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Phil Wolstenholme
Phil Wolstenholme

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What I've been reading (week 48, 2022)

I keep a record of articles, blog posts, videos etc that I've enjoyed this week. Here's a sample of seven of them:

Developing a focus style for a themable design system

A deep-dive into picking an approach to focus outlines. The end result is similar to what I've used before, a two-colour box-shadow approach with special treatment for links to avoid breaking-across-lines issues.

Why you should never use px to set font-size in CSS

A reminder to avoid shipping CSS that uses pixels for font sizes or media queries as it affects text zoom users. I hate the mental maths or using mixins to convert pixels to [r]em so I author in px but let postcss-pxtorem & postcss-em-media-query handle the conversion for me.

Speeding up the JavaScript ecosystem - one library at a time

It's really impressive how the author was able to find, fix, and explain so many JavaScript performance issues in one blog post. This kind of runtime performance isn't something I know a lot about, so it's really interesting how seemingly small changes can have such an impact.

Software Engineering at Google

"A candid and insightful look at how Google construct and maintain software. This [free, HTML] book covers Google’s unique engineering culture, processes, and tools and how these aspects contribute to the effectiveness of an engineering organization."

Capture, debug and mock all Docker HTTP traffic

This looks great, especially being able to rewrite incoming requests to simulate backend behaviour without the backend having to be in that particular state (or even exist!)

Designing a sustainable front-end toolset for FT.com

I'd share this article just for this quote alone (sorry non-UK people): "Our 'No next Next' tech strategy means we are continuously replacing parts of our stack (like the Ship of Theseus or The Sugababes)"

Making microservices accessible

A great article on the accessibility pitfalls of using standalone services within an organisation. The blog post focuses on government but this also applies to commercial sites that redirect you to a separate 'account' or 'auth' service/application to log in.


I also tweet these as I find them (@philw_) and post them on my personal site at https://wolstenhol.me/#reading.

What were your favourites? Was there anything you found useful?

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