Paradigms for Organizing your CSS in 2021
I recently attended “An Event Apart” a conference about the latest in design, UX, and development, and a talk by Nicole Sullivan inspired me to look deeper into CSS structure and some of the prevailing paradigms. The goal of this blog post is to share the latest in CSS structure and organization paradigms with you, and hopefully give you a high-level explanation of how they can work together or independently to help you level-up your CSS.
The paradigms that I want to unravel in this post are the following:
- SMACSS
- OOCSS
- BEM
And why should you implement one on your website?
CSP is one of your first lines of defense against malicious actors on the internet. What a content security policy allows you to do, fundamentally, is to to specify what addresses you want to allow your website to load scripts and other resources from. It looks something like this:
To set it you will either add the above line (configured to your liking) to the header section of every page on your website, or configure your server to do the same thing for you. …
An Overview of Building a chatbot on AWS and the Tools Required
What is Amazon Lex? Lex is a framework built by Amazon that helps you build, configure and deploy chat-based applications very quickly.
You can think of Lex as a custom REST API application running on a shared Amazon server, that has a simple yet secure set of instructions for interacting with a client application or any other AWS services. Using Amazons definition, Lex is a “Service for building conversational interfaces into any application using voice and text”.
AWS has a very specific definition of “service” inside their own ecosystem, which is essentially any process that will consume server resources on…
A fundamental cloud computing exam
This is my study guide for the Azure 900. I hope that this will help some aspiring developers and techies to get a firmer grasp over these concepts and land your cert. The guide exactly follows the structure of the Microsoft Learning Online Courses, updated in 2021.
Part 1) Cloud Concepts
This part contains general knowledge about cloud computing e.g. what are the benefits of cloud, the differences types of cloud service offering, and the differences in cloud deployment models.
Technological benefits of cloud:
High Availability — The major cloud providers (Azure, AWS, GCP) have multiple data centers spread around throughout the world. Data and code stored in…
How to reroute users to a public login page when they try to access protected routes.
Background
React-Router is the go-to standard for routing with react. it allows you to specify which components you want to render for each url in the application, and makes sure that your app will rerender when the user navigates to a new page. If you haven’t been exposed to React-Router I would recommend starting with the basics here.
The fundamental core of react-routers functionality is made clear when you look at the <Route> component provided by the package:
import Home from './components/Home.js'<Route path="/" component={Home} />// Or this will render the same thing
<Route path="/"/> <Home /> </Route>
When the…
The ‘box shadow’ property applies a shadow with the parameters you specify to the box model container that matches the selector that you have written in CSS. You can play with the selector here.
The ‘text shadow’ property applies a shadow to all of the text nodes within the div that matches your css selector. You can play with the selector here.
Where and when variables will be accessible in your code.
Scoping is important because we want to as much as possible follow the Principle of Least Privilege when writing programs — that is, if you don’t need to reveal your variable to the rest of your program, then keep its scope isolated. This important for many reasons, including reducing the chance of creating bugs/side effects, and increasing the efficiency of garbage collecting of variables while your program is running.
There are many articles out there on this topic so I wanted to really quickly break it down in a way that makes sense to me in 2020 (because things do…
Using a small extension to the Github CLI called Hub.
Three steps and you are off and running.
- Download Homebrew for Mac OS
- Download Hub for Github
- Run the script below (copy and paste into your terminal of choice)
Why
If you are like me, you like to track all your personal projects and files in source control. If you are in a workflow where you need to create new repos frequently it’s kind of a pain to have to keep switching in and out of command line and the git website.
What it does
The script above will take the following steps for you:
- Create the local git repo
- Create the remote Git Repo
- Connect the two repos
- Commit your…
How hard is it to write UI components without a front end framework? Let’s find out by writing a simple one in Vanilla JS.
There’s so much hype these days around front-end frameworks (React, Angular, Vue) that I thought I would stop and think about what the problem is that these frameworks are solving and what they are useful for.
As an experiment, I’m going to create a simple component-based feature using nothing but browser-supported Javacript (Sorry Internet Explorer). …
Share your re-useable code publicly or privately. Making an NPM Module is useful to understand whether you are coding in a corporate environment or just for fun.
If you don’t know what NPM or an NPM Module is, you can view the description in the Node.js documentation, watch this intro video, or this more detailed video by the creator of NPM at JSConf.
In this blog post I’ll be going over how to make a super simple npm module — explaining the process while also touching on some important concepts of NPM as I go.
By the end of this post we will have made an npm account, an npm module, and also imported the module into another application for use.
Alex Zito-Wolf
Product Manager + Software Developer. Interested in Travel, Culture, and the Internet.
