80 Percent of Online Retailer Sites Are Fake

As Christmas season comes around people will be preparing to do quite a bit of shopping in order to prepare for the holidays. Since we are living in a modern day and age, the fact of the matter is that most people are going to be doing this shopping online. Now, if you are planning to shop online...

[ This is a content summary only. Visit our website https://ift.tt/1b4YgHQ for full links, other content, and more! ]

by Zia Muhammad via Digital Information World

Web Design Weekly #372

Headlines

Don’t Serve Burnt Pizza

When you ship a minimum viable product you risk not actually testing your product, but rather a poor or flawed version of it. A bit of a topical point but I feel Jiaona Zhang nails it. (firstround.com)

Opening up the data behind your design systems (figma.com)

Sponsor Web Design Weekly and reach over 30,142 passionate designers and developers

Articles

No, Absolutely Not

Robin Rendle has some wise words around the difference between a junior and senior front-end developer. Worth a read as he has some pretty solid points. (css-tricks.com)

Design APIs: The Evolution of Design Systems

As the needs of software-driven businesses grow even larger, design systems are evolving — they are beginning to look and work like APIs. Matthew Strom explains. (matthewstrom.com)

Thinking about color

A deep dive into how the talented Cloudflare team went about reworking the use of colour within their products. (cloudflare.design)

Build your own React

Incase you have lots of free time you might want to rewrite React from scratch. Rodrigo Pombo gives a step by step guide. It follows the architecture from the real React code. In all seriousness, some great insights in this. (pomb.us)

How Discord achieves native iOS performance with React Native (discordapp.com)

Tools / Resources

FAB – Frontend Application Bundles

FABs are a compile target for frontend applications. They unify static sites, single page applications as well as server-rendered JavaScript UIs in one bundle format, allowing instant deployment to a wide range of hosting platforms. (fab.dev)

Facebook and Microsoft Partnering on Remote Development

In teaming with Microsoft, Facebook are aiming to further improve remote development extensions, with a focus on enabling engineers to do remote development at scale with Visual Studio Code. (developers.facebook.com)

How Do You Remove Unused CSS From a Site?

So you have a CSS bloat issue and you are thinking of removing unused code. How do you go about it? Well Chris Coyier puts some ideas on the table to help you make that decision. (css-tricks.com)

Miro

Where distributed teams work together via an online whiteboard and collaboration platform. (miro.com)

Step by step guide to becoming a modern Frontend developer (roadmap.sh)

Console cheat sheet for JavaScript developers (gitconnected.com)

The state of web fonts in 2019 (httparchive.org)

What Are Design Tokens? (smashingmagazine.com)

Inspiration

Scott Bolinger on WordPress and the future of the independent developer (poststatus.com)

Inspirational Websites (tympanus.net)

Jobs

Frontend Software Engineer at Canva

Our culture is unlike anywhere else and our offices are designed and constantly improved to let you do your best work. At Canva you can be part of a company that is growing rapidly, building a product that users really love. Just check out our Twitter stream. (canva.com)

Senior UI/UX Designer at Hello Design

Hello Design is looking for an experienced Senior UI/UX Designer to make the future with us. You will define user experiences and design cutting-edge interfaces for web and other interactive mediums from concept through creation. (hellodesign.com)

Need to find passionate developers or designers? Why not advertise in the next newsletter

Last but not least…

Global Design Survey (dribbble.com)

The post Web Design Weekly #372 appeared first on Web Design Weekly.

by Jake Bresnehan via Web Design Weekly

Google Docs Now Lets You Add Different Page Numbers

The standard word processor for people that might want to write on a regular basis has always been Microsoft Word, but the fact of the matter is that over the past few years another real contender has been Google Docs which is a part of the overall G Suite tools most, which compete directly with...

[ This is a content summary only. Visit our website https://ift.tt/1b4YgHQ for full links, other content, and more! ]

by Zia Muhammad via Digital Information World

Remote Work: Tips, Tricks and Best Practices for Success

There are lots of advantages to working away from the office, both for developers and for the companies that employ them. Think about avoiding the daily commute, the cost of office space, the cost of living in or traveling to the city for rural or international workers, the inconvenience of office work for differently abled people or those with unusual family or life responsibilities, and the inflexibility of trying to keep traditional 9–5 hours as more and more of our workforce adapts to the gig economy by taking on second jobs or part-time side hustles.

Remote work can help address many of these difficulties while improving team transparency and putting the focus of work back on the reasons you were hired for your job in the first place. It also opens up a world of possibilities for companies, including broader recruitment opportunities, improved worker transparency, lower infrastructure costs, and more scalable business models based on actual worker productivity.

But working from home or from a co-working space can also present new challenges, and learning how to recognize them and overcome them can make the difference between a productive, happy work experience and endless hours of misery, loneliness, and frustration.

Think I’m being overdramatic? Let me explain.

I’ve had the experience of being the remote worker who didn’t think he needed to pay attention to interpersonal office dynamics, or keep track of his time and accomplishments. I’ve worked long into the evening because I didn’t notice when the work day ended. I’ve struggled with inefficient tools that might have worked fine in an office environment, but proved woefully inadequate when it came to remote collaboration.

So I’ve learned to cope with these issues myself, and for years I’ve been coaching engineering teams by working on-site, remotely, and in various combinations of the two. Depending on your situation, there are a number of useful tools, tricks, and fundamental practices that can make your remote working experience so much better than it is today — for yourself, your team, your manager, and your company.

Remote Self-management

For better or for worse, most of us are used to having a manager decide what our working hours are, where we’re going to sit, what equipment we’re going to use, and whom we’re going to collaborate with. That’s a luxury that comes with the convenience of working together in a shared space, where management can supervise and coordinate our efforts. It may not always feel luxurious, but you may well find yourself missing the support of an attentive manager when you start working from home and realize you have to make these decisions for yourself.

Set a Schedule and Stick to It!

The first tip I offer for anyone starting out a remote role is to establish the hours you’re going to work, and stick to those hours.

It’s not as easy as it sounds. When you’re working from home, you won’t have all of the little cues that come with office life to tell you when to pause for lunch, when to take a break, and when to stop working for the day. Working from a co-working space or a coffee shop can help, but it’s not the same as having your colleagues around you to exert that not-so-subtle social pressure. What’s more, if you start to feel anxious about whether people at the office know how hard you’re working, you may find yourself wanting to compensate by putting in a few extra hours.

Some people find that it's easier to compartmentalize remote work by using a co-working space, simulating the effect of going out to work and then coming back at the end of the day. If you're working from home, your professional and personal lives can start to blend. You’re going to find yourself washing the dishes, feeding the cat, answering the telephone, and attending to all the other chores that crop up in your living space. And you know what? That’s just fine! … as long as it doesn't start to interfere with your productivity on the job.

Decide up front on your morning and afternoon work hours and respect them. Write them down somewhere you won’t forget to see them, so you can’t pretend you don’t know what they are. The same advice applies to teams working together in an office or people using co-working spaces, but it’s even more critical if you're working from home.

Let Everyone Know When and Where You'll Be Working

Building on the theme of scheduling, a remote worker needs to let anyone who works with them know how to get in touch, and may need to encourage that kind of contact regularly. Remote workers can feel isolated or even excluded — left out of important decisions because people at the office simply forgot about them. It's up to the person who’s working off site to make their existence known throughout the work day, and to advocate for visibility.

This can be easier said than done. One of the advantages of remote work is the ability to focus without interruption for extended periods. Sometimes just the knowledge that the bubble of isolation can be broken is enough to foster distraction and make it harder to concentrate. This can make the experience draining and unproductive, and negate most of the advantages.

It's not a bad idea to start off just using email to stay in touch with the team for typical group communications. And as a personal productivity tip, try to establish set times during the day to check that email — perhaps three or so over the course of a day. Checking your email constantly can establish a pattern of behavior that puts your attention at the mercy of anyone who wants to reach out to you for anything at any time. Email is asynchronous by nature, so use that to your advantage when you're working from home.

Apart from direct communication, it's good to get your team using a messaging tool such as Slack or HipChat. These services can run in the background on every team member's computer, or even on their mobile devices, providing a shared space for inter-team, intra-team, and cross-functional messaging. There are secure ways for companies to make services like these available for sensitive internal communications, and they can work both on site and off site, establishing virtual shared message boards to keep teams aligned.

The post Remote Work: Tips, Tricks and Best Practices for Success appeared first on SitePoint.

by M. David Green via SitePoint

After “Close Friends” Feature on Instagram, Facebook is now Testing “Favorites” Option for Stories

Many people use stories option on both Facebook and Instagram, however, many people avoid using it since stories become visible to all of the users. To cater to this need of users, Instagram introduced a new “close friends” feature that enables users to let their stories be visible to only those...

[ This is a content summary only. Visit our website https://ift.tt/1b4YgHQ for full links, other content, and more! ]

by Madiha via Digital Information World

Chrome App has Finally Incorporated Google Lens into its Image Search!

Google Lens hasn’t been shy of making its presence felt in different apps and services owned by the tech giant. A way to transmit photos via Lens’ smart system has been incorporated into (Google) Assistant, Photos, Images and Camera. Courtesy of this smart system, the items in a particular image...

[ This is a content summary only. Visit our website https://ift.tt/1b4YgHQ for full links, other content, and more! ]

by Ali Siddiqui via Digital Information World

Microsoft's Bing Introduces Improved AI system Integration in its Image Search

Bing has announced new AI-based improvements in its search engine, especially in the image search section. The new improvements will allow multi-granularity matches, better understanding of user queries, images, webpages and the link between them. Somewhat like Google, Microsoft now integrated...

[ This is a content summary only. Visit our website https://ift.tt/1b4YgHQ for full links, other content, and more! ]

by Aqsa Rasool via Digital Information World