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Web Development Reading List #163: The End-Of-Year Wrap-Up






 



 


Only one week left until Christmas, and people already start freaking out again. No gifts purchased yet, work isn’t finished either, and suddenly some budget has to be spent until the end of the year. All of this puts us under pressure. To avoid the stress, I’ve seen a lot of people take a vacation from now until the end of the year — probably a good idea.

Web Development Reading List #163

And while it’s nice to see so many web advent calendars, I feel like I’ve never written a longer reading list than this one. So save this edition if you don’t have much time currently and read it during some calm moments later this year or early next year. Most articles are still worth reading in a few weeks.

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Mistakes Developers Make When Learning Design






 



 


The blank Photoshop document glows in front of you. You’ve been trying to design a website for an hour but it’s going nowhere. You feel defeated. You were in this same predicament last month when you couldn’t design a website for a project at work. As a developer, you just feel out of your element pushing pixels around.

Mistakes Developers Make When Learning Design

How do designers do it? Do they just mess around in Photoshop or Sketch for a while until a pretty design appears? Can developers who are used to working within the logical constructs of Boolean logic and number theory master the seemingly arbitrary rules of design?

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Tech Advent Calendars For Web Designers And Developers In 2016






 



 


With the holidays almost here and the new year already in sight, December is a time to slow down, an occasion to reflect and plan ahead. To help us escape the everyday hectic for a bit and sweeten our days with a delightful little surprise each day up to Christmas, the web community has assembled some fantastic advent calendars this year. They cater for a daily dose of web design and development goodness with stellar articles, inspiring experiments, and even puzzles to solve.

Advent Calendars For Web Folks

To make the choice of which ones to follow a bit easier, we collected a selection of advent calendars in this Quick Tip for you. No matter if you’re a front-end dev, UX designer, or content strategist, we’re certain you’ll find something to inspire you for the upcoming year. So prepare yourself a nice cup of coffee, cozy up in your favorite chair and, well, enjoy!

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Styling Web Components Using A Shared Style Sheet






 



 


Web components are an amazing new feature of the web, allowing developers to define their own custom HTML elements. When combined with a style guide, web components can create a component API, which allows developers to stop copying and pasting code snippets and instead just use a DOM element.

Styling Web Components Using A Shared Style Sheet

By using the shadow DOM, we can encapsulate the web component and not have to worry about specificity wars with any other style sheet on the page. However, web components and style guides currently seem to be at odds with each other.

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How My API-Driven Website Helps Me Travel The World






 



 


Recently, I decided to rebuild my personal website, because it was six years old and looked — politely speaking — a little bit “outdated.” The goal was to include some information about myself, a blog area, a list of my recent side projects, and upcoming events.

How My API-Driven Website Helps Me Travel The World

As I do client work from time to time, there was one thing I didn’t want to deal with — databases! Previously, I built WordPress sites for everyone who wanted me to. The programming part was usually fun for me, but the releases, moving of databases to different environments, and actual publishing, were always annoying.

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How To Build A SpriteKit Game In Swift 3 (Part 3)






 



 


Have you ever wondered what it takes to create a SpriteKit game? Do buttons seem like a bigger task than they should be? Ever wonder how to persist settings in a game? Game-making has never been easier on iOS since the introduction of SpriteKit. In part three of this three-part series, we will finish up our RainCat game and complete our introduction to SpriteKit.

How To Build A SpriteKit Game In Swift 3 (Part 3)

If you missed out on the previous lesson, you can catch up by getting the code on GitHub. Remember that this tutorial requires Xcode 8 and Swift 3.

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