vanadium

Clients care about the value proposition, and this is the right time to be heavily specialized.

1. In SEM and SEO both, technical performance is blossoming as a crucial need in both search engine ranking and the ad bidding process, say nothing of the benefits to mobile conversions and decrease in bounce rates. All of this is well-covered in numerous e-com/retail studies. There's significant value here for companies if you can articulate why. AMP isn't a cure-all in any way, and many clients are going to look at the investment versus return and decide instead that the investment in optimizing what they already have is worth the price.

2. Accessibility is also massively growing, due to increasing litigiousness and the contemporary view that the ADA covers websites in general as opposed to individual legal mandates (such as those in public education, healthcare, etc). There are also specialized, legitimate certifications such as the IAAP [1] where you can pretty much write your own paycheck with the amount of consulting work out there.

But you _really_ need to know your shit for both of them, and increasingly, specialized consultancies in these areas have formed or are forming to go after those companies. You're not going to get away with half-assing it either--especially #2 due to the legal liability--and you'll absolutely have to demonstrate your value. Additionally, this actually opens up opportunities to consult for companies that make site builders and other tools, to ensure they're thoroughly considering these specialized aspects of development.

There's also still a lot of good remote roles out there for more experienced folks; about 3/4 of the Front-End friends of mine clear well above $100k/year working for established companies and startups in a 100% remote basis. The best way to get into that realm is networking; the adage that the most important way to get where you want to go is through networking is true, as is the adage that a good percentage of the good jobs are never even posted.

But as for the bottom-of-the-market, I started back in '97 doing those types of small websites, and there's been hardly any appetite for freelancers in terms of being able to make a sustainable living of it. If you're going to go this route, you need to land profitable fish with a real need and actual money to pay you with.

[1] https://www.accessibilityassociation.org/certification

Gah, I've seen altogether dozens and dozens of hours of this show, to the point where I was hunting down "lost" or hard to find episodes.

Barakan is a treasure.

We're trying to figure out on my team what the Edge Team's plan for rollout on OSes with IE11 already installed looks like; e.g., will Edge Chromium outright pull and replace Legacy Edge _and_ IE11 from Win7? And is "IE Mode" going to be an option on the non-Enterprise version of Chromium Edge?

I'd love to see more messaging around the rollout intentions; plenty of us out here still supporting IE11 (non-Government, non-Enterprise) and trying to read between the lines to a point where we can start legitimately calling the time of death.

!s takes you to Startpage, which, if you're trying to avoid Google, gets you where you want to go by proxy.

CNN's now reporting that water cannons are being aimed at the central fire.

Oh, that was in the back of my mind when I responded. Most assuredly.

> Also you don't just drop water from planes above cities... this makses no sense.

Superb way to collapse the structure, incinerate/crush the firefighters, and endanger pretty much anyone around the area, all while leaving pretty much nothing to be saved. Say nothing of anyone that might be trapped in there.

And this is why I spent $100 on a hot air gun for my video game console repairs & restorations instead of trying to do DIY reballing without proper equipment (which is $$$).

Consistent and controlled heat are absolutely vital when working with tiny SMD components.

Correct. And it has _both_ terrible holographic Sega games. Galloping Ghost Pinball just opened up the other week down the block a bit.

Can't wait to see the new Stern tables at the Midwest Gaming Classic in Milwaukee this weekend.

Color contrast between a default background #FFF and foreground text of #000 is pretty much the gold standard.

It's also a business obligation, in my opinion, because 1) an increasing percentage of the population has some form of disability, and 2) not accommodating them has a bottom-line business impact.

There's a moral, legal, and business obligation to serve your product in an inclusive manner. We're working to get select developers IAAP (International Association of Accessibility Professionals) certified on my team.

On the legal front, see also Gomez v. GNC: https://www.levelaccess.com/federal-court-decision-gomez-v-g...

I guess I'm confused by Nicepage being "Web Design 3.0", being told Bootstrap is yesteryear, then using Bootstrap 3.x.x (and a boatload of jQueryUI dependencies) with !important directives sprinkled all over the place. Don't get me wrong, it's pretty on the front-end, but the technical choices are still rather confusing after reading the article.

https://nicepage.com/Content/BundledScripts/main-libs.js https://nicepage.com/Content/BundledScripts/main-libs.css

Additionally, I have yet to find a page builder that's in any way 1) performant and 2) not compromising fundamental best practices (because WYSIWYG site builders require exorbitant amounts of flexibility).

https://www.webpagetest.org/result/190305_4Y_ff1823195f2bedd...

I liked the article and agree with the central thesis of CSS Grid enabling some wild UI designs, but the whole thing came off in a completely different light after looking under the hood.

I never thought I'd get my notice to update one of my flash cartridges from HN, and here we are. It's a slick piece of hardware overall.

And then either install Cloudflared [1], or Unbound [2].

[1] https://bendews.com/posts/implement-dns-over-https/

[2] https://pi-hole.net/2018/06/09/ftldns-and-unbound-combined-f...

Google was also supposed to start penalizing sites that used their AMP pages as interstitials, but...I'm not sure whatever became of that.

Asking the real questions here, I'm seriously interested in knowing the staff breakdown by role.

Back in the mid-00s there was a logo sweatshop called Arteis (later bought by HP) where people of widely disparate creative backgrounds pumped out logos for businesses, some as many as a few dozen a day. They, too, all looked pretty much cut from a template, because thinking requires time and the pay was about 1/10th you'd pay an equivalent Graphic Designer to do it over their lunch hour. It's just generating pretty cookie-cutter stuff whether by hand or by machine.

You definitely get what you pay for, either way.

"Startpage acts as an intermediary between you and Google, so your searches are completely private. Startpage submits your query to Google anonymously, then returns Google results to you privately. Google never sees you and does not know who made the request; they only see Startpage."

From: https://support.startpage.com/index.php?/Knowledgebase/Artic...

More: https://support.startpage.com/index.php?/Knowledgebase/List/...

!s = Startpage, anonymizing by proxy the Google SERPs. I know, I'm having to retrain my DDG Bang muscle memory myself.

It's definitely not a knock on you or your position; it's more a knock on these sorts of politically-motivated, but empty, sweetheart deals. Walker's a particularly efficient trigger when the subject comes up.

Also, I'm just a bit bitter as someone who travels back to my hometown area (the Fox Valley) often from Chicago and it's never the same thing twice. ;)

They _finally_ finished construction on the I-94/I-41 upgrade (also accommodating a new Amazon warehouse near Kenosha) a couple of years back, and this Foxconn agreement meant having to tear it all up again and redo it even wider than before. It's (IMO) unsafe to drive through in the Winter time.

It's a perpetual mess in Southeast Wisconsin. The problems extend far further than just the economics of the deal, into perpetual construction, shady eminent domain and reclassification of generational farms as "blighted", etc. It's criminal how much this one "deal" cost the area.

> Anyone can learn CSS from zero to expert in a week.

Maybe the (highest level of) basics, but as someone who's been in the industry 21 years and manages all hiring for front-end, the one area of front-end that everyone seems to think is easy but also one of the rarest skills to find on the market is someone who actually understands the finer points of CSS, like why one would use "font-display: swap" in the context of performance, the performance implications of complex CSS on mobile devices, CSS methodology rationale, accessibility implications of using X vs Y, best way of delivering CSS to accelerate the "Start Render" metric, etc.

I'm well aware of the last company I worked for requiring reviews of all fresh-from-college hires. HR would press them right after onboarding, and boom, you'd see 6-7 new reviews all following a similar style and template before they even touched code.

More recently (and I'm years gone from the company at this point yet can still recognize it) they've been doing the same to their offshore teams in India, and by no means are they in a position to refuse.

It isn't even close to hidden, as you can discern the pattern/template six ways from Sunday. If it weren't for those forced reviews, they'd be tanked.

Definitely going to put more muscle memory into !s, thanks!

> But don't get lazy then and really take the time to learn the basics.

Here was a typical (not verbatim) exchange when I was a Front-End Architect interviewing candidates for my team back in 2012 or so:

---

Q: Tell me about your experience with JavaScript.

A: I know JavaScript because I've been working in jQuery for a year.

---

Further questions would isolate the fact that they've _only_ used jQuery. It was depressing, really.

I mentor developers to really strive to learn and understand the fundamentals precisely to stop propagating the idea that libraries and frameworks > fundamentals. Problem is, I've already started to witness history repeating itself when interviewing candidates and getting the equivalent answer above--but with "React" in its place.

thegrid.io was (yet) another flame-out associated with the same line of thinking. The intricacies of performant web development are quite a bit more nuanced than a lot of people aiming to automate it would like to acknowledge.

> Part of it is that they no longer have practical interview skills, or even understand the current trends in recruiting and hiring.

I'm in my 40s, and this is _precisely_ why I mentor peers to interview occasionally with other companies after a couple of years at their gig, even if they have no intention of leaving. It's not just keeping up with the technology, it's keeping up with the soft skills, the trends in recruiting, etc.

What if they fit the gig they're interviewing for and get an offer? I could think of worse problems someone interested in keeping up and going through this exercise could have.

And especially for hiring managers, occasional interviewing is even _more_ helpful for finding better, more efficient methods for interviewing in your own company. Or finding out your own process is better run.

You might not want to do this in a small town where you're going to exhaust your options rapidly, but in major cities, if you're methodical about the roles and industries, it's an unbelievable wealth of information (and competitive analysis, to be fair).

All of our components are contained in a folder specific to that component, and include the JS (Vanilla ES6), SASS, and template markup.

This is easily done using SASS components as well. No framework needed.

This is exactly what we do, and suffer zero issues. You have the globals (color scheme, typographical rules), and then you have the component-based, scoped SASS.

I don't see any reason to do it any other way, and it scales just fine for the systems we build.