’ve not seen it much in the wild: The usage of the universal :where() selector. So we’re coming from the following example where I want to style elements in an text article different to how the same elements are styled globally on the site. Usually you …CSS :where() to replace complex multi-selectors
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as Article We all know these endless lines of CSS selectors before the real CSS rules start in the stylesheet. And while it’s not entirely new anymore, I’ve not seen it much in the wild: The usage of the universal :where() selector. So we’re coming from the following example where I want to style elements in an text article different to how the same elements are styled globally on the site. Usually you …CSS :where() to replace complex multi-selectors
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as Article Recently, I see a few articles and people talking about “too much CSS”. Are we at the point where we will have »CSS Engineer« or »CSS Developer« positions on the job market? It would make sense and clarify things compared to »Frontend Engineer«. There are 548 properties in the CSS spec. 🤯 (…) How can we practically learn when and how to use all this? —Cory House on Twitter Sacha Greif’s article …Is »CSS Engineer« now a job position?
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as Note When I started web development I was 12 years old. It was back in 2001, and we used HTML4 and basic CSS. The term cyber was a thing, but I never found it to be the proper term for what we are talking about: The internet, a virtual network platform for human beings. After all these years the term »cyber« is still a thing. It still sounds wrong to me personally. Whenever I read this word it …Cyber is still there
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as Note Since my subscriber list grew over two thousand people for WDRL I’m self-hosting my newsletter service instead of using a SaaS solution. But that also means a lot of work, too. Things you need to take care of when self-hosting: Choose the best newsletter software for the project Choose a service provider for actually sending the emails (e.g. AWS SES or SendGrid) Keep it up to date Choose a good …Notes on self-hosting newsletters
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