October 1, 2021

🧶 ICYMI #23: October 1, 2021

Howdy y'all,

Happy 👻 spooky season 🎃. 'Tis the most wonderful time of the year. I'd be gleefully wearing a hoodie, were I not in Texas.

✏️ Writes

• How SPA architectures affect Core Web Vitals (Philip Walton, Yoav Weiss) - How are Core Web Vitals measured in a single-page application (SPA)?
• Chrome DevTools Console Drawer (Jon Kuperman) - A nice short write-up on six cool features hiding in Chrome Dev Tools.
• The Product-Minded Engineer (Gergely Orosz) - Defining a "product-minded engineer". I've been working on the Growth team at Netlify for nearly a year now, and a lot of this resonated with my day-to-day. I had always considered it to be a "small team" phenomenon -- I don't see how to not be product-minded (as described in this post) in a small team.

🔨 Projects / Courses

• Can Include - A Glitch project that helps you understand which tag you can include in another, based on the WHATWG HTML spec.
• Accessible Palette - How do you develop color palettes with consistent perceived lightness of colors? Accessible Palette is an app for building color systems with consistent lightness and predictable contrast ratios across color levels. Here's a nice post about it with more.
• CSS for JavaScript Developers - The CSS for JS Devs course is officially launched! I participated in early access in the spring, and the course in incredible -- whether you're new to CSS or an expert, or somewhere in between.

💬 Tweets

https://twitter.com/JenMsft/status/1442493529381507072?s=20

https://twitter.com/glanderco/status/1442522435375489024?s=20

https://twitter.com/dan_abramov/status/1443386807798874117?s=20

🌵 Personal

• On Tuesday, the gunman who murdered five people at the Capital Gazette newspaper in 2018 was sentenced to more than five life sentences without the possibility of parole. Every mass shooting is a horrifying tragedy, but this one is particularly close to my heart. A close friend of mine worked at the Capital Gazette years ago (and was not there at the time of the shooting). I remember having a conversation with her back then about someone who was a valued mentor to her -- one of the people who later died in the shooting. The sentencing will never bring back those who were lost, or eliminate the trauma for everyone touched by the shooting, but I hope it gives them a measure of justice and closure.
• A Profession is Not a Personality (Arthur C. Brooks) - As the title says, "a profession is not a personality". This happens everywhere, but especially when I lived in DC, "what do you do?" was always the second question after "what's your name?" I don't know about you, but I find it so easy to default to, and it takes conscious exercise to avoid -- in my mind -- reducing myself and my worth to my job and productivity.

Be well, and have a nice weekend,

Amberley