Eric Bailey shares some thoughts on creating, maintaining and evaluating accessible technology. Adam Silver passes on loads of knowledge about form design. High-quality and customizable Gatsby themes and more. Enjoy.

The post Web Design Weekly #363 appeared first on Web Design Weekly.

Marianne Bellotti passes on some great advice that has stuck with her during the process of becoming a better manager. With Chrome 76, you'll be able to use the new "loading" attribute to lazy-load resources. Robin Weruch explains how to fetch data in React with Hooks and lots more. Enjoy.

The post Web Design Weekly #364 appeared first on Web Design Weekly.

Adam Noffsinger explains how Dropbox Design migrated to Figma. Harry Roberts dives into 'Time to First Byte'. Linzi Berry, Product Design Systems Manager at Lyft, shares the story and core principles of their design system. Enjoy.

The post Web Design Weekly #365 appeared first on Web Design Weekly.

Hui Jing sheds some light into why reading CSS specifications is immensely helpful to build a strong understanding of CSS. A look into how visual elements affect our perception, recognition and memory by interacting with digital products. Philip Walton explains how to bundle modules and lots more. Enjoy!

The post Web Design Weekly #366 appeared first on Web Design Weekly.

Is the internet boring now? Jake Underwood reflects on the years gone by and asks the questions, where did the web’s old personality go? Virginia Start shares a 5-step guide for designing global addresses that she devised during her research for Shopify’s International team. A handy tool that automatically generates splash screen and image assets for your Progressive Web App and lots more.

The post Web Design Weekly #367 appeared first on Web Design Weekly.

Mark Boulton shares his concerns he has with the current thinking of what constitutes a good design system in our industry. Rachel Andrew explores the situations in which you might encounter overflow in your web designs. Firefox 69 features a number of nice new additions and lots more. Enjoy.

The post Wed Design Weekly #368 appeared first on Web Design Weekly.

Milica Mihajlija covers how browser rendering works and how to navigate DevTools to diagnose animation performance issues. Travis Almand look at how to use intersection observer watches and lots more. Enjoy.

The post Web Design Weekly #369 appeared first on Web Design Weekly.

A look behind the scenes at how Netflix keeps you engaged and addicted. An insight into how Design Ops at Spotify work. A look into moving from Sketch to Figma and lots more. Enjoy.

The post Web Design Weekly #370 appeared first on Web Design Weekly.

Rachel Andrew looks at some common layout patterns that we can’t yet do on the web. All the React Conf 2019 videos are now live. A dive into making Instagram faster and so much more. Enjoy!

The post Web Design Weekly #371 appeared first on Web Design Weekly.

Robin Rendle has some wise words around the difference between a junior and senior front-end developer. Figma posted about gathering the data behind your design systems. The Cloudflare team did a deep dive into how they went about reworking the use of colour within their products and so much more. Enjoy.

The post Web Design Weekly #372 appeared first on Web Design Weekly.

U.S. loses record 20.5 million jobs in the month of April; White House National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow weighs in on ‘America’s Newsroom.’

Contrary to popular belief, people do order fish sandwiches at Arby's.Senate Democrats recently learned one of their own is among that rare crowd when Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.V.) forgot to hit mute when driving through an Arby's drive-through last month. Manchin pulled up to the fast food spot in his home state, asked for a King’s Hawaiian Fish Deluxe sandwich, and later learned his mistake after staffers texted him, he tells The Wall Street Journal."It's a big piece of fish and it has a big slice of cheese," Manchin described to the Journal. "They were just jealous they weren't getting the good sandwich." Manchin himself may be jealous that unlike West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice, he doesn't have a sandwich named after him at his local Arby's.Manchin is far from the only lawmaker who's been "busted," as he put it, for forgetting to hit mute. Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) says his children have repeatedly walked by and told him to "tell [House] Speaker [Nancy] Pelosi to say now is the time to start forgiving student loans." Several described overhearing "colleagues exercising on ellipticals, doing sit-ups, dealing with children, or taking other phone calls," they tell the Journal. And many of them have admittedly skipped showers on days they know they don't have to be on camera. Read more about congressmembers' at-home habits at The Wall Street Journal.More stories from theweek.com The full-spectrum failure of the Trump revolution Unemployment is a catastrophe — but it could still be worse Trump reportedly got 'lava level mad' over potential exposure to coronavirus

When gas began leaking from a nearby chemical factory and drifting towards his house in southern India, there were no warnings and no alarms, welder Elamanchili Venkatesh said. Venkatesh, who staggered outside blindly, said he coughed up blood before losing consciousness.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai has told employees to expect to work from home for the remainder of 2020, but will open offices for certain exceptions.

Will life return to how it was once lockdown restrictions are eased, or will some things change for ever?

The brother of Harry Dunn, who died outside a US airforce base, urges Boris Johnson to take up the case.

Ministers say they will drive a "hard bargain" but Labour say they must be "wary" of President Trump.

As of 6 May, the name of Assembly Members will change to Members of the Senedd.

The historic move will be temporary to cope with the coronavirus pandemic, says Commons speaker.

The band's influence can be heard in everything from art-rock and hip-hop to trance and house.

How closely have you been paying attention to what's been going on during the past seven days?

A selection of the week's best photos from across the continent and beyond.

A selection of news photographs taken around the world this week.

Video calling technology is helping people share their special day with others during lockdown.

The UK is testing its own design but a Google-Apple initiative is winning over many other nations.

New mothers are missing out on support for their babies amidst lockdown restrictions.

An eerily beautiful dust devil flings picking up hundreds of tumbleweeds in Washington state.

Like 90s hip-hop, The Web We Lost™ retains a near-mystical hold on the hearts and minds of those who were lucky enough to be part of it. Luke Dorny’s recent, lovingly hand-carved redesign of his personal site encompasses several generations of that pioneering creative web. As such, it will repay your curiosity.

The post The Web We Lost: Luke Dorny Redesign appeared first on Zeldman on Web & Interaction Design.

It’s a rotten disease. You’re well enough not to need hospitalization, but too weak to do anything useful.

The post The world we return to appeared first on Zeldman on Web & Interaction Design.

Blasian - black and Asian - couples now exist in South Africa... but they don't always have an easy time.

Reporter Aaron Roach Bridgeman speaks to suspects, police and campaigners.

What can younger people learn from the generations that lived through World War Two?

Today was going to be my big day until Covid-19 intervened. But that won't stop me delivering my speech.

Horticulturalist Ben Cross is working with supermarkets to donate flowers to NHS workers.

The CEO of a social care firm says there is a surge in demand for live-in carers due to coronavirus.

Many small coffee producers fear they will go under, as Covid-19 has shut down their usual buyers.

I’ve been working on a pretty large react-router codebase at work. Currently it has around 50~ code splits, which as you can imagine, is a lot of routes. This is going to be a post on the things I’ve learned throughout building out my development / production config and how we are using webpack in production.

###Initial Setup

Before I really dive into how my webpack config is setup and the problems I’ve found, I’ll quickly go over how this app is setup. Currently, there’s one entry point and it looks like this:

import React from 'react'
import { render } from 'react-dom'
import { match, Router, browserHistory } from 'react-router'
import AsyncProps from 'async-props'
import routes from '../routes/index'
/* globals document, window */

const { pathname, search, hash } = window.location
const location = `${pathname}${search}${hash}`

match({ routes, location }, () => {
  render(
    <Router
      render={props => <AsyncProps {...props}/>}
      routes={routes}
      history={browserHistory}
    />,
    document.getElementById('app')
  )
})

It looks like a standard react-router setup, except a couple things are different. For one, there’s way too many routes to have them all in this file, so we are importing the main route object into this file. Second, we are using match on the client side. Without matching first, the client side would try to render before the splits were downloaded causing an error. You can read a little more about match on the client here.

Next, we are using Ryan Florence’s awesome async-props library for loading data into components. It allows me to load data from an api before the server renders components. It will pass the data down to the client for the client-side render, and then data will load as you navigate to new pages automatically.

###Routes

Our main routes file looks like this:

export default {
  component: 'div',
  path: '/',
  indexRoute: require('./index'),
  childRoutes: [
    require('./login'),
    require('./account'),
    ...
  ]
}

There’s a lot more require’s in our app of course. And these are nested pretty deep. The files referenced in the root file have more child routes, and those use require.ensure which you can read about in the webpack docs on code splitting. It tells webpack to make a new bundle, and then load that bundle when require.ensure is called on the client. Here’s an example:

if(typeof require.ensure !== "function") require.ensure = function(d, c) { c(require) }

module.exports = {
  path: 'account',
  getComponent(location, cb) {
    require.ensure([], (require) => {
      cb(null, require('../../views/master/index.jsx'))
    })
  },
  childRoutes: [
    require('./settings'),
  ]
}

There’s a few things going on here. First, we have a function at the top that will polyfill require.ensure. Why? Well, on this project we are server rendering our whole site as well, which I would rather not do, but due to the type of site we are building: we have to. The next thing is the relative require path. I’m using this awesome babel resolver plugin along with webpack’s resolve paths so that I can import files like this:

import Header from '../../master/header'
//becomes
import Header from 'master/header'

Why do I have to use a babel plugin AND webpack’s resolve feature? Once again, doing a server rendered app, the code is ran on the server and also through webpack. In this particular app, I haven’t had time to experiment with webpacking the server. Anyways, if I didn’t use the babel plugin, errors would be thrown on the server, but webpack would work fine. This is one of the common things I have ran into while building this app.

Realizing some things need to be done slightly different on the server or client. You may still be wondering why I am referencing the component as a relative path in the above route example, and that’s because the babel plugin I’m using only works with import and not require. My route objects are the one place that I have these “nasty” looking paths.

##Webpack

I was prompted to make this article after tweeting this out:

webpack splits vs AggressiveMergingPlugin({minSizeReduce: 1.0}) pic.twitter.com/b6kxHEqNcO

— ReactJS News (@ReactJSNews) March 10, 2016

A couple people wanted a better explanation as to what’s happening here. When I was first building my production webpack config, even after using all of these plugins:

new webpack.optimize.CommonsChunkPlugin('vendor', 'vendor.js'),
new webpack.optimize.OccurenceOrderPlugin(),
new webpack.optimize.DedupePlugin(),
new webpack.optimize.UglifyJsPlugin({
  compress: { warnings: false },
  comments: false,
  sourceMap: false,
  mangle: true,
  minimize: true
}),

My bundle looked like this:

That’s pretty huge if you think about it. And I’m not talking about the amount of bundles. I’m talking about the file size. After searching everywhere for a solution to get the bundle size down further, I found webpack’s AggressiveMergingPlugin. This thing is a life saver. As you may have seen from the tweet, the output turns into this:

Just having the main, vendor, and one other bundle brings the whole site under 1MB. I’m using the plugin to only merge files if the size reduction is more than 50%, which is the default.

People talk about code splitting in webpack and think it’s really amazing to load the JS for the page you’re on and nothing more. It sounds great. The problem is that the file size is immensely bigger. If someone more familiar with webpack has a better idea as to why this is, I’d like a better explanation. It isn’t feasable to keep the splits instead of merging them. This site is pretty large, with a lot of routes as you can tell from the screenshots. Codesplitting without merging would cause way more waiting on the client side every time you navigate to a new page. Even if the JS was heavily cached, the first time you hit these pages it will have to load a 300kb bundle for some of them.

##Caching

That takes us to caching. We are about a month away from publicly launching this site, so we haven’t setup the workflow for pushing updates through a cdn, but that will be the end result. For now, in my webpack config, my output object looks like this:

output: {
  path: __dirname + '/public/assets/js/[hash]/',
  filename: '[name].js',
  chunkFilename: '[id].js',
  publicPath: '/assets/js/[hash]/'
},

This is in the production config of course. This way I can cache the files and when I update the code, the hash will change and the browser won’t be caching the old code. I pass in the hash as an env variable at runtime to that the server has the correct path to the assets folder.

##Problems

There were a few big problems I came across while building out a server rendered app with dynamic routes. The first was page titles. How am I supposed to have the right title on the client and on the initial server render? Thankfully, Ryan has yet another solution. react-title-component solves this perfectly.

The next was, how do I hit an api, wait for the response on server render, load new data on route changes, and of course, do this at the component level. As I mentioned before, async-props solves this problem too. It will give you route info so that you can make requests based on things in the url.

The next problem is one that I haven’t fully solved. Webpack is getting really slow. It takes around 20 seconds on a maxed out macbook 15” to build code in production. On the server, it takes more like a minute! If I’m in development mode, it takes around 10 seconds to make the initial build, and sometimes it lags on building the splits on code change. If anyone has insight into this I would love to hear it.

This one goes along with the webpack one, and it is reloading the server. I haven’t tried to webpack the server but I hear doing so works great for this. I don’t think it would fix the problem with webpack being slow though, and in fact it would probably make it even slower.

##Folder structure

I almost forgot to throw this one in here! I’m really happy with the structure of this project. I have a views folder that has all of the same folders and file names as the routes folder. It makes it really easy to find things. These also correspond with the URL to the page. /account/settings will be in views/account/settings.jsx and routes/account/settings.js. The same is true for my tests folder.

##Conclusion

I hope this gave you a good glimpse at how webpack and react router work at a larger scale than you see most blog posts cover. If you have any questions or things that you would like me to talk about that I haven’t already, please leave a comment below and I will update this post! I’m sure that I forgot a few problems and tips writing this. I was thinking this would be a short post but it blew up on me!

FIFA.com ​spoke to the disconsolate yet proud Mahdi Javid after Iran were defeated 4-3 by Russia in the semi-finals of the FIFA Futsal World Cup.

Impressive resilience was the key to Argentina's maiden triumph in the final of the FIFA Futsal World Cup Colombia 2016. La Albiceleste twice hit back within seconds of Russia scoring, while their strong defence was also fundamental in ensuring the win.