Harry Roberts, of CSS Wizardy:

It’s hard, if not impossible, to deny that performance is by far one of the most critical aspects of any decent web project, be it a small portfolio site, a mobile-first web app, right through to a full-scale ecommerce project. Studies, articles and personal experience all tell us that fast is best.

A good primer on frontend performance, for the uninitiated.

Dr. Dobbs, on his website (emphasis mine):

However, during the last 24 months, the sheer volume of change in the computing paradigm has been so great that programming has felt its imprint right away. Multiple programming paradigms are changing simultaneously: the ubiquity of mobile apps; the enormous rise of HTML and JavaScript front-ends; and the advent of big data.

Good to know I’m not the only one who feels like they’re drinking from the firehouse lately.

Emily Lewis writing on Web Standards Sherpa about CSS Style:

When we think of CSS, we naturally think of styles. Styles to control layout, color and typography. Even styles to progressively enhance our user experience.

Lately, when I’m writing my CSS, I’m thinking about a different kind of style: the style I use to actually write my CSS … more specifically, my selectors.

Some good tips, as things to avoid that Emily noted, that are worth repeating here:

• Don’t add a tag name to your id selectors. ids should be unique, so qualifying it with a tag (e.g. h2#title) is unnecessary and can slow browser matching.
• Avoid complex selectors. Not only can they be a performance hit, but they can make dealing with specificity far more difficult than need be. I try to keep my selectors to a maximum of three.
• If you are having problems with specificity, don’t turn to !important. This can not only lead to duplicate markup, but becomes a headache for future maintenance.

Jeremy Ashkenas writes on his blog:

What’s the on roadmap for Backbone.js beyond 1.0?

The essential premise at the heart of Backbone has always been to try and discover the minimal set of data-structuring (Models and Collections) and user interface (Views and URLs) primitives that are useful when building web applications with JavaScript. We’re going to keep hunting for that specific type of feature, and if you think that you’ve found one, please send it on in. In an ecosystem where overarching, decides-everything-for-you frameworks are commonplace, and many libraries require your site to be restructured to suit their look, feel, and default behavior — Backbone should continue to be a tool that gives you the freedom to design the full experience of your web application.

Suffice to say, over the past 2 and a half years, what’s been built with Backbone has surpassed our wildest expectations. I’m looking forward to being surprised by more great apps.

Whenever the “Which Javascript MVC framework should I use?” question comes up, Backbone.js is always near the top of the list. Glad to see that they’ve reached a milestone in development.

From Hacker News:

Hacker News-alike site for JS professionals (echojs.com)

Looks like a great resource, this new Echo JS site. Bookmarked.

From the homepage:

Creating, testing and maintaining a large JavaScript code base is not easy — especially since great resources on how to do this are hard to find. This page is a collection of the best articles, videos and presentations we’ve found on the topic.

I’m in. Superhero.js: Go for the content, stay on the site for the great design, and responsive layout. Nice art-directed single-page site, with great content for those interested in working with large JavaScript code bases. You can also subscribe to their newsletter at the bottom of the page for updates.

A great interactive free learning course for beginners coming to jQuery. It’s a small portion of Code School, which looks like a reputable learning resource. Similar to Code Academy, or treehouse. It’s fascinating to see the online education space for frontend engineering to get some quality competitors.

Mark Otto:

Preboot is a comprehensive and flexible collection of LESS utilities. Its original variables and mixins became the precursor to Bootstrap. Since then, it’s all come full circle.

If you’re a fan of LESS, the CSS preprocessor, then this is a good collection of LESS goodies to use in your next project. It’s the precursor to Twitter Bootstrap, hence the name.

Imran Jafri on Medium:

Front-end development or roughly HTML/CSS/jQuery was considered a petty job. But in today’s modern web, it’s as much complicated as server-side scripting languages.

So true. Probably the main reason I started this site. This specialization called Front end development is complex, and deserves that kind of respect.

From Thomas Fuchs, the author of Zepto.js, and script.aculo.us :

Microjs.com helps you discover the most compact-but-powerful microframeworks, and makes it easy for you to pick one that’ll work for you.

Pretty nifty collection of JavaScript micro-frameworks, not to mention cool design and organization.