Web Development Reading List #100

What’s happening in the industry? What important techniques have emerged recently? What about new case studies, insights, techniques and tools? Our dear friend Anselm Hannemann is keeping track of everything so you don’t have to. The result is a carefully collected list of articles that popped up over the last week and which might interest you. Starting from today, we are happy and honored to feature a bi-monthly web development reading list here on Smashing Magazine. Now it should be a bit easier to stay up to date. — Ed.

Welcome to the one hundredth edition of the Web Development Reading List and the first one to appear on Smashing Magazine. I am very happy to extend my audience and keep you up to date with what’s going on in the web development industry. If you have any feedback, please let me know in the comments or write me an email.

Further Reading on SmashingMag:

• Are We Thinking About Digital All Wrong?
• All You Need To Know About Customer Journey Mapping
• How To Make Yourself Redundant
• How To Spark A UX Revolution

News

• You can now test Microsoft’s new Edge browser in a virtual machine. Finally, a Windows 10 VM image is up on the testing website and you are able to natively test for compatibility.
• The link rel="preconnect" meta property is now supported by Chromium, and will soon be available in Chrome and Opera.
• The first feature-complete beta of PHP7 has been released and it is great to see the massive performance impovements, better error handling, 64-bit support and many more cool things you should check out if you are using PHP as your language of choice.
• Ember 2.0 is out. It’s less about new shiny features but much more about removing all the old cruft from the code without breaking older codebases. Very cool to read about their clever deprecation and release plan.
• Pointer Events have landed in Firefox Nightly. They have been part of Firefox Mobile for a long time but now desktop has support, too, leaving only WebKit browsers not supporting it.
• The WebKit project now has a roadmap/feature status page as well. This is great news as it suggests techniques that Apple might integrate into their OS X and iOS Safari browsers in near future. I am glad that social media pressure seems to work again and WebKit joins a more open process of development.

General

• The problem is not that we are moving too fast with the web platform but that we still lack ways of providing developers easy ways to do basic things. We’re focusing on the wrong stuff. And that is what we need to fix. Wise words by Nicolas Bevacqua.
• Aaron Gustafson, meanwhile, has summed up the quest for better interoperability instead of features.

Concepts And Design

• Petro Salema’s beyondtellerrand video is up and it’s worth watching: “Designing Interfaces That Think”. A good primer on user experience design and clever thought interfaces.
• Why we should take more time creating empty states in our applications. They are key to user happiness.

Tools

• An introduction to Git. If you haven’t used it yet or still don’t get the basics, this is a series worth reading. For example, learn the differences between git merge and rebase or how to deal with conflicts.
• Never, ever expose your Git repository on a public webserver. It will leak not only code but passwords, keys and more.
• Most of us use npm or Bower together with Grunt or Gulp nowadays. But for some projects the latter are often not necessary. Within your npm package.json it is possible to run scripts and complete basic tasks without the additional abstraction of Gulp or Grunt. Hans Christian Reinl shares how he approaches task automation in projects using some simple scripts with just npm.
• Hui Jing learned web languages three years ago. Now he is sharing why it’s important to know the basics of web development before you use a framework. The problem isn’t with the frameworks but often the lazy people using them.
• If you use Windows, you probably have a hard time with Node and npm. But now there is this little tool called npm-windows-upgrade that ensures your command line will find the new npm version right away.

Security/Privacy

• To use several newer browser APIs it is essential to have an HTTPS connection. ServiceWorkers, for example, require a TLS connection to work. Andrea Giammarchi shares how to set up a TLS certificate for your localhost.
• Windows 10 has been out a few weeks now and while it finally nails user experience, it introduces a couple of not so cool privacy issues you should be aware of, like the auto-backup of your private encryption key to OneDrive (you know that officials have access to Microsoft products), customized ad fingerprinting, and possible data disclosure. Take care if you upgrade.
• The LetsEncrypt initiative shared their new launch schedule with general availability in the week of November 16th this year. While it’s being pushed back a little, to me this is a good thing: more stability and probably a better product. I think the key to its success is that hosting companies are able to implement it seamlessly, which is going to be hard.
• Mark McDonnell shares his research on what the security basics of the web mean. He explains PGP, SSL, SSH, certificates, and the general purpose of public and private key methods.

Web Performance

• DNS: the heart of the internet. If you never really understood how DNS works internally to resolve a domain name, you should be entertained by these comic strips on how DNS works.