Snippets

There are plenty of stories floating around about how some organization improved performance and suddenly saw an influx of traffic from places they hadn’t expected. This is why. We build an experience that is completely [unusable] for them, and is completely invisible to our data. We create, what Kat Holmes calls, a “mismatch”. So we look at the data and think, “Well, we don’t get any of those low-end Android devices so I guess we don’t have to worry about that.” A self-fulfilling prophecy.

I’m a big advocate for ensuring you have robust performance monitoring in place. But just as important as analyzing what’s in the data, is considering what’s not in the data, and why that might be.

Let me show you a way I recently discovered to center a bunch of elements around what I call the pivot. I promise you that funky HTML is out of the question and you won’t need to know any bleeding-edge CSS to get the job done.

[…]

[H]ere’s a sample of the HTML that drives this puzzle:

Here’s a generalized version of the [styles]. As you can see, it’s just 15 lines of simple CSS:

Can I use… is an invaluable resource that we all (hopefully) use on a regular basis, but what if you have an existing codebase that you want to evaluate for browser support? You could go through it manually, but that could be a lot of work. Thankfully, someone has put together an app and a Node.js module that can crawl your CSS and list what will break in what browser.

Did you know that the PNG image format can contain arbitrary data - such as a ZIP file - in its metadata? I sure didn’t. Turns out you can store a whole static site in a PNG file. 😮

Despite being one of the three founders, I was never an owner of Clearleft.

[…]

But now, after fifteen years, I am also an owner of Clearleft.

So is Trys. And Cassie. And Benjamin. And everyone else at Clearleft.

Clearleft is now owned by an employee ownership trust. This isn’t like owning shares in a company—a common Silicon Valley honeypot. This is literally owning the company. Shares are transferable—this isn’t. As long as I’m an employee at Clearleft, I’m a part owner.

On a day-to-day basis, none of this makes much difference. Everyone continues to do great work, the same as before. The difference is in what happens to any profit produced as a result of that work. The owners decide what to do with that profit. The owners are us.

In most companies you’ve got a tension between a board representing the stakeholders and a union representing the workers. In the case of an employee ownership trust, the interests are one and the same. The stakeholders are the workers.

Here are the CSS ingredients we used for a media-query-less card component:

• The clamp() function helps resolve a “preferred” vs. “minimum” vs. “maximum” value.
• The flex-basis property with a negative value decides when the layout breaks into multiple lines.
• The flex-grow property is used as a unit value for proportional growth.
• The vw unit helps with responsive typography.
• The  object-fit property provides finer responsiveness for the card image, as it allows us to alter the dimensions of the image without distorting it.

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