Article Roundup - Week of 5/08/2017

A11Y Style Guide
Accessibility isn’t very fun, but it is a necessary task when designing a site. This is a beautiful style guide showing many of the things that should be done to make your site functional for people who use screen readers and other assistive technologies.

45% Faster React Functional Components, Now
If you haven’t work with React this won’t make much sense, but here goes. React components generally have state, but you can create functional (stateless) components too. That sounds great, but the stateless components are just wrapped in a stateful component for now. Which means you don’t get much performance improvement. In the future that will be changed, but with one small change you can get the performance without waiting.

pkg
With pkg you can turn your Node application into an executable. This is great if you don’t want to deal with installing a ton of dependencies or you want to provide an easy to run version of your code. It can target multiple versions of node, multiple operating systems, and multiple processor architectures.

Design avatars that make sense — and be more inclusive in the process
Why does Github give everyone a generated avatar to start with? Why did Google switch to using initials? What is with this monster avatars? It’s all about being inclusive. I highly recommend this article. Even if the information is not new to you it provides good food for thought.

It’s not you, it’s your form
Have you ever had to fill out a form online and it was absolutely awful? Let’s all change that. A form shouldn’t be slapped together. It is often the first interaction your user has with you. Make it a pleasant one.

The Springer Nature Front-End Playbook
I always like seeing how other people do things. This is a developer playbook. It outlines the process, style, and tools of a particular group.

A Modern Front-End Workflow – Umar Hansa | Render 2017
A nice run through of tools for working with the frontend. A lot of it revolves around Chrome’s DevTools and features that are still experimental.

Async functions - making promises friendly
Async functions and promises go hand-in-hand. This is probably one of the better explanations of async functions I have come across. If you deal with JavaScript promises I recommend reading this.