Blog

Being a frontend developer these days means to learn the new things every day. We read articles and blog posts, examine the changelogs, follow the Twitter announcements and participate in the GitHub discussions. This helps to keep up. However, when it comes to something bigger, like the exploring of a new framework or an ecosystem, it is not enough. The perfect solution is to organize a whole day hackathon for the developers in your company. At SC5 online, we took this advantage mastering the React development. Few ecosystem components such as webpack and redux came along.

My first task for new projects is to create a git repository. Whether it is a new app, or conference slides, or even an article, I prefer to keep everything in Git. It is an excellent tool, and, personally, I enjoy its command line interface. However, there is always room for improvement. Recently I found an idea how to make my git visualize the changes that I've done to the images in a repository.

My recent huge project was developing a library of CSS and JavaScript components for sharing this code across a lot of web services and mobile apps. In most cases such work brings up question about how to avoid blocking the processes. The library has its own flow, and obviously the new things can only appear in new versions. Although I made my best to provide fast releases, and so the library has them 2-3 times a week, it is still understandable that the library customers sometimes cannot wait even an hour. I belive that one of the must-haves of UI library is the freedom which it should give to its customers. You can easily provide this if practice atomic approach everythere. For example, for the icon fonts.

Last week I faced a need to make a fake tag cloud, where the words need to be of different size. This was needed for a presentation slide, and as my slides are always in HTML/CSS, must be implemented with these technologies. It is always possible to inject some JavaScript and code anything. But what about pure CSS, do we get random sizes there?

I never thought that I would write a post about diversity. But as the unicorn law says that being a woman in tech you will be eventually speaking about women in tech, I do so now. However I'm doing this not because it is a strong will of mine. Something happened which makes me to respond.

I've been presenting SC5 Style Guide several times during this year sharing my experience of using it for one of the SC5's clients, Elisa. Assuming that Elisa is a huge mobile operator with a lot of websites and a need to keep those websites visually consistent, there is no wonder that the SC5 Style Guide as a tool provides benefits there. But what about smaller websites? Would it be useful there? I did not know the answer to this question and wanted to experiment. The experiment was conducted on my blog codebase.