Week 11 of 2023

Weeklies are my notes of things not big enough for a blog post but worthy of being mentioned and linked to. Find all of my Weeklies at /weeklies.

• Future CSS: Anchor Positioning by Roman Komarov

  This week saw a bunch of new CSS stuff end up on my radar. The first one was this anchor positioning one by Roman Komarov. Chrome's Canary version has a couple of new features for CSS in testing. Anchor positioning allows the developer to define the absolute position of an element in relation to another element. Roman goes into the feature in-depth with examples and videos and analysis and it's a highly recommended read.

• An end to typographic widows on the web by Richard Rutter

  Another new CSS thing that's in Chrome's Canary is text-wrap: balance which provides a way to automatically balance the length of the lines in a multi-line text. For example by default, a two-line heading may have five words on the first line and one on the second, causing the heading to feel unbalanced. text-wrap: balance makes the headings more balanced.

• Build license management into your pipelines by Floor Drees

  Floor wrote a great piece on license management when using open source libraries in your projects and what to keep in mind when projects change their licenses midway through their life cycle.

• How to Do Code Reviews Like a Human by Michael Lynch

  Michael Lynch has a great 2-part article about code reviews. He writes about the social side of code reviews. There are a lot of different opinions about code reviews in general, mine is that they are great. Some people see them as a mechanism for a system that lacks trust but I personally see them more as a great way to share knowledge, to discuss decisions and to collectively improve the shared codebase. In this first part, Michael goes through 8 techniques that help make code reviews better and in the second part he focuses on avoiding ugly conflicts that can arise from a code review with 7 more techniques. If your team is doing code reviews, I recommend reading these and sharing them with your team for discussions.

• Don't Ask 'Why' in Code Review by Minna Captain

  Speaking of code reviews, I find this talk by Minna a great addition to your toolkit as you progress improving your team's code reviews. I'm cheating my system a bit since I didn't discover it this week but rather last year when it was recorded but I wanted to add it here as an added piece to accompany Michael's articles.

• Debugging a slow web app by Jesse Skinner

  I shared this great story in the aforementioned Syntax Error newsletter as this month's debugging story and I wanted to share it here as well since not everyone of you is a subscriber to the newsletter (yet!). Jesse ran into a situation where client complained of a slow app and I love the detailed step-by-step explanation that he offers of his journey figuring out where the problem was, how to fix it and what we can all learn from the incident.