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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

CSS requires a different mindset

View this email in your browser (or share it with a friend!) Hello Reader, Last week, I talked about how CSS is like a strange puzzle. Like a regular puzzle, when we write CSS, we need to figure out how to fit all the pieces together properly. But it’s made more complicated because each piece can change it’s size and position. Despite that, we still need everything to fit together. There are so many variables at play at any given time that it sometimes feels like we’re just hoping for the...

View this email in your browser (or share it with a friend!) Hello Reader, A few weeks ago, my dad and my 10-year-old son were working on a puzzle together. My dad mentioned that it was a pretty hard puzzle for a kid, and he was impressed with my son's patience with it (he isn’t always the most patient type 😆). The reason I bring this up at all is because one of the reasons that I often tell people I like CSS is because it’s like a puzzle. Just like with a real puzzle, where you do have a...

Flexbox Simplified

View this email in your browser (or share it with a friend!) Hello Reader, Another shorter email than usual this week. We’ll be back to the regular ones starting next week 🙂. 🙋♂️ What I’ve been up to this week Create a fun, quick text flip effect Not sure about the name and thumbnail that I made for this one, as the text doesn’t flip, so much as, slide in and out. I don’t know what else to call this effect, or how to make a good thumbnail to illustrate what's going on, so this is it 😆. I took...

View this email in your browser (or share it with a friend!) Hello Reader, You may have noticed that I didn’t send out an email last week. This week’s email is going to be a short one as well. I have some personal matters that I’m taking care of at the moment, so I may miss sending one out next week as well; we'll have to see, but things will be back to normal here in another week or two. And because this section is shorter than normal, an apology to everyone who voted for the musings at the...

Kevin, with a disgusted look on his face and he looks at code with a bunch of media queries in it for redefining how many columns a grid has

View this email in your browser (or share it with a friend!) Hello Reader, My newsletter has evolved over the last few years to have a few distinct sections it and it got me thinking… what is it that keeps people signed up for my newsletter? Luckily, I have a way to find out! So, what part of this newsletter gets you opening them each week? What is your favorite part of my newsletter? The first part where I ramble about stuff What I've been up to this week Other awesome links from around the...

Hey! Congrats on yoru success with General Musings With Kevin Powell! You've already released more episodes than most podcasters ever do, which is amazing! I'd love to support your show by listening; can you send me a link to one of your recent favorite e

View this email in your browser (or share it with a friend!) Hello Reader, As you might expect, I get a lot of emails. A large majority of them are from people who follow me, and fall into a few general categories: Replies to something I mention in a newsletter. Asking a question or looking for guidance. People simply letting me know they appreciate what I do. I like all of those emails, even if I have a hard time keeping up with them and don’t always have a chance to reply to everyone. Then,...

What if you couldn't use your keyboard tomorrow?

View this email in your browser (or share it with a friend!) Hello Reader, Today's newsletter is a bit of a different format. First up is a video I put out this week because I think it's one of the most important videos I've ever put on my channel. That's followed up by a story of how I got nerd-sniped by a perfectly fine solution to a problem I wanted to try and improve on, before we get back into the regular format. What if you suddenly couldn't type anymore? Salma Alam-Naylor, who you...

Meme of a developer sitting in front of a computer with a puzzled look on their face, and the text "it doesn't work, why?". Then, the same picture is directly under that, but with the text "it works, why?"

View this email in your browser (or share it with a friend!) Hello Reader, You write a couple of lines of code, hit save and... nothing happens. You check for typos and everything looks fine. You open your dev tools and don't see anything that seems wrong. Except, something is wrong because it isn't working!!! Nothing is more frustrating than when something won't work, and you have no idea what the problem is. Though, sometimes, the opposite is true, where you get something working and have...

So many new CSS features!

View this email in your browser (or share it with a friend!) Hello Reader, Whenever I mention new CSS features on my channel, there are always comments from people complaining that the last thing we need is more CSS features. They argue that CSS is already complicated enough and that adding more to an imperfect language doesn’t help—it just complicates things further. I get where they’re coming from, but I think this view misses some important issues. The Reality of CSS as an Evolving...

Building a dark theme for a website, live!

View this email in your browser (or share it with a friend!) Hello Reader, Looking back over the last 12-months or so, I’ve done so many things that I literally never dreamed that I’d have the opportunity to do. Namely, I’m thinking of: talking at CSS Day talking at Smashing Conf New York and having a course on Frontend Masters. And, while it’s incredible—and still a little unbelievable—to look back at those things, it also now, even after they’ve all happened successfully, they all still...