Gnarly Learnings from October

We love reading, watching, and listening to constantly update our skills andlearn new perspectives. Here are some of the exciting pieces we learned fromthis month.

Web Accessibility Guidelines: Modals (Dialog Windows)

Accessibility on the Web is important for everyone, but some things, like modal windows,just don't seem like they can be. Well, here is a good rundown of how to make sure yourmarkup changes so all the accessibility-related attributes get set up in a way to highlightthe content you want the user to focus on, while also lessening their attention on thecontent they don't need to care about right in that second.

Better StimulusJS

Patterns are hard! StimulusJS does a lot to streamline and simplify the work ofimplementing strong, consistent patterns using modern JS, but it's still (VERY)possible to write yourself into a corner. This site provides clear, accessibleStimulus patterns with proven utility, and also demonstrates some less-than-idealapproaches. By explaining issues, providing links, and demonstrating best practices,it does a lot to make Stimulus more enjoyable to write.

Why We Killed Our End-to-End Test Suite

We enjoy learning about the challenges larger organizations encounter within their engineering team.In this post, Nubank quantifies their upcoming end-to-end testing challenges andthen built out an ambitious solution by using contracts. While this approach isn'tpractical for every project, it illustrates some pain points they ran into and goesinto detail on how they attempted to solve them. Nubank also happens to have aworld class engineering team so any solution they propose is likely going to belegit and worth a read!

How We Got to LiveView

Even if, and perhaps especially if, you haven't followed the progression of thePhoenix web framework built on top of the Elixir programming language, trackingthe evolution of the framework as summarized to date by its creator is aninteresting read.

Advanced Active Record: Using Subqueries in Rails

Even though we may spend more time utilizing ORMs and other abstractions tohandle accessing data from our database, it's important to consider how thosetools translate what we're asking them to do into SQL and determine if that isdoing that in the way we'd expect.

Modern Unix

If you're searching to replace a tool that you wish was just a little differentor better, or you're just interested in perusing different command-line toolsthat exist, this README has a great summary.

Tips for creating accessible SVGs

Adding graphics to UIs help bring them to life. SVGs are a great way to do this because the graphic will stay sharp if a user needs to view the page zoomed in. This article goes over some accessibility and usability considerations when using SVGs to ensure all users can get the most out of your UI.

3 TypeScript Tricks I wish I knew when I learned TypeScript

Here at The Gnar Company, we love TypeScript and the security it provides in our applications. This article details 3 tricks (or treats) that we would have loved to have known when we first started working with TypeScript. Readonly was especially interesting because it was new to many of us.

Contributors

• Ethan Fertsch
• Jon Yurek
• Kevin Murphy
• Nick Maloney
• Nick Marshall
• Will Mahoney

Learn more about how The Gnar builds software.