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CSS in React Server ComponentsUnderstanding the future of CSS-in-JS and React IntroductionOn May 4th, 2023, Vercel announced the stable release of Next 13.4, becoming the first React framework to be built on top of React Server Components. This is a big deal! RSC (React Server Components) gives us an official way to write server-exclusive code in React. It opens a lot of interesting new doors. But

IntroductionFor a long time, centering an element within its parent was a surprisingly tricky thing to do. As CSS has evolved, we've been granted more and more tools we can use to solve this problem. These days, we're spoiled for choice! I decided to create this tutorial to help you understand the trade-offs between different approaches, and to give you an arsenal of strategies you can use, to han

IntroductionCSS Grid is one of the most amazing parts of the CSS language. It gives us a ton of new tools we can use to create sophisticated and fluid layouts. It's also surprisingly complex. It took me quite a while to truly become comfortable with CSS Grid! In this tutorial, I'm going to share the biggest 💡 lightbulb moments I've had in my own journey with CSS Grid. You'll learn the fundamental

IntroductionSo, here's something that makes me feel old: React celebrated its 10th birthday this year! In the decade since React was first introduced to a bewildered dev community, it’s gone through several evolutions. The React team has not been shy when it comes to radical changes: if they discover a better solution to a problem, they'll run with it. A couple of months ago, the React team unveil

Large language models like GPT-4 are becoming increasingly capable, at an alarming rate. Within a couple of years, we won't need developers any more! …Or at least, that's the narrative going viral on Twitter. I'm much more optimistic about what these AI advancements mean for the future of software development. Keep reading.

CSS gives us so many options when it comes to expressing color—we can use hex codes, rgb, hsl, and more. Which option should we choose? This turns out to be a surprisingly important decision! In this article, we'll take a tour of color formats in CSS, and see which option will serve us best. Keep reading.

IntroductionFlexbox is a remarkably powerful layout mode. When we truly understand how it works, we can build dynamic layouts that respond automatically, rearranging themselves as-needed. For example, check this out: This demo is heavily inspired by Adam Argyle’s incredible “4 layouts for the price of 1” codepen. It uses no media/container queries. Instead of setting arbitrary breakpoints, it uses

What's the deal with these two hooks?! Lots of devs find them confusing, for a whole host of reasons. In this tutorial, we'll dig deep and understand what they do, why they're useful, and how to get the most out of them. Keep reading.

IntroductionSo, I'll be honest. I had been working professionally with React for years without really understanding how React's re-rendering process worked. 😅 I think this is true for lots of React developers. We understand enough to get by, but if you ask a group of React developers a question like “What triggers a re-render in React?”, you'll likely get a handful of different hand-wavy answers.

IntroductionShould I use pixels or ems/rems?!This is a question I hear a lot. Often with a dollop of anxiety or frustration behind the words. 😅 It's an emotionally-charged question because there are a lot of conflicting opinions out there, and it can be overwhelming. Maybe you've heard that rems are better for accessibility. Or maybe you've heard that the problem is fixed and pixels are fine? The

IntroductionModern front-end frameworks like React, Angular, and Vue rely heavily on the terminal. If you're not comfortable with command line interfaces, you'll struggle to run a local development server or build your application! There's something deeply ironic about this. Our whole job is to build graphical user interfaces, but the tools we use in our development are mostly command-line based!

Understanding Layout AlgorithmsThe mental model shift that makes CSS more intuitive A few years ago, I had a Eureka! moment with CSS. Up until that moment, I had been learning CSS by focusing on the properties and values we write, things like z-index: 10 or justify-content: center. I figured that if I understood broadly what each property did, I'd have a deep understanding of the language as a who

IntroductionReact is famously unopinionated when it comes to file/directory structure. How should you structure the files and directories in your applications? Well, there is no one “right” way, but I've tried lots of different approaches in the 7+ years I've been using React, and I've iterated my way to a solution I'm really happy with. In this blog post, I'll share the structure I use across all

So here's a CSS linear gradient, going from pure yellow to pure blue: Notice that it gets kinda washed out and muddy in the middle there? This is what Erik Kennedy has coined the “gray dead zone”. Unless you're really careful when selecting colors for your gradients, you'll often wind up with a desaturated midsection in your CSS gradients. As it turns out, though, we can absolutely avoid the gray

IntroductionWhenever I start a new project, the first order of business is to sand down some of the rough edges in the CSS language. I do this with a functional set of custom baseline styles. For a long time, I used Eric Meyer's famous CSS Reset. It's a solid chunk of CSS, but it's a bit long in the tooth at this point; it hasn't been updated in more than a decade, and a lot has changed since then

:root { --shadow-color: 286deg 36% 56%; --shadow-elevation-low: 0.3px 0.5px 0.7px hsl(var(--shadow-color) / 0.34), 0.4px 0.8px 1px -1.2px hsl(var(--shadow-color) / 0.34), 1px 2px 2.5px -2.5px hsl(var(--shadow-color) / 0.34); --shadow-elevation-medium: 0.3px 0.5px 0.7px hsl(var(--shadow-color) / 0.36), 0.8px 1.6px 2px -0.8px hsl(var(--shadow-color) / 0.36), 2.1px 4.1px 5.2px -1.7px hsl(var(--shadow

IntroductionIn my humble opinion, the best websites and web applications have a tangible “real” quality to them. There are lots of factors involved to achieve this quality, but shadows are a critical ingredient. When I look around the web, though, it's clear that most shadows aren't as rich as they could be. The web is covered in fuzzy grey boxes that don't really look much like shadows. In this t

IntroductionLike so many things in CSS, the transform property is surprisingly remarkable. At first glance, it may seem like a pretty niche thing. How often do we need to rotate or skew something, after all? And yet, the more I learn about transform, the more I find myself taking advantage of it. In my blog's codebase, I've used the transform property more than 350 times! In this blog post, we're

When I first started using styled-components, it seemed like magic ✨. Somehow, using an obscure half-string-half-function syntax, the tool was able to take some arbitrary CSS and assign it to a React component, bypassing the CSS selectors we've always used. Like so many devs, I learned how to use styled-components, but without really understanding what was going on under the hood. Knowing how it w

Filed underGeneraloninApril 20th, 2021.Apr 2021.Last updatedoninMarch 21st, 2024.Mar 2024. If you've been thinking about creating a dev blog for yourself, you've probably been a bit overwhelmed by the number of tools and technologies. We live in an era of abundance, and there are a lot of options. When I was building this blog, my biggest priority was to find a solution that would let me embed tot

The styled-components Happy PathMy personal suite of “best practices” For a few years now, my #1 favourite tool for managing CSS in React apps has been 💅 styled-components. It's a wonderful tool. In many ways, it's changed how I think about CSS architecture, and has helped me keep my codebase clean and modular, just like React! It shares something else in common with React: developers often disli

In the late 90s, if you were to pop open the source of a typical website, you'd likely encounter this curious fella: CSS didn't exist yet, and web layouts were built using HTML tables. Tables were finnicky, and an empty cell would collapse and break the layout, so developers would toss this image into a table cell to keep it open. GIFs were used because GIFs were the only image format that support

Instead of sitting 48px apart, their 24px margins merge together, occupying the same space! This idea might sound simple, but if you've been writing CSS for a while, you've almost certainly been surprised when margins either don't collapse, or they collapse in weird and unexpected ways. In real-world projects, all kinds of circumstances can complicate matters. The good news is that once we underst