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General Musings with Kevin Powell
Canada
เข้าร่วมเมื่อ 3 ต.ค. 2023
I have a newsletter where I usually start things off with pretty long general musings before I share the content I've created in the previous week, as well as any interesting articles I've stumbled across in the last week.
Not everyone likes reading or having more emails in their inbox, though, so this podcast is an audio version of my newsletters. They aren't tutorials or technical explorations like my regular videos are, but instead tend to talk about a wide range of different topics, though they're generally at least somewhat related to front-end development in some way.
If you prefer, you can also get it as a regular podcast:
- Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/general-musings-with-kevin-powell/id1705267112
- Spotify: open.spotify.com/show/1scASfrTESkNKPffUJ4CPW
- RSS: feeds.zencastr.com/f/kdZb7wVs.rss
Not everyone likes reading or having more emails in their inbox, though, so this podcast is an audio version of my newsletters. They aren't tutorials or technical explorations like my regular videos are, but instead tend to talk about a wide range of different topics, though they're generally at least somewhat related to front-end development in some way.
If you prefer, you can also get it as a regular podcast:
- Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/general-musings-with-kevin-powell/id1705267112
- Spotify: open.spotify.com/show/1scASfrTESkNKPffUJ4CPW
- RSS: feeds.zencastr.com/f/kdZb7wVs.rss
Why You Should Learn CSS Grid Before Flexbox
This week I'll talk about why I believe Grid is simpler and more intuitive to learn first compared to Flexbox, exploring some common misconceptions, the complexity of Flexbox, and how learning Grid first sets you up for success.
My primary TH-cam channel where I teach frontend development, with a strong focus on CSS: youtube.com/@KevinPowell
✉ The written version of my newsletter: www.kevinpowell.co/newsletter
💬 Come hang out with other dev's in my Discord Community: discord.gg/nTYCvrK
Help support my channel
👨🎓 Get a course: www.kevinpowell.co/courses
👕 Buy a shirt: teespring.com/stores/making-the-internet-awesome
💖 Support me on Patreon: www.patreon.com/kevinpowell
My primary TH-cam channel where I teach frontend development, with a strong focus on CSS: youtube.com/@KevinPowell
✉ The written version of my newsletter: www.kevinpowell.co/newsletter
💬 Come hang out with other dev's in my Discord Community: discord.gg/nTYCvrK
Help support my channel
👨🎓 Get a course: www.kevinpowell.co/courses
👕 Buy a shirt: teespring.com/stores/making-the-internet-awesome
💖 Support me on Patreon: www.patreon.com/kevinpowell
มุมมอง: 934
วีดีโอ
I hate that people say stuff like this...
มุมมอง 4772 หลายเดือนก่อน
In this episode I dive into a topic sparked by a discussion in my Discord community where someone avoided learning grid because an experienced developer told them Flexbox can do it all. I share my thoughts on the impact of experienced developers' opinions shaping new learners' paths and emphasize the importance of embracing new tools to make our work easier. My primary TH-cam channel where I te...
Why does CSS keep getting more complex?
มุมมอง 5882 หลายเดือนก่อน
In this episode I delve into the evolving landscape of CSS, discussing why we have so many ways of doing "simple" things, like declaring colors. I emphasize the importance of a solid foundation in core languages, the necessity of continuous learning, and the value of practical experience in mastering front-end development. Despite the increasing complexity, I believe these advancements ultimate...
The slow adoption of new CSS features
มุมมอง 1.2K2 หลายเดือนก่อน
My experience talking at CSS Day 2024: www.kevinpowell.co/article/my-experience-talking-at-css-day-2024/ My experience attending CSS Day 2024: www.kevinpowell.co/article/my-experience-attending-css-day-2024/ Miriam's article I mention near the end: www.oddbird.net/2024/06/13/css-layout/ My primary TH-cam channel where I teach frontend development, with a strong focus on CSS: youtube.com/@KevinP...
A conversation with Clark Sell
มุมมอง 6232 หลายเดือนก่อน
Go here to enter your name to win a ticket to THAT Conference: forms.gle/vQPr383ZodpTqLq16 Or check out the site, and get your own ticket: thatconference.com/wi/ My primary TH-cam channel where I teach frontend development, with a strong focus on CSS: youtube.com/@KevinPowell ✉ The written version of my newsletter: www.kevinpowell.co/newsletter 💬 Come hang out with other dev's in my Discord Com...
I felt like I was taking a step backward
มุมมอง 3543 หลายเดือนก่อน
In today's episode, I talk about why I think it was so hard for me to make the decision to reduce my workload for TH-cam content, even though, looking at that decision now, it was a really good one! If you'd like a bit more context, I talked about the decision more in this video on my main channel: th-cam.com/video/S6Sh9byMpZQ/w-d-xo.html My primary TH-cam channel where I teach frontend develop...
A conversation with the person who inspired my channel, Travis Neilson
มุมมอง 1.2K3 หลายเดือนก่อน
I had the pleasure of sitting down and talking with Travis Neilson, who's channel @OfficialDevTips inspired me to start my own channel. Our conversation explores their experiences in the web development industry and their approach to creating content. We discuss the pressure to conform to trends and algorithms, the importance of staying true to oneself, and the challenges of keeping up with rap...
How much browser support is enough?
มุมมอง 5014 หลายเดือนก่อน
In this episode, I talk about how I've started to see Cascade Layers used in the wild, and I talk a bit about how much support is enough support before you start shipping features in production. My primary TH-cam channel where I teach frontend development, with a strong focus on CSS: youtube.com/@KevinPowell ✉ The written version of my newsletter: www.kevinpowell.co/newsletter 💬 Come hang out w...
It's easy to get stuck in our ways
มุมมอง 3984 หลายเดือนก่อน
The Veritasium video I mentioned: th-cam.com/video/rhgwIhB58PA/w-d-xo.html In this episode, Kevin discusses the importance of being open to different learning methods and not getting stuck in one's preferred way of learning. He emphasizes the debunking of the learning styles myth and advocates for a multimodal approach to learning. Kevin shares his personal experience of scheduling learning tim...
A conversation with Una Kravets: The rapid evolution of CSS and hobbies outside of work
มุมมอง 1.8K4 หลายเดือนก่อน
Una's Website: una.im/ All of Una's Talks: una.im/speaking/ Give Una a follow on Twitter: Una More on anchor positioning: 12daysofweb.dev/2023/anchor-positioning/ My primary TH-cam channel where I teach frontend development, with a strong focus on CSS: youtube.com/@KevinPowell ✉ The written version of my newsletter: www.kevinpowell.co/newsletter 💬 Come hang out with other dev's in m...
Answering your questions - Mailbag episode
มุมมอง 6314 หลายเดือนก่อน
In this episode, I answer questions from my audience, covering topics such as studying coding courses, the importance of consistency in learning, starting a blog, the relevance of pixel units in CSS, other programming languages Kevin knows, the use of utility classes vs custom classes, and subtle UI animations and page transitions. My primary TH-cam channel where I teach frontend development, w...
How teaching helped me become a better developer
มุมมอง 1.1K5 หลายเดือนก่อน
In this episode, Kevin discusses the benefits of teaching as a way to enhance your learning. He shares his personal experience of teaching and how it helped him deepen his understanding of CSS. Kevin emphasizes the importance of building a strong foundation and filling in knowledge gaps through teaching. He encourages listeners to start a blog or any public-facing platform to share their learni...
Is HTML the easiest, or hardest, to get right?
มุมมอง 2.6K5 หลายเดือนก่อน
The podcast is back! And in this episode, I talked about how the difficulties of semantic HTML. If you ask any front-end developer what the easiest language is between HTML, CSS, and JS, and everyone is going to say HTML, right? It’s funny though, because most of the things I hem and haw over the longest are often related to how to mark something up in my HTML. 🔗 Links My newsletter: kevinpowel...
Taking a short break
มุมมอง 5677 หลายเดือนก่อน
The year in review: kevin-powell.ck.page/posts/year-in-review-and-my-plans-for-2024 My primary TH-cam channel where I teach frontend development, with a strong focus on CSS: youtube.com/@kevinpowell ✉ The written version of my newsletter: www.kevinpowell.co/newsletter 💬 Come hang out with other dev's in my Discord Community: discord.gg/nTYCvrK Help support my channel 👨🎓 Get a course: www.kevin...
Quick one as we head into the holidays!
มุมมอง 1.1K8 หลายเดือนก่อน
A shorter episode than normal as we head into the holidays. Other awesome stuff around the web: - Stephanie Eckles 12-days of Web: 12daysofweb.dev/ - Oh No, Overflow! css-irl.info/oh-no-overflow/ - Observation: color-mix and currentColor: blog.kizu.dev/color-mix-current-color/ - Elevate your CSS debugging skills with these Chrome DevTools tricks in 2024: utilitybend.com/blog/elevate-your-css-de...
Don't rely on this non-existent optimization
มุมมอง 2.4K8 หลายเดือนก่อน
Don't rely on this non-existent optimization
It took me 6 years to realize I had a great idea
มุมมอง 1.9K9 หลายเดือนก่อน
It took me 6 years to realize I had a great idea
Two important dev skills that don’t get enough attention
มุมมอง 1.6K9 หลายเดือนก่อน
Two important dev skills that don’t get enough attention
Is 54 units too many units, or not enough?
มุมมอง 7959 หลายเดือนก่อน
Is 54 units too many units, or not enough?
How do you know you're ready to start applying for jobs?
มุมมอง 1.7K9 หลายเดือนก่อน
How do you know you're ready to start applying for jobs?
How people's struggles with CSS evolve over time
มุมมอง 1.6K9 หลายเดือนก่อน
How people's struggles with CSS evolve over time
Why is CSS so frustrating for so many people?
มุมมอง 1.9K10 หลายเดือนก่อน
Why is CSS so frustrating for so many people?
Keeping up momentum with self-paced learning
มุมมอง 1.7K10 หลายเดือนก่อน
Keeping up momentum with self-paced learning
My simple technique for a better work/life balance
มุมมอง 42911 หลายเดือนก่อน
My simple technique for a better work/life balance
How I use Notion to help stay on task
มุมมอง 29011 หลายเดือนก่อน
How I use Notion to help stay on task
can you please link the playlist of the interviews you mentioned? I didn't find it in the description! as always, great video Kevin.
I just went through a web and mobile Dev course bachelor year in a major uni in Scotland and the web guy thought us jQuery, echoing markup with PHP on the page one line at a time, and making layouts with tables. You don't talk to me about the way we're being taught and trigger my traumas 😭
I found grid to be more intuitive than flexbox and so, much easier to learn.
I will be brief, but I think that "solution based" resources are part of why people don't choose the right tools; I see this happening in Java code-bases, but much more frequently in CSS and Typescript ones. EDIT: I have to point, "unofficial solution based" resources; official sites often suggest the appropiate tools.
Hi Kevin, First of all big thanks for all of your content. You make me fall in love with CSS. You are truly a CSS wizard. Secondly, I tried to open podcast link from your newsletter but it doesn’t seem to work. I can access the website, but play button doesn’t work, and it shows that podcast is 00:00:01 (1 sec) long. Best, Rafal
Agree for the most part but have to say that `fr` has some unintuitive behavior, too.
When flexbox first came out I tried learning it and failed. I persevered and failed. Eventually I just went back to how I did stuff before. Then grid arrived and I thought gret, another thing to totally baffle me. I could not have been more wrong. Straight away it just clicked. took me a while to grasp some of the nuances but the basics just seemed natural. Since learning grid and thanks to your videos I've now got a very simple understanding of he basics of flexbox and am able to use it when appropriate but I'll always look to grid first to see if it is the best fit for what I need.
I really want to use grid more but I have yet to encounter a situation where it feels more straightforward (Not that there are no use cases, i just personally haven't run into them yet, i'm very new). The biggest draw for me towards the grid system is by far the fraction unit system even if it can be reproduced in flex, fr literally makes sense, there's no magic behind it, it just does what it says it does.
Great video. Social media can be quite polarised. It’s also important to consider a wider range of views if you’re looking for help and not just the initial responses. The expression.. “There are many ways to skin a cat..”
Thanks Kevin - always good to remind folks that what they say can have an impact other than what they think.
I fucking hate css
CSS unfortunately just doesn’t have the best fundamentals necessary for all our current use cases. And trying to tack on all these use cases is naturally going to complicate the language further and further. What’s best would be if we could just scrap it and start from scratch with a completely different mental model - but alas that is no longer possible - so we’re stuck with this for ever. Like we had media queries for responsive design - now we have container queries. We might get container style queries - but there’s also talk of `if` statements for conditional properties. We had specificity bs - and now we have layers. lol it just never ends
I always thought he said 'Hello my friend and friends'...
Nahh😅
Honestly it's a lot, but also the best time to be a frontend developer imo.
Most likely a lot of developer will end up using some design systems like Tailwind or Material so I guess just less things to worry about it.
Sure. but if you want to make something more creative than usual work, you will need what he is talking about.
Tailwind alone is NOT a design system.
I think having a multiple ways to do thing offers flexibility. Maybe what is needed is a collection of best practices and examples. For those you use a product or language constantly they tend to know what works best in most cases. Then again, I guess because CSS is constantly changing, so best practice is constantly evolving.
The problem is not in the anwer "it depends"; the problem is in the result question: "when it depends?" A problem that I experimented in Front-end, Kevin, is that no one is deep diving into the use cases necessary for understading how, and when use all these different solution; this, creates stagnation in the knowledge base of the way of duing thing, and consequentially you will never know when "it depends", since even Senior Devs are not going to build an experience. This is a nice rope to unravel.
Thanks for the nudge! I need check out container queries again. Theoretically, they’d shine in “components” - just need to take a step back and think through how it interacts with existing responsiveness.
People don't look for something new once they have something that works for them. People don't every day have the mentality that I will improve my workflow and techniques, not only CSS but in general; once they learn something that fulfills their needs, it is enough for them. They learn something new once they have a requirement that pushes them to do so.
Good points. I stand convicted as one of those devs who often manhandles css just to get something done while my "real" work is with javascript or dotnet etc. Your channel really helps me to genuinely focus on the art and science of css. Because of you I DO use container queries.
I used container queries, they broke our modals. (Because it catches position: fixed, like relative catches absolute) So... Next project.
TBH CSS is so powerful nowadays you can do a lot without JS.... it's awesome 😎
I am a web developer over 20 years but had a few years of break now. I lost completely track of newer CSS features and play catch up at the moment. Most people have a specific workflow or way of thinking where container queries change, like everything in thinking of design structures. Like for 10 years you walk down the street on right side, now someone comes up say, please use left side instead. This is how it must feel for most people adopting it. Perhaps one day we all will use it as there come some benefits with it in the way we design things independently of device their width.
That stat is interesting, i'd say my current role id say im 80% html and css😅
The people who are working on the adoption of new CSS features for browsers are the most important to do this in my opinion, if they implement the new features the people who try to adopt them will try harder. I have 2 incidents to tell you about. The first is about a few months ago, I applied border-radius, outline, and outline-offset to a set of buttons. They were working fine, except one day one of the team members told me that it was not working on the mobile browser, so I tried with an Android mobile browser Chrome, and he was right, it's not working. After a little bit of digging, I found out that border-radius doesn't work with outline in some browsers. So I changed the CSS and used border and box-shadow as a CSS-Trick for the design I wanted. The second incident is recent. I have done like 25% of a project using the new CSS nesting, and guess what, it got me again in mobile browsers. After checking a little bit and chatting with the ChatGPT I concluded that for now, it won't be wise to use the new CSS features except for practice purposes. I felt sooooo bad because the new features are so awesome.
Is there also the question of browser adoption for new CSS? Some browsers adopt faster than others. The time between initial release, adoption and full(ish) support probably means enthusiasm is curbed or sometimes the feature just slips off the list. With the exception of features that are progressive enhancements, which can be used early on. Just my thoughts.
I've always found that there is a big disconnect between the ever-changing capabilities of CSS and the knowledge of *stakeholders*, not devs. A lot of dev work is not designed or determined by the dev, but by other people, who aren't usually coders. For example, knowing about @container queries and the possibilities it allows makes no difference if the Figma spec you are given has only two variants of the product card ("that's desktop, and that's mobile - look, we're responsive!"). It's the same for new colour spaces and other visual capabilities. "Here's the brand colours, and they're all RGBA". As regards dev-centric stuff like @layer, native nesting, etc, a dev's chance of actually getting to use them depends very much on technical debt. Refactoring is often a hard sell to the Project Manager. "Will this improve site performance right now?" I think there is a lot of room out there for educating non-devs in the new CSS capabilities. I've run in-work 'seminars' aimed at UX/UI designers, letting them know about stuff like new animation powers, colour spaces, transitions, etc. But this would need to be a regular thing, given how fast CSS is moving.
css grew so much in the last couple of years, so it's probably overwhelming for new designers. also, with so many new features people need to keep track on caniuse, people just opt to use near perfect adoption, and just wait for the community to announce that 'it's ok now!' it feels to me that wide adoption of flex and grid was just yesterday.. and look at as now! @container lol!!
That was great! I think Clark needs a day off…🫣😅 I work in I.T networking. Technology moves so fast. Have done some Frontend Dev but like with technology I struggle to keep abreast of developments. I refer to myself as a generalist. I have a general understanding across a broad spectrum of tech, software etc… but when needed, I find a specialist to fill in the missing knowledge.Because no one person can really know it all… well, Kevin might be a CSS exception..😅
Maybe 2 days ;)
@@ClarkSell Go for it! 👏
I like this guy. Not many people think like this nowadays and here we are...
I didnt know you have second channel. I am really excited for more podcasts. Pls bring all type of devs, not only front end focused. I mean just a req. You can do whatever you want. I am happy with anything.
What's up FEF? Feel free to AMA.
Great interview would love to get out to THAT conf someday.
do it!
Thoroughly enjoyed the chat
if anyone can give me and advice about how to find a remote job i sent a lot of offers on indeed i never get emailed back i have a strong portfolio and experience i worked on a lot of project freelancing such as ERP system and many cool website am strong both of backend and frontend but i hardly can get any income
Tables...ugh. CSS needs to update tables. I wrote some cool stuff to turn a table vertical on smaller screens because I don't want bloated libraries that never do what I want. But, would be nice if CSS would update tables to make them more friendly to work with.
there was a 50/50 chance that this episode was about the less stylesheets language
I think you're spot on Kevin. While all things web related will never be more than a hobby (at most) for me I've found your videos very useful as I try to get more of an understanding of it in general. Your videos where you talk about learning and more general things are very useful for life in general so can be applied to a lot of my other hobbies (I'm retired so seem to be collecting them).
The thing about *some* tech interviews (well, we'll call them that) is the sheer self-centeredness of all parties involved.
Love it, keep doing more of this, DevTips is in my top 5 youtube channels, I'm so happy is back!.
TRAVIS IS THE REASON I STARTED FRONT-END WEB DEV!!!
Shoutout to Quiet -- read this earlier this year too (solid book with some good parenting advice toward the end iirc) and scored in the middle as well 43:25
the story of DevTips is a crazy roller coaster, i didn't know he was back
Travis was my favourite CSS wizard :)
This is awesome. The two of you are huge inspirations for me. Will definitely giving this a listen on Spotify later today.
Great vibes! This was def a treat for me, you both have influenced me along my journey.
1 ) the absolute worst browser in keeping up with web standards is iOS safari and mac safari follows close behind that. 2 ) at least half of the people use safari Conclusion: People who know, know. If you don't code for safari first, you will pay later. I also passionately hate safari.
For me it's not only to look for "The 99% support or does all the major browser support it" I generally will consider a support with a history with a lot version behind the feature release
I might be in the extreme in some peoples opinion, but for me I'm ready to implement at around 88%. I think for too long the general consensus has been to hold back on new technologies for too long and that it has slowed down development, but now my philosophy is to implement new technologies early and say that it is the users responsibility to keep their browser up to date.