This online course from Sara looks superb!
I know how overwhelming and even frustrating accessibility may feel at first. But I promise you, accessibility isn’t always as hard as it seems (especially if you know where and when to start!). And my goal with this course is to make it friendlier and more approachable.
Best of all, there’s $100 off if you sign up now—that’s a 25% saving.
New from Mr. Vanilla JS himself, Chris Ferdinandi:
A learning space for people who hate the complexity of modern web development.
It’ll be $29 a month or $299 a year (giving you two months worth for free).
This is a great (free!) course on learning CSS from the basics up. Nicely-pitched explanations with plenty of examples.
Scott is brilliant, therefore by the transitive property, his course on web performance must also be brilliant.
You know that this online course from Scott is going to be excellent—get in there!
Our insular discourse, the way we’ve jealously protected the language and tools of design, the way we’ve focused so much on the “genius designer”… these behaviors have all worked against our own interests.
Khoi on design thinking and the democratisation of design.
Any embrace of design by non-designers is a good thing, and design thinking qualifies here. The reason for this is that when that happens, it means our language, the vocabulary of design, is broadening to the rest of the world.
This JavaScript training course looks like it’s really well planned to take you from zero to hero—there’s a whole module on progressive enhancement.
Here’s a great free curriculum for teaching HTML and CSS.
This is a free online video course recorded by Jake a couple of years back. It’s got a really good step-by-step introduction to service workers, delivered in Jake’s typically witty way. Some of the details are a bit out of date, and I must admit that I bailed when it got to IndexedDB, but I highly recommend giving this a go.
There’s also a free course on web accessibility I’m planning to check out.
A proposed syllabus for critical thinking: Calling Bullshit in the Age of Big Data.
Our aim in this course is to teach you how to think critically about the data and models that constitute evidence in the social and natural sciences.
Practical tools and case studies are also provided.
Online discourse:
Wouldn’t it be nice if we had an x-ray that could peer into the true intention behind words on a screen? Sadly we don’t have that x-ray yet (for most of humanity’s existence, we had body language to enrich our words and enhance understanding, but we live in interesting times where so much, perhaps even the majority, of our communication lacks body language) and so we have to be mindful of how our words might be perceived, and what the ramifications of publishing them might be. That’s not to say we should hold off completely, but it does mean we should be mindful if we’re to be most effective.
There’s something quite Kafkaesque about reading through the comments on Jeff Atwood’s request for an alternative to Ember.js …for rendering some text on a screen.
Every now and then someone pipes up with “server-rendered HTML?”, there’s a pause, and then a response of “naahhhhh.”
Surreal.
When I wrote about Reddit and Hacker News, criticising their lack of moderation, civility, and basic decency, many people (invariably men) responded in defence of Reddit. Nobody defended Hacker News. Nobody.
Oh, and all of you people (men) defending Reddit? Here’s your party line …I find it abhorrent.
Alex’s response to my post about Web Components, in which he ignores my excitement and dismisses my concerns as “piffle and tosh.”
I gotta say: I think cautious optimism and nervous excitement are healthy attitudes to have about any technology. For Alex to dismiss them so summarily makes me even more worried. Apparently you’re either with Web Components or you’re against them. Heaven forbid that you might voice any doubts or suggest any grey areas.
The beatings will continue until morale improves.