Personal blog of Drew Powers

10 Years of Frontend

Plus another 6 of whatever you called it before that.

3 Layers of UI Interaction

Every interactive UI element should consider all 3 layers; do yours?

The great(er) divide in front-end

A year of reflecting on Chris Coyier’s “The Great Divide” post. I think it holds up, but requires a little more nuance.

All the answers to “should designers code?”

the eternal war rages on

Anger can be a force for good

if expressed right—a huge, ginormous “if”

A handbook to animation easings

If you use default easings for your animations you might as well not even bother animating it.

Are images your slow-down?

the secret to optimizing images

Bazel is incompatible with JavaScript

If you don’t know what Bazel is, you not only can skip this blog post; I envy you greatly.

Build your own touch slider with hammer.js

high-performance touch events for demanding jobs

check out these foundries for new fonts

designs looking a little stale? it’s probably your weak fonts

Cloud-jumping: swap hosted services easily with Manifold

how to take back full control of your cloud services in one afternoon

CSS puzzles: a mentorship program for better styling

How a 12-week program resulted in open-source education

Did we fuck up the internet? part 1

The principal designs of the internet were made a long time ago, for different uses than what we use it for today. Are keeping those old designs hurting the internet long-term?

Did we fuck up the internet? part 2

As the philosopher Thom Yorke once said, “where do we go from here?”

The distributed web part 1: you don’t need a website

when to not get sold by marketing speak

The distributed web part 2: …or do you?

when is it time to pony up for custom development?

Don’t use HSL

HSL is great in theory, but worse than you realize in practice

Dribbble is a painkiller, not a vitamin

how instant gratification can curb growth

What I learned working at Envy Labs

Envy Labs’ 2017 rebrand

rediscovering meaning, returning to form

Error handling like a three-prong outlet

the hidden part of programming

Expanding hex colors to 48 bit

Dumb solutions can be smart, sometimes

getting started with webpack

harnessing the web’s most powerful build tool

Hey now, you’re an AI Star

My world’s on fire, how ’bout yours?

How to get a job coding in 2022, part 1

It’s tough to get started, but the rewards are worth it.

How to get a job coding in 2022, part 2

Go read part 1 first if you haven’t!

How to optimize images for web

not all optimization techniques are equal

lessons from Astro

lessons from helping start a startup from scratch and working on open source fulltime

Media queries are (still) a hack

Media queries are janky. No, it’s not just you.

On Startups

How to burn out your employees AND bridges all at the same time!

Planet of the Apps: where are they now?

Looking back on everyone’s favorite cursed Shark Tank ripoff.

4 tips for setting a playfulness budget

At what point does whimsy and “delight” turn into user frustration?

Playwright for visual regression testing in Storybook is stupid easy

It will exceed your wildest expectations, or your money back.

React is… fine

The year of React’s demise should be coming the same year as the Linux Desktop.

Responsive modular typography scales in css

a time-saving type system with little config and lots of flexibility

How to handle responsive font sizes in css

Get perfect, easy-to-use font scaling with < 1kB of CSS. Sound too good to be true? It’s not!

Secure runtime variables in IronWorker with Manifold

Docker secrets with minimal code & configuration

Stylable: the good, the bad, the weird

taking the new CSS preprocessor from Wix for a spin

Not enough people are talking about ES Modules

JavaScript changed forever in 2019. Did you miss it?

There’s no such thing as multi-axis modes

Modes, themes, collections, whatever you call it, doesn’t solve your busted design token setup.

Learning javascript? try Vue

great for beginners, great for experts

VIM setup for a designer/front-end dev on macOS

when you want to use vim but don’t want your eyes to bleed

Why aren’t you using Vitest for testing yet?

Throw away whatever you’re using already and use this for testing.

Is it time to retire HTML?

HTML was designed for basic text editing. How is it still holding up in a world where we’re building rich interactive experiences?

We migrated to Next.js to serve our home page 7.5× faster

server-side rendering by the numbers

Web design isn’t becoming more boring, and isn’t losing its soul

don’t listen to the haters

webpack + postcss + cssnext

writing future CSS in a modern JS setup

the weird, wacky world of RGB

Color isn’t as simple as one might think