profile

Hi! I'm Kevin

Weekly newsletter, where I talk about tangentially-related front-end development topics and share what I've been up to in the last week, plus any cool/fun/interesting/useful links I come across as well.

Featured Post

Glassy UIs, CSS Battles, and more

View this email in your browser (or share it with a friend!) Hello Reader, Lots of content this week… meaning I was busier than usual and we’re skipping the general musings for this week! 🙋♂️ What I’ve been up to this week Create this trendy blurry glass effect with CSS I didn’t plan for this to coincide with Apple’s new Liquid Glass UI, but I guess the timing was good! It’s not the exact same thing as what Apple’s Liquid Glass, but with the hot mess it is in terms of accessibility, that...

View this email in your browser (or share it with a friend!) PRE-S: The latest State of CSS survey is now open! I’ll be doing a live stream this upcoming Thursday or Friday, going through it myself, but you might as well jump in first! The more people who take this, the more representative it is, and the browsers use the data from these to know what features need improving and what is missing, so it is worth the time to take! Hello Reader, I’ve been getting a lot of comments lately asking...

View this email in your browser (or share it with a friend!) Hello Reader, Ethan Marcotte first coined the term Responsive Design in an article for A List Apart back in 2010. Yup, it’s been 15 years. As the name implies, Responsive Design involves writing CSS that allows the layout to respond to how a user is consuming the content, with “Fluid grids, flexible images, and media queries [being] the three technical ingredients for responsive web design.” For a long time, media queries (@media)...

View this email in your browser (or share it with a friend!) Hello Reader, I got this comment on a video that I posted this week: For such a fundamental concept, you'd think it would be something that's talked about more, but it really isn't talked about enough. Of course, that's why I made this video! I only really started thinking about this more recently, because for some reason, it was one of the things I sort of never thought too much about. It might seem strange, but for me, it was...

View this email in your browser (or share it with a friend!) Hello Reader, One big problem with features like Grid and Flexbox (and maybe soon Masonry) is that we can move elements around. This might sound like a feature, but in reality, it can cause many issues because even something as simple as flex-direction: row reverse can muck with tab order. There are times where it can potentially be a good idea to re-order things with CSS (say, when you want an image above a title of a card, but in...

CSS Hell

View this email in your browser (or share it with a friend!) Very quickly, before we get into the topics of this week's newsletter, the State of Devs survey is going to be closing shortly. The survey is for devs, but asks about who we are, rather than what we know. As with all the "State of..." surveys, the more people who take it, the more representative the results are, so if you have a few minutes, it'd be great if you could take the time to take it. Hello Reader, So, Figma had a big event...

View this email in your browser (or share it with a friend!) Hello Reader, Have you ever found yourself staring at some CSS that you were sure should work, but it wasn’t doing what you wanted? If so, welcome to the club 😂. These days, for me, it’s less about not understanding a specific behavior and more about making dumb mistakes, but there are times when it still catches me off guard as well. At this stage, most of the time I can reason my way out of the problem I’m facing, but with years...

View this email in your browser (or share it with a friend!) Hello Reader, I was going to bury this part lower down, but I think the topic of AI and it’s impact on development is very front-of-mind these days, so I’ve kept it up here at the top. Josh Comeau recently put out an article titled The Post-Developer Era. A listener on my second channel asked for more content where I share my thoughts on articles and news, and Josh's piece seemed like the perfect opportunity to try this approach!...

View this email in your browser (or share it with a friend!) PRE-S: Sending this week’s newsletter out early this week, which I’ll talk about more of why a little further down. Hello Reader, I’m so curious about how some of the new CSS features that are coming out now are going to impact how we author our stylesheets in the years to come. I think the one that might have the biggest singular impact might be the advanced attr() function, which finally allows us to use the values of data...

View this email in your browser (or share it with a friend!) Hello Reader, I have two sons, who are now 10 and 13 years old now (time flies!). Raising them is surprisingly a lot like writing CSS, where something works when you try it in one situation, only to be frustrated when you try it again somewhere else and it no longer works the same. Like, I can get one of my kids to clean their room, including doing a great job dusting it and wiping everything down with just a small amount of...