found drama

• Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem
  

  Written by Yiren Lu for NYTimes.com; such a great piece. This pull quote doesn't quite summarize it, but it comes close:

  Since the acquisition, Biswas, who is 32, has fought to retain the spirit of the vanguard, but his struggle reveals an implicit fear — that young engineers might be willing to work at Meraki but not at Cisco (because it’s too big and fusty), or that clients might be willing to buy from Cisco but not Meraki (because they don’t really trust start-ups).

  Lu does a fantastic job of capturing the conflicts and paradoxes that are bound up in the broader discourse that surrounds this. (And as an aside, I was pleased to see that Lu ended it with a bit of an optimistic note since there's so much temptation to emphasize the doom-and-gloom here.)

  (tagged: start-ups innovation Silicon Valley )
• Lesser-Known JavaScript Debugging Techniques
  Amjad Masad with a write-up of a few clever JavaScript debugging techniques that are pretty amazing. Added bonus: debug_utils on Github.
  (tagged: JavaScript debugging )
• CSS performance revisited: selectors, bloat and expensive styles
  Really interesting research results by Ben Frain. The short version seems to be that you shouldn't worry about your selectors (they rarely make a difference) but be mindful of what's going on { inside the braces }. The post reminds me a bit of Nicole Sullivan's 2012 CSS Summit talk where she talked about using Chrome DevTools to chase down rendering performance bottlenecks. (Short version there: profile! profile! profile! because the problems are almost never what you think they are.) And/but, this seemingly throwaway line caught my attention:

  Also be aware that when I performed the test I discarded the first couple of results as they tended to be unusually high in some browsers.

  If this were consistently true, and it looked like there were some kind of priming effect happening, wouldn't that be something you want to know more about?

  (tagged: CSS performance Ben Frain )
• ∞ things I didn’t know about HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
  Mathias Bynens' Kod.io 2014 presentation. The whole thing is fantastic, but slide #98 is far and away my favorite.
  (tagged: HTML CSS JavaScript lolwut )
• Sass 3.3 is Released
  Tl;dr: they've added maps, source maps, more flexibility to the parent selector operator, and fixed some pernicious bugs with variable scoping.
  (tagged: Sass SCSS CSS )

About Rob Friesel