Zines about computer science! Each zine focuses on one concept & is filled with comics, diagrams, stories, examples, and exercises.

Some readers, who are not familiar with our School of Strength, the system, and the exercises, may not know all the drills, which are mentioned in the chapter. They can of course spend some time trying to find them on YouTube, but what they find may not necessarily be exemplary of what we do in StrongFirst.

To make life easier (regarding searching for info, not practicing), my wife Justyna and I created a short overview video of all the exercises featured in Pavel’s chapter.

A design system is a collection of documentation on principles and best practices, that helps guide a team to build digital products. They are often embodied in UI libraries and pattern libraries, but can extend to include guides on other areas such as 'Voice and Tone'.

Voice and Tone

Great example including branding

The Basics of Node-KSS

To achieve our goals of a platform agnostic, low-friction style guide, we landed on kss-node, which is itself a Node.js implementation of Knyle Style Sheets (KSS), a Ruby library that:

... provides a methodology for writing maintainable, documented CSS within a team. Specifically, KSS is a documentation specification and styleguide format.

The basic principle is that your style guide is generated via comments you create in your CSS, SCSS, Sass, LESS, etc.

Use velocity.js instead!

Velocity.js is a free, lightweight library that you should be using - developer Neal O'Grady gets you started.

Secret to cohesive color schemes: pick a bunch of colors you want to do (purple, blue, etc like you did here), then pick an overall color (let's say orange, for playfulness) that you want to tint everything towards... Overlay the "overall color" (or soft light, or whatever blending mode depending on if you want darker or lighter colors) and play with the opacity till you get something you can work with.

I did #ff9c00 set to Overlay and opacity set to 25% over your original choices to get this scheme.

In September 2012, I had two courses of computer graphics behind me and had a lot of spare time. So I got an idea to make a simple web-based photo editor. I was working on it for 3 months in 2012 and 2 months during this summer, and I really enjoyed it! :) I learned many new things and realised, that it is not going to be as easy as I expected.

A fun and colorful explanation of how DNS works.

Hey there! We made this comic to explain what happens when you type a website address in your browser.

Almost five years ago, I had the honor of writing a post on Smashing Magazine about my Photoshop panel GuideGuide. Since then it has seen wild success as the most installed third-party Photoshop extension, an achievement I’m quite proud. In that time, I’ve added some powerful features and, most recently, expanded it to Illustrator. This post will give you a taste of how GuideGuide can change the way you use guides in Photoshop and Illustrator.

There’s more to spaces than the key you instinctively hit between words with one of your thumbs. Let’s find out what other space characters there are, what their heritage is, and how they can be useful today.

Original dissertation

For the last few years, whenever somebody wants to start building an HTTP API, they pretty much exclusively use REST as the go-to architectural style, over alternative approaches such as XML-RPC, SOAP and JSON-RPC. REST is made out by many to be ultimately superior to the other “RPC-based” approaches, which is a bit misleading because they are just different.

While it's really hard to immediately win over a crowd, as a speaker it's really easy to lose the room within the first minutes of your presentation.

To make sure you don't lose your audience I asked Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, accomplished speaker and founder of TwitterCounter and The Next Web, for some of the things you should never say during your presentations.

Using Prototypes

You can think of the prototype mechanisms as providing some sort of inheritance - but it certainly doesn't bring with it any of the other pillars of OOP, encapsulation and polymorphism say. It is a much simpler and much more direct mechanism to make code sharing possible.

If you have a single object then there isn't much practical advantage in designing a prototype object for it. On the other hand having a prototype object with all of the methods that the object is using does provide an organization. The object then has just the instance variables and the methods are all provided by the prototype. If things change and you need a second object, or more objects, then the prototype provides an easy solution.