March 2, 2017 — Douglas Crockford famously declared browsers to be “the most hostile software engineering environment imaginable,” and that wasn’t hyperbole. Ensuring that our websites work across a myriad of different devices, screen sizes and browsers our users depend on … Read More…

February 21, 2017 — JavaScript module bundling has been around for a while. RequireJS had its first commits in 2009, then Browserify made its debut, and since then several other bundlers have spawned across the Internet. Among that group, webpack has jumped out as one of the best. If you’re not … Read More…

February 14, 2017 — I’ve been thinking a lot about speech for the last few years. In fact, it’s been a major focus in several of my talks of late, including my well-received Smashing Conference talk “Designing the Conversation.” As such, I’ve been keenly interested in the development of the Web … Read More…

February 7, 2017 — As JavaScript developers, we often forget that not everyone has the same knowledge as us. It’s called the curse of knowledge: When we’re an expert on something, we cannot remember how confused we felt as newbies. We overestimate what people will find easy. Therefore, we … Read More…

January 26, 2017 — When the Russian ruble’s exchange rate slumped two years ago, it drove us to think of cutting hardware and hosting costs for the Mail.Ru email service. First, we had to take a look at what email consists of. Indexes and bodies account for only 15% of the storage size, … Read More…

January 24, 2017 — Email is one of the best ways to engage with your users, especially during the holiday season. However, if you want to stand out, no matter how beautiful your emails are, you need to make sure they render correctly in your reader’s inbox, regardless of what email … Read More…

January 19, 2017 — First of all, let’s define some vocabulary. “Internationalization” is a long word, and there are at least two widely used abbreviations: “intl,” “i18n”. “Localization” can be shortened to “l10n”. … Read More…

January 16, 2017 — The rise of JavaScript frameworks such as React, Ember and recently Angular 2, the effort of the W3C to standardize a web-native component system, pattern libraries and style guides being considered the “right way” to build web applications, and many other things … Read More…

January 10, 2017 — HTML email: Two words that, when combined, brings tears to a developer’s eyes. If you’re a web developer, it’s inevitable that coding an email will be a task that gets dropped in your lap at some time in your career, whether you like it or not. Coding HTML … Read More…