Every day after work I make a point of sitting down and reading through my blog roll. Not only does it keep me up to date on everything happening in the design and development industries, but it also keeps me in tune with what I should be learning. Being a 9-5 in-house web developer, rather than freelancing or working in a web shop, means that I need to go out of my way to stay in touch and to do my best to keep my knowledge base and skill set current. One of the easiest ways to do that is to see what the best and brightest are doing and follow suit.
Having Newsify and Flipboard on my iPad makes that even easier, as I can basically come home and read my industry "newspaper" as I sip my afternoon coffee. Just like a newspaper, there are cover stories from industry leaders, as well as back pages from up and coming designers and developers that I also like to follow along with.
In order to keep this relatively short and still informative, this list will be comprised mostly of my front page reads.
Paul Irish
Front-end developer wiz, Google Chrome dev team member,
jQuery team member, lead dev on lots of amazing projects like
Modernizr and
HTML5 Boilerplate. Irish does it all and his tips are worth their weight in gold.
CSS Tricks
Tutorials and tips on front-end web development by Chris Coyier. Chris is exactly 1/2 of the
ShopTalkShow podcast. Lots of CSS goodness, but also plenty of HTML5, Javascript, jQuery, etc.
Remy Sharp
Founder of
Left Logic and
Full Frontal Conf. Great Javascript tips and tricks, and lots of personal projects like
JS Bin to follow along with.
Jeffrey Zeldman
Founder of
A List Apart and
HappyCog. Creator of web trends.
Jacob Thornton
One of the creators of
Twitter Bootstrap. His Svbtle blog is as much a place to find his personal philosophy as it is a Javascript code dump.
Brad Frost
Mobile Web specialist formerly of
R/GA. Lots of mobile and responsive expertise to be learned here.
A List Apart
Lots of fantastic articles on web design and developments from some of the brightest minds in the industry.
Chris Eppstein
Creator of
Compass and Software Engineer at
Caring.
Jason Santa Maria
Creative Director for Typekit and former Creative Director for
A List Apart.
Dave Rupert
The other half of the
ShopTalkShow as well as the lead developer for fantastic Austin shop
Paravel.
Laura Kalbag
Freelance front-end web developer. Fantastic web designer with an eye for color.
Zack Shapiro
Engineer at
TaskRabbit. Lots of editorial posts and a great point of view on programming.
Steven Wittens
Math and 3D lover whose projects are absolutely stunning (if not over my head a bit). It's always interesting to see how far technology can be pushed.
Nicole Sullivan
Web developer with lots of great front-end tips.
Zoe Gillenwater
Focusing on CSS and accessibility, Zoe is part of the
Web Standards Project and always has great information to share. Definitely worth keeping up to date on.
Anthony Short
Front-end developer focusing on new technologies like Sass and Backbone.js. If you want to move past working in standard HTML/CSS, Short is a great person to follow.
Ian Stewart
"Theme Wrangler" for
Wordpress.com creators
Automattic. Expert in Wordpress theme development.
Tab Atkins
Web standards hacker working for Google on the
Chrome project. A blog to keep up to date on if purely to stay on the cutting edge of web standards. It's always good to know what's coming next.
Andres Pagella
Game developer that also writes about HTML5 and Javascript. HTML5 gaming is a completely new frontier, and Andres' blog is a great place to start. His
Snake game tutorial is a great place to start learning about creating HTML5 games.
It will be interesting to see how my list will change coming next year and how it will affect both my philosophy and skillset. I hope that I find a lot more up and coming designers and developers to add to my "front page" reading and even more that I can start following consistently.
Maybe even by the end of the year, this blog can even start breaking into a few of those lists.
Blogroll 2013