The information you put into a commit message needs to be useful to the people who will read it. Instead of going into too much detail, or worrying about abstract questions like whether a given commit is the release version of a thing, focus on a much simpler story: I just did a thing, and this is the thing I just did. In this excerpt from Git for Humans, David Demaree outlines some best practices for crafting effective commits.
Topic: Code
Blending Modes Demystified
In an ideal world, we’d be able to modify a design or graphic for the web while keeping the original intact, all without opening an image editor. We’d save tons of time by not having to manually reprocess graphics whenever we changed stuff. Graphics could be neatly specified, maintained, and manipulated with just a few licks of CSS. Oh. Wait. We can do that! Justin McDowell gives us the lowdown on blending modes.
Interaction Is an Enhancement
The web has an endless supply of single-point-of-failure horror stories, where sites serve up blank and blocked pages to dumbstruck users. But the fault is not with JavaScript and other technologies—it’s with how we use them, banking on them alone instead of diversifying how we deliver our experiences. In this excerpt from Chapter 5 of Adaptive Web Design, Second Edition, Aaron Gustafson explains why understanding and working within limitations is the key to building resilient websites.
Mixing Color for the Web with Sass
We use color to influence mood, create an environment, and tell a story. 125 years ago, impressionist painter Claude Monet changed the way we think about color by describing light’s role in it. His observations have largely been lost on design for the web—but a preprocessor like Sass offers us unprecedented power to mix tints and shades that will imbue our palettes with more nuance.
Writing CSS on Growing Teams
A clear process—based on communication, code reviews, and documentation—will help your team write strong, modular CSS together.
Offering Feedback
If you only interact with users when they need support or have a feature request, you’re only interacting with the minority of your customers. The ones who don’t reach out to you may be creating their own workarounds to a problem you’d love to hear about, or they may have a use case that would lead to a brilliant feature. Are you guilty of the same developer shyness? Do you build things to enhance a tool or service for your own use, and assume the developer is too busy to want to hear about it? Don’t wait until there’s a need for support: ask your happy customers what they do with your product, and tell developers how you’re using their product.
URLs Beyond the Web
As the newest operating systems for Android and iOS enable deep-linking directly into third-party apps, Anthony Colangelo sees an expanding definition of “the web” and an opportunity to better serve our users.
The Analog Revolution
Back in the day, when software was released (on physical media), it was considered done. In the present, some products could benefit from a limitation like that. To tie development to something immutable, such as a physical thing or a hard deadline, might just foster a sense of responsibility to design our product so it has what it takes to last a few years.
How Do We Get It Done, Now?
In the future that’s forever one short year away, brilliantly functional, widely implemented APIs will redeem us from our toil and trouble. We just have to get ready for their coming, while seeing to the nitty-gritty of making the web work in the present. Sadly, it’s a lot less predictable than that. Every new standard has to start small, and we’ll always need to choose which API to back and which to pass over.
The Nearly-Headless CMS
Decoupling your CMS can broaden your options for the presentation layer, let team members narrow their focus to what each does best, or provide data for iOS and Android applications along with a responsive site. Maybe the greatest benefit is that having to consider the relationship between the CMS and rendering layer helps break up assumptions about delivery formats, making you more future-friendly along the way. Mark Llobrera shares a couple of tales where headless was the right solution.
