Back to News Working in tech and design requires constantly keeping up with the latest techniques, tools, technologies, and industry news. Here are a few of the things our team found useful over the last week.
News
GitHub is now free for all teams
github.blog
Great news for those early stage startups and small organizations that don’t need all the bells and whistles. Also great to see that pricing for teams like ours will be reduced from $9 per member to only $4! Thanks, Microsoft!
— Mark
Design
McDonald’s and other brands are making ‘social distancing’ logos
edition.cnn.com
It’s quite interesting to see how brands are modifying their logos to represent social distancing.
— Mark
Pointers (iPadOS) – Apple human interface guidelines
developer.apple.com
With the exciting addition of first-class mouse support on iOS, it’s important for interface designers to understand how to use them effectively. A good read for anyone with an interest in UX design.
— Mark
Seven rules for perfect Japanese typography
aqworks.com
As a designer, it is an ongoing challenge to perfectly refine a Japanese website design using Japanese typography, especially when working together with Latin typefaces. This article outlines some of the characteristics of Japanese type, such as differences in line height, character density, font weight to name a few, and provides easy to change adjustments to make the design feel more harmonious and high quality. Not only has this helped to design better multi-lingual websites, it also helped making key decisions for CSS styling during development!
— Adam P
Tech
Announcing React Native 0.62 with Flipper
reactnative.dev
Flipper is now supported by default, which should be very useful to help track down those pesky bugs and require a few less visits to Xcode or Android studio. I’m excited to see how the plugin support grows in the future.
— Mark
GitHub protips: tips, tricks, hacks, and secrets from Lee Reilly
github.blog
While I knew a lot of these, there were a few that I didn’t, including number 4 which is is fantastic! Definitely work a look for anyone who uses Github.
— Mark
CSS-Tricks
css-tricks.com
CSS-Tricks tackles many real world challenges and possibilities with styling on web in the most innovative way possible. I love reading their articles as it is a great hub to catch up on CSS standards, trends, browser compatibility and extremes you could take to apply beautiful designs and animations on the web. It’s a great list of articles to refer to while working on front-end styling or even while designing for the web to see what’s possible. A few recent articles that were helpful to read: Gulp for WordPress: Creating the Tasks, Browser Compatibility for CSS Grid Layouts with Simple Sass Mixins, and The trick to viewport units on mobile.
— Adam P
Domain driven design
fsharpforfunandprofit.com
I really enjoyed Scott Wlaschin’s presentation because it not only showed concrete examples of Domain Driven Design, it also introduced me to a new language and showcased some of the advantages of functional programming. Wlaschin has his own popular blog F# for fun and profit and has released a highly rated book Domain Modeling Made Functional which shows how to create an ordering system using Domain Driven Design concepts and the F# language. As far as I know this is the only book which shows concrete examples on DDD in a full project so even if you don’t use F# it could have many useful takeaways.
— Adam A
Flutter for React Native developers
flutter.dev
Alongside the accompanying guides for those coming from iOS, Android, and frontend web, this is a very nice introduction to how programming with Flutter differs from the languages, frameworks and patterns we’re used to.
— Mark
KotlinConf 2019: I Walk The Line by Ellen Shapiro
youtube.com
I came across this video while conducting research for an article. While it’s not about React Native specifically, it contains some very nicely worded insights into some of the issues surrounding supporting cross-platform apps for iOS and Android. Worth a watch for anyone in the mobile tech industry.
— Mark
Lazy-loading images used to be hard, but with loading=”lazy”, it’s now super-simple
mailchi.mp
Speedshop is a great resource for tips on improving performance in general and Rails performance in particular. Their latest newsletter article concerns a new-ish image attribute for lazy loading supported in the latest versions of Chrome and Firefox. I’ll definitely be giving this one a try in my own projects.
— Ian
Learn you a Haskell for great good!
learnyouahaskell.com
If you want to try functional programming you have to decide which language to use. Haskell is the most famous functional language but to many it looks like an intimidating language. Fortunately, there is a book which dispels this notion. Learn You a Haskell for Great Good! is a beginners introduction to Haskell and it is written in easy to understand prose and beautifully illustrated. Not at all academic like. It has over 500 reviews on Amazon but you can read the book for free on its web page.
— Adam A
Ruby on Rails code audits: 8 steps to review your app
blog.planetargon.com
Robby Russell’s article is a nice list of low-hanging fruit to keep in mind when developing and maintaining a Rails app. It could also be an excellent starting place when taking over a crusty app and bringing it up to snuff.
— Ian