CSS Tricks

I was recently mentoring someone who had trouble with the .reduce() method in JavaScript. Namely, how you get from this: const nums = [1, 2, 3] let value = 0 for (let i = 0; i < nums.length; i++) { value += nums[i] } ...to this: const nums = [1, 2, 3] const value = nums.reduce((ac, next) => ac + next, 0) They are functionally equivalent and they both sum up all the numbers in the array, but there is a bit of paradigm shift between them. Let's explore reducers for a moment because they're powerful, and important to have in your programming toolbox. There are literally hundreds of other articles on reducers out there, and I'll link up some of my favorites at the end. What is a reducer? The first and most important thing to understand about a reducer is that it will always only retu...

Part of the job of being a front-end developer is applying different techniques and technologies to pull of the desired UI and UX. Perhaps you work with a design team and implement their designs. I know when I look at a design (heck, even if I know I'm not going to be building it), my front-end brain starts triggering all sorts of things I know will be related to the task. Let's take a look at what I mean. Check out this lovely Dribbble shot for a Food Recipe Website from Riko Sapto Dimo. It's a very appealing design, and there is loads in there to think about from a front-end web design and development standpoint. We're going to mostly be talking about design pattern choices and HTML/CSS tech choices. There is much more to the job of front-end development. Accessibility! Performance! Se...

If you’re looking for more manageable ways to create bar graphs, or in search of use cases to practice CSS Grid layout, I got you! Before we begin working on the graph, I want to talk about coding the bars, when Grid is a good approach for graphs, and we’ll also cover some code choices you might consider before getting started. Preface The bar is a pretty basic shape: you can control its dimensions with CSS width, height, number of grid or table cells, etc. depending on how you’ve coded it. As far as graphs go, the main thing we want to control is the height of the bars in the graph. Controlling height with Grid cells (like here) is convenient for designs where the height is incremental by a fixed value — no in-betweens. For example, signal bars in phones or when you don’t mind setting a ...

You may have wondered lately what all the buzz is about Context and what it might mean for you and your React sites. Before Context, when the management of state gets complicated beyond the functionality of setState, you likely had to make use of a third party library. Thanks to recent updates by the awesome React team, we now have Context which might help with some state management issues. What Does Context Solve? How do you move the state from a parent component to a child component that is nested in the component tree? You know that you can use Redux to manage state, but you shouldn’t have to jump to Redux in every situation. There's a way to do this without Redux or any other third party state management tool. You can use props! Say the feature you want to implement has a tree struct...

Everyone has special and perhaps, particular, tastes when it comes to their code editor. There are literally thousands of themes out there, and for good reason: a thing of beauty and enhancement to productivity for one can be a hindrance to another. It’s been an item on my bucket list to create my own theme. I was coding very late the one night, well into the small hours of the morning. Everyone in my house was sleeping and so, as usual, the only light was the glow of my screen. I know it’s not necessarily healthy to code like this, but it’s literally the time I’m most productive: there are minimal distractions, I’m not dealing with work stuff, family stuff, friend stuff, or puppy stuff. I can focus. I had some preferences set for the theme I had been using and, though they all worked well...

  CSS is easy, some might argue, but that "easiness" can cause messy code. This is especially true through power of preprocessors like Sass or Less where, if you aren’t careful, your CSS can become harder to deal with instead of easier. Sass? Harder? This Gist shows a great example of Sass nesting hell. If your Sass code looks like that, you can definitely improve your code with SEM & BIO, a CSS technique I’ll introduce you to now! In this article, I am going to use the code example below to explain how SEM and BIO works and how they can help enhance your CSS strategy. See the Pen by thebabydino (@thebabydino) on CodePen. Generally, SEM is concerned with high level CSS philosophy whereas BIO is an actual technique to help you write better CSS to achieve SEM. The main purp...