Hello Reader,

I’m struggling to wrap my mind around how 2024 is almost over already!

Before we get into the main content of this one, a quick heads up that this is the last newsletter I’ll be sending this year.

I’ll be back in your inbox on January 5th with my annual year-in-review/goals-for-the-new-year email.

I have a lot of exciting things that I want to share with you for next year, but I’m going to hold off until that email for them… but I’ve got some big plans for 2025, I’m just hoping that I’m not being overly ambitious!

Instead of looking ahead, we can look back (a little bit) with what I was up to this week, and then a lot of links of fun things I've come across this week.

🙋‍♂️ What I’ve been up to this week

Turns out, I was up to a lot!

This position absolute mistake is ruining modals

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Modals have close buttons, and most of the time those buttons are positioned with position: absolute, and that can lead to an easily avoidable issue!

​The solution? Using floats!

There’s a number of comments on this video mentioning using Flexbox or Grid as potential solutions. Personally, for getting a button into a corner, I don’t really see why you’d want to use either one of those*.

It feels like some people avoid floats at all costs now.

They had a purpose, and this type of thing is basically what they were meant for (wrapping text around an element).

*there will always be situations where one of those might be the right thing, I’m talking about the large majority of cases.

The CSS is Awesome Game

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I was teamed up with Michelle Barker (you might know of her from her site CSS in Real Life), and we took on Miriam Suzanne and Stephanie Eckles.

I won’t give away which team won, but it was a very tight finish!

Smart Layout Patterns with Modern CSS

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Okay, so this isn’t something I did this week, but my talk from Smashing Conf NYC just became available on their YouTube channel!

Navigating ADHD as a developer

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Over on my second channel, Chris Ferdinandi joined me to talk about navigating ADHD as a developer.

Chris shares his personal journey with ADHD, including the impacts of it on his life and his career as a developer, and talks about the importance of diagnosis and practical strategies to managing it, along with a lot more.

He shares a bunch of resources, so even if you don't want to give it a listen, there are some great articles and things that you can find here.

If you’d prefer, you can get listen to the audio-only version of our chat here.

Shorts of the week

I’m going to be changing this section a little, because in 2025 there is a good chance I have extra shorts, so I’m probably going to just have them as a bullet list like this in those cases.

I’ve already planned out my regular weekly shorts for 2025, and plan to record all the ones for Q1 after I finish writing this newsletter.

I also plan to make Short form content anytime I come across something fun, whether it’s a useful tip, trick, or resource, so I’ll probably often have 2-3 a week… so I just think a bullet list will be better for… reasons 🤷 - this could change, we’ll see how it goes 😁.

• ​Improve your animations by adding weight to them​
• ​It’s time for some lavenderblush and peachpuff in your CSS​

🔗 Other awesome stuff around from the web

• ​Leet Heat - Speaking of gameshows, Learn with Jason has a new, very highly produced one called Leet Heat. Love the concept, and as usual with anything Jason does, I’m blown away by the production value. And he’s already said he’ll be stepping up the spiciness for future episodes 😊.
• ​Pure CSS Halftone Effect in 3 Declarations - I somehow missed this when it first came out, but a really great article by Ana Tudor here, not only showing how to do the effect, but more importantly (in my opinion) explaining how it all works.
• ​Stylish holidays! Creating a scroll-driven Christmas tree in CSS - A fun holiday themed CSS tutorial by Brecht De Ruyte. If you’d like to learn more about SVGs and scroll-driven animations, definitely give this one a read.
• ​Christmas Canon - even if you don't celebrate Christmas, you'll enjoy this.
• ​Two Typographic Tricks - You'll need to put your math hat on to really appreciate this article, where Donnie D'Amato looks at how to create a baseline grid using round(), and some complicated math to create dynamic letter spacing depending on the font size.

🎨 Fun with colors

Normally I don't have sections within the links part, but with so many fun, color related things, I felt like they could have their own part here!

• ​Sorted colors - If you didn’t watch the Short above on colors, this is the resource I was talking about, a fun color picker that gives you all the named colors based on whatever hue you’ve picked.
• ​ColorGuesser - After sharing Sorted Colors on Bluesky, I got a reply from fauxtrots about a CSS color guessing game that I might have spent too much time playing... (the advantage of being a content creator is you can turn time sucks into part of the job).
• ​CSS Colors Password Generator - The named CSS color values thread continued, with this password generator that creates passwords by combining four named color values.

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🏁

I hope you have a fantastic holiday season!

Until next year,
Kevin

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