In Case You Missed It: 2014
Series: 2023, 2022, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013
Rather than a bunch of individual “In Case You Missed It” tweets, I thought I’d repeat what I did last year and just do one big yearly semi-comprehensive recap of the web community things that I contributed to this year. Enjoy!
Font Family Reunion Project
★ Font Family Reunion—Compatibility tables for CSS font-family defaults. http://t.co/wIBJstPyiA Read more: http://t.co/LffbwRqYr8
— Zach Leatherman (@zachleat) September 30, 2014- Go directly to fontfamily.io (do not pass go, do not collect $200).
- Read the Blog Post.
- Watch the NebraskaJS recap: How and Why I built fontfamily.io
- Watch the talk on YouTube (18:45) Video
- Slides on Speaker Deck (44 slides)
Bulletproof Accessible Icon Fonts Blog Post
I’m lucky that Todd Parker asked me to research this topic for a Filament Group blog post. This really set in motion a series of things that I was really excited to investigate: accessibility, font loading, mobile Unicode character support, et cetera. So many great things snowballed from this.
☆ New post: Bulletproof Accessible Icon Fonts http://t.co/Ea8cQxHKLG
— Zach Leatherman (@zachleat) January 13, 2014See also this tweet from @filamentgroup.
CSSConf Talk
Luckily the success of the blog post above turned into a speaking opportunity! I had the honor of speaking about Icon Fonts at CSSConf in 2014.
- Watch the talk on YouTube (26:16) Video
- Slides on Speaker Deck (106 slides)
- Storify Scrapbook
Dev.Opera Blog Post
I transitioned from focusing on icon fonts with @font-face and instead moved to talk more about generic font loading. There was a fair amount of overlap between this and the CSSConf talk.
★ Better @font-face with Font Load Events: https://t.co/jj6eeViILT Very grateful and excited for the opportunity to write for Dev.Opera.
— Zach Leatherman (@zachleat) September 26, 2014SmashingConf Talk
This was definitely the highlight of the year for me. A super professional conference in a beautiful location—Whistler! A huge thank you to Vitaly and Tim and all the staff for having me along. It was really a unique conference with lots of personality. The videos have not yet been published—but soon you’ll get to see me try to get a crowd of 300 people to do the flashback arm waving sequence from Wayne’s World.
- Slides on Speaker Deck (203 slides)
- Storify Scrapbook
Stop Using SVG in @font-face
Chrome 37, Opera 24 support DirectWrite on Windows, which means we can FINALLY retire SVG @font-face! Related: https://t.co/rxUTJJsWUk
— Zach Leatherman (@zachleat) September 2, 2014SVG web fonts are dead—stop using them, Opera edition: https://t.co/Clh1yiEZlk
— Zach Leatherman (@zachleat) October 15, 2014The Pastry Box Blog Post
I wrote a guest blog post for The Pastry Box about Impostor Syndrome. You might have noticed that the content of this post was very similar to my 2013 talk at BarCamp Omaha. See also this tweet from June 9.
BarCamp Omaha Talk
- Watch the talk on YouTube (11:15) Video
- Read the Blog Post
- See also this tweet from September 10
Attended Thunderplains
Mike Taylor was really on point with his suggestion to attend this one. It was a great event put on by some really special individuals.
If you want to learn how to foster a tech community, follow @amandaharlin and @5imian. What they’ve done with @techlahoma is amazing.
— Zach Leatherman (@zachleat) October 29, 2014Guest on the Word-Break Podcast
My first ever podcast interview!
Filament Group Collaborations
Font Loading
A little bit different than the approach I’ve been putting into my presentations.There may just be an official Filament Group blog post forthcoming talking all about this.
Wrote up a summary of the @filamentgroup approach to avoid FOIT for content fonts using @scottjehl’s loadCSS: https://t.co/6U692qf63D
— Zach Leatherman (@zachleat) September 26, 2014In related news to support the Filament Group font loading approach, we worked on a WOFF2 feature test using the CSS Font Loading API:
New in the lab: WOFF2 See the Wizard, a Wonderful JavaScript Feature Test by @zachleat http://t.co/dbXYt2k8qb
— filamentgroup (@filamentgroup) October 16, 2014Tablesaw
A set of plugins for responsive tables (Filament Group Blog Post). This one kind of caught fire on GitHub, hitting #4 on GitHub’s most popular repositories (all programming languages) for the month of June 2014.
Looking for ways to make tabular data responsive? Check out our Tablesaw plugin, thanks to @zachleat - https://t.co/8haZb760f3
— filamentgroup (@filamentgroup) May 16, 2014Politespace
An accessible alternative to input masks that adds whitespace for readability to form fields (Filament Group Blog Post).
Shoestring
We worked hard on this lightweight DOM utility library that shares a subset of the jQuery API.
How I'm using @filamentgroup's Shoestring + cutting the mustard to minimize JS bloat: http://t.co/r1veVyjYBO
— Tim Kadlec (@tkadlec) October 30, 2014Top Five Jokes (by Retweets)
If `grunt watch` is scrolling your terminal too fast to read, make it run in slow motion with `grunt baywatch`.
— Zach Leatherman (@zachleat) January 15, 2014before you print that shell script, please think of the environment variables.
— Zach Leatherman (@zachleat) June 4, 2014When two marketers decide to get married do their personal brands get engaged?
— Zach Leatherman (@zachleat) July 22, 2014Is this the real life? Is this just font-family: fantasy?
— Zach Leatherman (@zachleat) August 27, 2014senator tom cruise you were good in top gun but leave the internet to the experts
— Zach Leatherman (@zachleat) November 10, 2014(In response to @SenTedCruz)
Thank You!
I owe everyone a huge thank you for giving me the amazing opportunities that I had in 2014. To everyone at NebraskaJS—the community we have in Omaha (and growing in Lincoln) is amazing. To Nicole Sullivan and company for taking a chance on me at CSSConf. To Tim Kadlec for also taking a chance on me for Smashing Conference. And most of all to my employer and coworkers at Filament Group. The list above would’ve been much shorter without their collaboration with and support of our great community. I’m feeling thankful—it was a great year.