Reading this Week

Here’s some web development articles that I have been reading over the past week.

Development

• What Does it Mean to Be “Full Stack”? - A nice article by Chris Coyier about what it means to be a full stack developer in 2019.
• Vue.js And SEO: How To Optimize Reactive Websites For Search Engines And Bots - After spending considerable time on SEO related optimization for various projects over the years, I have often wondered about the SEO implications of JavaScript frameworks. This article does a pretty good job of exploring the issue and concluding it isn’t as big of a deal as it once was.
• An introduction to the JAMstack: the architecture of the modern web - A nice, quick intro to the JAMstack (JAM - JavaScript, APIs, Markup) that we hear so much about these days. For more detailed reading, JAMstack.wtf is a good source.
• The Vanilla JS Toolkit - This is a really helpful site emphasize all that you can do in JavaScript without needing a front-end framework. Lots of examples, helper functions, etc — definitely worth checking out. I think of it in the same realm as You Might Not Need jQuery.
• Best Free Form Builder Plugins WordPress 2019 - I thought maybe I was the only one who found the state of WordPress form plugins to be exceedingly frustrating, but apparently not. Some good suggestions in here for plugins for a task that really shouldn’t be as frustrating as it is…

Design Exercises

I have found that I’m much more inclined to work on my front-end skills if I have some plausible scenarios to work on and/or a specific project, otherwise I get stuck trying to come up with ideas rather than coding. The following are some nice resources for practicing your skills:

• Frontend Mentor - Definitely my favorite, this site offers a number of challenges and has an active community around it.
• Brief Box - More design than development oriented, but it offers a bunch of prompts for design exercises, some of which are websites.
• Symu - This site gives users PSD files of designs for various websites. You can then code the sites from the mocks.

Random Design Stuff

• Should I Use A Carousel? - A snarky take on an all-too-common design pattern.
• Can’t Unsee - A nice quiz-formatted resource for learning basic UI/UX concepts.