Link Collection Zero

Since I have been a bit busy lately (and sure yeah a bit procrastinatey, lets face it), rather than finishing up any of the several million draft posts I have in here, here are some links and things I have been reading or playing lately that I think more people should know about:

Quantity queries

I am SUPER DIGGING Heydon Pickering's amazing talk 'Solving problems with selectors'.

There is an A List Apart article on quantity queries that goes with it as the slides might not make much sense if you weren't at Responsive Day Out. Though the pictures are still very good.

The key to my understanding of the concept was in the section on 'Evaluating divisibility'. Use your arrow keys to flip back and forth. Isn't that just great? I have a little side project on where I'm thinking of putting them to good use. I love it. (Why didn't I think of this!? In 2011?!)

Futurelearn's CSS

Speaking of great, I also loved James Mockett's Futurelearn blog post on How they write CSS and their plans for the future.

RDO highlight

Of course, the best talk of the day at Responsive Day Out was Alla Kholmatova talking about the pattern library at Futurelearn, the journey we went on creating it and what they've been doing to improve it since I left! You can get the audio of Alla's talk on the RDO site. I've been using it as a good example at other companies and it's so lovely to see it being improved and worked on, and being useful.

(We all went out for an absolutely STUNNING meal afterwards at vegetarian restaurant Terre à Terre on Gabor's recommendation. Even the meat-eaters among us were blown away by the amazing taste and presentation of not just tofu. Really interesting stuff, like how do you even stuff a potato anyway? I mean, a new potato, so it looks like you haven't cut it open and you get a nice pestoey surprise. Very clever. (Hey, I already like vegetables, but even more so like this). It was really nice to catch up and I had a lovely day & evening.

Lifeline...

... just got a bit exciting! I like how Taylor is a boy to my (male) partner and a girl to me. Reminds me of the interactive fiction show my Dad wrote for Channel Cyberia back in the day - in fact I'm tempted to suggest we make one together. I love the simplicity of the interface (it's basically a text adventure) so it can't be that hard, right?