There are a few fleshed-out articles about why utility-first CSS is a good thing. However, if you’re just a little curious and want a brief introduction, Chris Ferdinandi has your back.

In JavaScript, we create small, modular functions that can be reused throughout the code base to keep our code DRY. In CSS, for some reason, it’s not seen as weird in the slightest to repeat yourself a lot.

Utility classes help keep CSS DRY.

The stylesheet for my website is so small that I can inline all of my CSS still send most of the page in a single HTTP request.

Read the rest of Chris’ article on gomakethings.com.

Hungry for more? Check out In Defense of Utility-First CSS by Sarah Dayan or CSS Utility Classes and “Separation of Concerns” by Adam Wathan.

Since the first iteration of my blog—some time around 2016—I’ve used highlight.js to highlight code blocks. With highlight.js being so popular, I never really second guessed the idea. It was a given to use JavaScript.

A few weeks ago, TJ Miller introduced me to highlight.php by writing a Parsedown extension for it. Highlight.php does the exact same thing as highlight.js: they both add tags and classes to your code blocks, which enables them to be highlighted with CSS. The difference is, highlight.php does this on the server.

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One of the best things about Vue templates is the special v-model prop. v-model allows you two quickly map prop getters and setters without breaking unidirectional data flow. Props down, events up.

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I have a specific pet peeve with user interfaces: things that draw my attention when they don’t need to. In any graphical interface, movement is distraction. Our eyes are naturally drawn to anything in motion.

Motion is a powerful tool. We can abuse this distraction to attract our users to a certain place: a notification, an added list item after a background refresh, etc. Let’s look into the movement behind a form submission. Below are three dummy forms, each with a different server response time.

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In my most recent project at work, I’m experimenting with JSX templates in Vue. Vue offers first-party support for JSX with near-zero configuration, but it doesn’t seem to be commonly used in the ecosystem.

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Maintaining a number of open source projects comes with a number of issues. Reporting a good issue will result in a more engaged approach from project maintainers. Don’t forget: there’s a human behind every project.

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Code splitting is bundler feature—if you’re using Laravel Mix, you’re bundling your assets with Webpack—that allows you to split application scripts in multiple files. These can then conditionally be loaded at a later stage.

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In a recent Design Details podcast, Guillermo Rauch (@rauchg) shares his thoughts on the web, design, the value of code, type systems, cryptocurrencies and much much more.

I have a lot of respect for Guillermo’s philosophies, and what he’s building with Zeit. An early quote from the interview (paraphrased):

I’ve always had this passion for the hyperlink. My whole thesis is everything that has not yet been hyperlinked, will be hyperlinked. If we step back and take that thesis a little further—you look at GitHub and they but a hyperlink on everything. They put a hyperlink on every per-character diff of your codebase. Every line of code. Every changeset. Everything.

Listen to the full podcast on Spec.fm.

Server side rendering is a hot topic when it comes to client side applications. Unfortunately, it’s not an easy thing to do, especially if you’re not building things in a Node.js environment.

I published two libraries to enable server side rendering JavaScript from PHP: spatie/server-side-rendering and spatie/laravel-server-side-rendering for Laravel apps.

Let’s review some server side rendering concepts, benefits and tradeoffs, and build a server renderer in PHP from first principles.

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One of the hardest (and sometimes frustrating) tasks in a programmer’s day-to-day workload is naming things. When I have a hard time finding that perfect word, I generally wind up in one of two situations:

• I have a plausible name in mind, but I’m not entirely satisfied with it
• I have no idea what I could possibly name it

Luckily, there are tools out there that can be of help.

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