Frontend’s Favorite Five — December Edition
Frontend engineering, like other fields in technology, evolves at a rapid pace. This makes it fascinating to work in the field, but it can also present a challenge, as it can be hard to keep up-to-date with the latest trends, toolsets and frameworks.
To help us with that, we always keep an eye out for interesting and reliable sources of information. In this post series, we will present a few of our favorites. They will include anything from our favorite news sources, books we’ve been reading, podcasts, to people we admire and ideas that inspire us.
So without further ado, here are our team’s favorite five for December…
Shop Talk Show
Type: Podcast
Interval: Once per week
Dave Rupert and Chris Coyier explore a wide range of topics in frontend, web design, user experience and accessibility. There are two main formats: “rapidfire” in which they answer listener questions, and the more traditional interview in which a prominent guest is invited to explore a topic. The strength of this podcast is the way Dave and Chris break down complex ideas and frameworks into a digestible format, injected with loads of humor. The Shop Talk Show podcast is a great way to keep up to date at any skill level, and a good way to get an overall understanding of the tool, opinion leaders ideas, and framework landscape.
Soft Skills Engineering
Type: Podcast
Interval: Once per week
Dave Smith and Jamison Dance talk about topics that we deal with in our everyday life as developers, but that we might not have covered in our education process. The hosts are both experienced in the field, and cover subjects like negotiating your contract and asking for a raise, as well as age-old dilemmas like whether to become a generalist or specialist. Dave and Jamison offer multiple perspectives which help us think about these situations in a holistic way.
Some of our favorite episodes include:
A11ycasts
Type: Videocast
Interval: Every two weeks
Rod Doson, developer advocate at Google, presents the different aspects of accessibility in this series of short videos. While every developer should be aware of the topic, many of us only have a vague understanding what it means to provide good accessibility. Giving introductions to the fundamentals, Rod Doson also demonstrates real world accessibility issues such as keyboard navigation or using voiceover, and useful strategies to approach them. A11ycasts (accessibility casts) are part of the ChromeDevelopers youtube channel which is also a great source of information.
Some of our favorite episodes include:
FunFunFunction
Type: Videocast
Interval: Once per week
Mattias Petter Johansson, frontend developer at Spotify, shares personal experiences related to frontend and software development in his youtube channel. While usually focussing on topics related to functional programming (e.g. currying or higher order functions) and JavaScript (e.g. prototypical inheritance and generators) Mattias also talks about more general topics (e.g. pair programming or time estimations) and career (e.g. the issue of losing motivation). His casts are usually quite short and a good mix between useful information and great entertainment.
Some of our favorite episodes include:
Do you know of something in frontend we should read, see, get or do? If so, we want to learn about it! Comment below or tweet at us @ProjectAcom with the hashtag #frontendfavorites.
This post was co-authored by Christian Höpfner and Marimar Hollenbach.
