Matt Reich

Development

The Colors of Tailwind CSS: Management, Customization, and Arbitrary Values

Tailwind CSS, a utility-first CSS framework, has caught the attention of web developers with its design simplicity and efficiency. One feature that stands out is how it handles colors — offering an extensive palette that is customizable and conveniently incorporated directly into HTML.

Development

Exploring Tailwind CSS: Balancing Utility-First Benefits and Concerns

In the ever-evolving landscape of web development, we frequently encounter new tools and frameworks claiming to offer improved solutions for designing websites. Among these, Tailwind CSS, with its utility-first perspective, has managed to draw significant attention lately.

Development

"Rendering" Frameworks

The State of Javascript 2022 came out just a bit ago. Lots of interesting tidbits in there, but one I think is particularly interesting to call out is this whole section on "Rendering Frameworks." I'm guessing not everyone knows what those are so thought I'd do a quick explainer.

Development

Setting up Next.js Middleware with Page Extensions

Here's a quick tip for getting middleware working correctly with Next.js if you are setting custom pageExtensions in your next.config.js. I went in circles on this and just could not figure out what was going on so thought I'd share this to provide another avenue to folks discovering the solution

Development

Building a UI - Understand First

Building a UI is difficult. It's important to take some time early on to really understand what you're building. But how do you do that. I'll take you through my thought process.

Development

The Balance of 'doing' and 'knowing'

I've been noticing more and more recently how different types of work line up with how my brain works. Am I doing what want? Am I pushing against the current? And also paying attention to various tendencies in others as well. How can I balance this out.

Development

Python Debugging - Pretty Print Your Output

Finding it difficult to read output to the console when debugging? Try this quick tip for debugging in Python.

Development

Basic CSS Custom Property Use

After all these years I’ve still got a soft spot for CSS. I’ve been doing some poking around as I haven’t done a ton of CSS work recently and was feeling kind of out of the loop and a little itchy for some CSS fun. One of

Development

Use the Debugger!

Consider this a plug for using the good ol’ debugger as part of your Javascript workflow. We’ve all done the thing where we throw console.logs all over the place, but I’m here to tell you that the debuggercan be your friend. It's not that scary. Really. How

Development

Split Form inputs with a form ID

Did you know you can split your form inputs from the form and still submit a group of inputs together as the same form? Well, you can.

Personal

I’m Tired

Is it just me? Why am I so tired? Like all the time. Not exhausted, but always some flavor of tired. Physically. Mentally. Across the board tired. I am getting older. I suppose we all are. There’s probably something to that. We don’t typically get more energetic with

Development

PM2: Why Aren't My Environment Variables Being Set?

I recently ran into an issue when working on a deployment that ended up pretty clearly pointing to some issues with environment variables. The application is leveraging PM2. This is a really handy tool most of time time, but there is also a lot of hidden corners and black magic

Development

How to use Sass !default Values

One of the core selling points of writing styles using Sass (or SCSS) is being able to use variables. This isn’t as novel a concept now that we have CSS variables native to CSS, but it’s still a big part of Sass. They work as you’d expect

Development

Array Map

One of the core skill-sets a developer needs are some strategies to handling data. I don't know about you, but I feel like I'm always doing this type of work. Arrays are a super common structure we encounter a lot in JavaScript and ES6 brought along with it some pretty

Development

Sass Maps Are Cool

One of the most basic, yet most useful functions of a preprocessor like Sass is the ability to leverage variables in your stylesheets. This little feature can save you lots of time and shield you from many headaches. There are a variety of strategies for using variables, but we're not

Development

Google Structured Data Testing Tool

I've been spending a fair amount of time working with microdata recently and I've found this Google Structured Data Testing Tool an incredibly useful to have a tool to help me test whether or not my markup has been correctly written. This tool allows you to either analyze a URL

Development

Extending HTML5 — Microdata

This post from html5 Doctor is more than four years old, yet it's still one of the best resources on microdata that I’ve found. If you’re working on the web then you should have some knowledge of microdata. Essentially we’re able to add more semantic meaning to

Development

Google — About Microdata

Here’s a brief introduction to the concept of microdata from Google. It’s a nice resource with a handful of examples attached. SEO is definitely something that microdata improves so info coming straight from the horse’s mouth is something we should pay attention to.

Development

W3C Microdata Specification

Reading through a spec is not always super useful for actually understanding how to use it, but it isn’t a bad thing to have on hand.

Development

Getting Started with Schema.org

This is the where the microdata spec is documented. In general, I'd say that microdata can be a bit confusing to start, but this section of schema.org is quite insightful (as compared to the actual documentation). I highly recommend reading through this area before digging to far into microdata.

Don't Forget About Those HTML Elements

As much work as I do in HTML I often forget all the different elements we have at our disposal. I think the ones that are most often forgotten and also most useful are the inline elements. What's great about leveraging HTML elements is that you likely get a little

Personal

A Gigantic Thank You

I’m not completely sure where to put this post so for lack of a better place I’m just gonna set this thing down right here… If you know me at all it should be no secret that I just got married. Well, a week ago anyway. Leslie and

Personal

Today is a Big Day

Today is a big day. Today is the day that I get to marry my best friend. The last few years have been quite the whirlwind. A new home, a new career, basically a new life. There have been some rough days, but they’ve been completely outweighed by the