Article Roundup - Week of 6/26/2017

CSS vs. JavaScript: Trust vs. Control
JavaScript can do what CSS does, but it generally doesn’t need to anymore. Before there was good animation support, before flexbox, before custom properties you might have needed to use JavaScript for styling and laying out your site. You don’t need to do that anymore, so long as your CSS and JavaScript work together you can get the best of both worlds.

CSS Triggers
This site has a table that shows how different css properties might impact rendering a page in different browsers.

Connect: behind the front-end experience
Stripe recently released a new version of their tool called Connect. For the landing page they took advantage of a lot of new techniques and technologies. The article spends a lot of time on some of the CSS features they used.

JavaScript for Microcontrollers and IoT: Part 1
If you want to try out an IoT project, but don’t want to learn a new language or dust off your C/C++ skills why not use JavaScript? There are downsides, but it is definitely something you can do.

The Equilateral Triangle of a Perfect Paragraph - A Web Typography Learning Game
I like the idea of the game, and I like the idea of the Triangle concept. However, the game is frustrating because it depends upon you visually “just knowing” when things are in balance and the intro to the game doesn’t offer anything to actually teach that.

Using CSS variables correctly
CSS Variables (Custom Properties) are supported in the major browsers. They let you do many things that preprocessor variables let you do, but they are very different. Some techniques transfer, others need to be rethought. This article does a good job of covering how one might best use custom properties, and a bit of how not to shoot yourself in the foot.

React Express
If you are wanting to learn React, this is a good place to start. If you want to learn more about a particular React topic and different approaches, you’ll also find some useful information. Especially around styling.

Patterns of Service-oriented Architecture: Denormalized Cache
This is part of a series on Service-Oriented Architectures, and I may have to go back through and read all of it. When you have interconnected data querying information can be slow. If everything is in one database you can make it work by querying across tables. If you have a microservices architecture that isn’t a good option, and caching is the way to go. The article does a good job of highlighting what problems denormalized caching can solve, but also what gotchas exist.