Monthly Digest - January 2019

Hello everybody! 👋

The last month was for me a "take a break" month, and I'll start my next job adventure in February. I can't wait and I had a lot of time to read, work on side projects and sharpen my design skills.

So let's dive into my favorite content of January!

CSS influences semantics in particular screen readers

Certain things in the Accessibility sphere still surprise me. Sara Soueidan shared that list-style: none removes semantics for VoiceOver users. Short, simple, and also... WAT?

The internet is a fu**ed up place

If you're a Frontend Developer, you probably know Chris Coyier from CSS-Tricks. He shared his frustrating experience with YouTube republisher channels. There are channels out there waiting for us to publish high-quality content. One is allowed to republish and redistribute videos under a CC license. These channels use this fact to republish the videos. They very often remove credit and hide the origin of the content to steal traffic.

It goes even so far that the copies rank higher than the originals on Google later. If you publish content on YouTube, make sure to evaluate the license before!

The hr element is more than a horizontal line

Did you know that the hr element actual has a semantical meaning? I didn't.

background-clip is configurable for every background gradient separately

I was snooping around in the CSS-Tricks redesign last month – it looks lovely in my opinion. A useful fact about background gradients caught my attention. It turns out you can use the background-clip property in the shorthand background declaration. This means that you can set backgrounds for the different box-models (content-box, padding-box, border-box) of an element easily!

color-adjust trumps user agent setting about background printing

Luckily, I had to deal with printing websites only once in my career so far. This month I learned that the CSS property color-adjust can influence how things are printed to, e.g. save paint.

Anne Helen Petersen wrote a massive (it's very long) piece on the "generation burnout". "How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation" describes a generation, that is always under pressure. A generation that always has something urgent to do. A generation that aims to be successful and to have stellar careers. Jep, we're talking about my generation – people around their thirties.

Surpringly, the same generation of young adults than struggles to do things like taking a break, reading a book or bringing stuff to the post office.

What can I say? I recognized myself not only once in this article.

The article with the catchy title "Laziness does not exist" shares thoughts and insights into university students that appear to be lazy. The psychology professor Devon Price includes many examples of people that show "bad behavior".

The article encourages us to have a look behind the curtain of everybody we meet. People don't want to fail intentionally. There is always a reason for specific behavior. We should all try to understand what's going on in the lives of the humans we meet before judging them.

If a person’s behavior doesn’t make sense to you, it is because you are missing a part of their context. It’s that simple.

Anna Migas gave an excellent talk about web performance at the performance.now conference. The talk "Debugging UI performance issues" includes lots of tips and tricks on how to build UIs that feel fast and snappy!

You may have noticed that I'm into women singing over soft piano tunes. Tara Nome Doyle from Berlin Kreuzberg appeared in my Spotify "Discover weekly" with her slow but powerful song "Down with you". It made me stop working and listening instead this month!

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And that's it for the beginning of February. Talk to you in one month! 👋