Journal

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What would you do without your music?

So sang D-Train on Music and never has the sentiment resonated more than during the current Coronavirus situation.

Cooped up at home and deprived of face-to-face contact with friends and family, I’ve found that music can really lift the spirits.

Fortunately, the supply of great records hasn’t stopped and there are a number of trusty online stores to keep us connected.

Let’s dive into the stack of wax that has been keeping me (mostly) sane during lockdown.

The Stance Brothers - Minor Minor

Here’s a pair of jazzy hip hop instrumentals from Finland, both riffing on the bassline from Bob James’ classic Nautilus. This 7″ was introduced to me by Tom a couple of years back and has just had a welcome repress. Fans of Marc Mac’s Visioneers project, Kenny Dope and BadBadNotGood won’t go wrong here.

Favourite Track: Minor Minor

Grab a copy on Bandcamp

Golden Ivy - Kläppen (LP)

Beautiful sounds from Malmo that straddle the organic and the electronic, settling on something vaguely oriental. I was relieved to snap up a copy before it disappeared, given that their previous LP – Monika - is as rare as hen’s teeth and still eludes me. Alas the parcel is currently languishing, unloved, on my desk at work, having arrived there from Gothenburg just a day after the office shut for the lockdown. Damn it! Good things come to those who wait…

Favourite Track: Klappen 11

Grab a copy on Discogs

D.K. - Live at the Edge (LP)

My favourite release to date from Parisian producer D.K. was his stellar collaboration with Suzanne Kraft on Melody as Truth in 2017. This LP ploughs a similar sensous, ambient furrough and would have been a pretty tasty live gig (if you happened to be in Seoul at the time). Yet another great release from Glaswegian label 12th Isle, with beautiful artwork to boot.

Favourite Track: Untitled 11 (not yet on YouTube)

Grab a copy at Rubadub

Datassette – Existenzmaximum

I’ve loved Datassette since his first outing on Ai records back in 2005. He’s got such a great sound – simultanesouly futuristic, funky, musical and heartfelt in a way that few electronic producers can match. This EP (from November last year but just repressed) is typically brilliant.

Favourite Track: Shooz Who

Grab a copy on Bandcamp

Various - Gazillions

These days I try not to buy records for just one track, but this is something special. Top cut Lotus Turbo by Russian duo Formally Unknown is a hard-hitting blend of electro and bass that sounds pretty fresh to these ears. This one is screaming to be played loud.

Favourite Track: Formally Unknown – Lotus Turbo

Grab a copy on Bandcamp

Various - Bubble Chamber (LP)

I’d urge any fans of serious electro to get on this tout suite – you won’t be disappointed. It boasts a formidable line-up, featuring tracks by Gerald Donald, The Exaltics and Plant43 to name but three. The music comes from a variety of locations and eras; we get Montreal-based Iko’s 1983 track Approach on Tokyo nestling alongside new music from Detroit. Kuldaboli from Reykjavík is a new name on me but offers up the pick of the bunch. Oh, and the vinyl also comes with a 56-page booklet containing previously unseen Drexciyan art by Abdul Haqq… which is nice.

Favourite Track: Kuldaboli – Draumur inní heilann þinn

Grab a copy at Vinyl Underground

Max D - Many Any (LP)

Solid LP from one half of Beautiful Swimmers, taking in house/techno cuts that evoke vintage Morgan Geist and Ferox, interspersed with hip hop influences. Big up my man Gav aka Other Lands at Underground Solu’shn for the hot tip!

Favourite Track: Shoutout Seefeel

Grab a copy at Rubadub

A beautiful, responsive, print-friendly résumé template from Max.

Some points of note:

• Accessible (WCAG AA)
• uses the h-resume Microformat
• uses a Spellcheck Linter
• Search Engine Optimized (meta, JSON-LD, etc...)
• Built with Eleventy
• Netlify-ready (although hosting choice is up to you)
• Critical CSS Inlined
• Print Styles

During the COVID situation, people have an urgent need to access critical information online. But in 2020, the average webpage is rammed full of large JavaScript files, huge images etc, and as a result is slow to load. This problem is likely to be most keenly felt by those who don’t have the luxury of fast internet – potentially the same people who need access to that critical information the most.

Here’s a brilliant discussion between Gerry McGovern and Jeremy Keith on that problem, suggesting tactics to help fix things such as performance budgets, introducing tactics at the design stage to mimic slow connections and other access constraints, optimising for return visits, progressive enhancement and more.

Loved this!

(via @adactio)

I have to reluctanctly agree on this one. I’ve interviewed quite a few candidates for “front-end developer” (or similarly named) positions over recent years and the recurring pattern is that they are strong on JavaScript (though not necessarily the right time to use it) and weak on HTML, CSS and the “bigger picture”.

🧵 It's time for our industry to realize the title "frontend developer" is obsolete. The vast majority of these profiles are actually "JS engineers", and they're usually quite good at it, but they're not as good at all the other things contributing to great frontend experiences.

— Benjamin De Cock (@bdc) April 13, 2020

Here’s a neat trick. You can use an emoji as a favicon! I’ve written previously about how to do favicons properly, but for a short-lived hack project you tend to just need something quick and dirty. Chris Coyier has also shared a nice lil’ Codepen website showing the technique in action.

Now that all modern browsers support SVG favicons, here's how to turn any emoji into a favicon.svg:

<svg xmlns="https://t.co/TJalgdayix" viewBox="0 0 100 100">
<text y=".9em" font-size="90">💩</text>
</svg>

Useful for quick apps when you can't be bothered to design a favicon! pic.twitter.com/S2F8IQXaZU

— Lea Verou (@LeaVerou) March 22, 2020

I thought it might be interesting to look back through the years at how the tools in Engineering have changed as our company has grown from 3 to over 240 (and engineering to over 100), and to give a shout out to (some of!) those tools that we consider crucial to our workflow today – especially in these most unusual times where most of the world is working remotely.

A great insight from FreeAgent CTO, Olly Heady, describing how the engineering team have benefitted from tools such as G Suite (Google Apps), Github, Trello, Datadog, Humio and Notion.

grep.app searches code from over a half million public repositories on GitHub.

This could be useful when you’re struggling to use a certain new CSS property, or npm package, and want to see how other programmers are using it.

I wanted there to be an easy way to complete crosswords together that didn’t need people to pass a phone back and forth or for a copy of the crossword to be made in a shared Google Spreadsheet.

Several People are Solving is a lovely React app which started as a fork of The Guardian’s Frontend repo in order to further develop their crossword component.

See author Chris Zetter’s article on how he then introduced WebSockets (within a Rails application) to facilitate real-time collaboration.

The crosswords are updated regularly so what are you waiting for? Get solving!

Here’s a handy resource providing BEM-based naming suggestions for some of the most common web components.

It includes sensible BEM naming for such common components as:

• Breadcrumb;
• Button;
• Card;
• Navigation;
• Tabs; and
• Stack.

It’s also important to do research with all the different kinds of people who may need your service, including those who: have disabilities or use assistive technologies; have limited digital skills or poor literacy; and may need help to use your service.

Useful advice regarding user research from GOV.uk covering how to define participant criteria, find participants for research and handle incentives.

(via @paddyduke)