Performance
Presentation on “Smaller, faster websites” by Mat Marquis: https://bocoup.com/weblog/smaller-faster-websites
The website obesity crisis (presentation): http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm
What developers should know about performance: https://medium.com/@christophelimpalair/developers-what-you-should-know-about-web-performance-550cef1040d8
What I’ve learned from monitoring four years of web page bloat: http://www.soasta.com/blog/page-bloat-2015-web-performance-monitoring/
Articles about how web performance affects revenue: https://wpostats.com/tags/revenue/
Avoiding Temptations that Harm Website Performance: http://calendar.perfplanet.com/2015/avoiding-temptations-that-harm-website-performance/
Progressive enhancement
Jeremy Keith hits a million nails on the head: “Server-side rendering is not a fallback; client-side rendering is an enhancement.” https://adactio.com/journal/9963
What “progressive web apps” mean for the web: http://developer.telerik.com/featured/what-progressive-web-apps-mean-for-the-web/
Interaction is an enhancement – an excerpt from Aaron Gustafson’s new book: http://alistapart.com/article/interaction-is-an-enhancement
The article that first described progressive enhancement: http://hesketh.com/progressive_enhancement_and_the_future_of_web_design.html
Reimagining Single-Page Applications With Progressive Enhancement: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2015/12/reimagining-single-page-applications-progressive-enhancement/
Accessibility
The modern web is broken for people with disabilities: https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/modern-web-fundamentally-broken-people-disabilities
Mozilla accessibility QA engineer tells us what the basics of accessibility are: https://www.marcozehe.de/2015/12/14/the-web-accessibility-basics/
Learn about accessibility in just 20 minutes: http://accessibility.parseapp.com/
On accessibility and the lack of proper HTML: http://www.iandevlin.com/blog/2016/01/opinion/on-accessibility-and-the-lack-of-proper-html
Free web accessibility tools round-up: https://medium.com/bread-crumbs/free-web-accessibility-tools-round-up-b83a33797789
Mobile
Why you shouldn’t bother creating a mobile app: https://medium.com/inside-birdly/why-you-shouldn-t-bother-creating-a-mobile-app-328af62fe0e5
The App-ocalypse: Can Web standards make mobile apps obsolete?: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/12/the-app-ocalypse-can-web-standards-make-mobile-apps-obsolete/
Instant Loading Web Apps with An Application Shell Architecture: https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2015/11/app-shell
Design/UX
Dark Patterns: fighting user deception worldwide: http://darkpatterns.org/
A rant: how are website still screwing up these user experiences: http://www.troyhunt.com/2016/01/its-2016-already-how-are-websites-still.html
Simple inline error message pattern: https://www.paciellogroup.com/blog/2016/01/simple-inline-error-message-pattern/
Three principles for using design successfully. No 1: Start with design, and don’t just end with it: http://blogs.wsj.com/accelerators/2014/02/21/john-maeda-three-principles-for-using-design-successfully/
Brad Frost is writing a book on Atomic Design, which you can read for free here: http://atomicdesign.bradfrost.com/
How to make sense of any mess, a free online book on information architecture: http://www.howtomakesenseofanymess.com/
Beyond the style guide: https://24ways.org/2015/beyond-the-style-guide/
How to do a UX review: https://24ways.org/2015/how-to-do-a-ux-review/
Business
Psychological pricing strategies (mammoth set of tactics!): http://www.nickkolenda.com/psychological-pricing-strategies/
The perfect storm in digital law: http://alistapart.com/article/the-perfect-storm-in-digital-law
What customer experience excellence looks like: “Customer experience is 10% technology and 90% culture”: http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/new-thinking/what-customer-experience-excellence-looks
Helping VIPs care about performance: https://24ways.org/2015/helping-vips-care-about-performance/
Teams/general development
Rachel Andrew on confidence and getting overwhelmed: https://medium.com/@rachelandrew/web-industry-confidence-and-overwhelm-e161313405c8
What RESTful actually means: https://codewords.recurse.com/issues/five/what-restful-actually-means
What do we ask in Stack Overflow: http://jkunst.com/r/what-do-we-ask-in-stackoverflow/
Yahoo gets rid of QA: http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/computing/software/yahoos-engineers-move-to-coding-without-a-net
JavaScript
A useful JavaScript glossary: https://github.com/HugoGiraudel/SJSJ
Microsoft open sourcing the Chakra JavaScript engine: https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2015/12/05/open-source-chakra-core/
An “operating system”, with lots of apps, in JS: http://os.js.org/
“Every JavaScript project you should be looking into”: http://www.javascriptoo.com/
Amiga emulator in JavaScript, with games: http://scriptedamigaemulator.net/
The service worker cookbook: “a collection of working, practical examples of using service workers in modern web apps”: https://serviceworke.rs
You don’t need jQuery: https://github.com/oneuijs/You-Dont-Need-jQuery
4 JavaScript design patterns you should know: https://scotch.io/bar-talk/4-javascript-design-patterns-you-should-know
Use React? here’s a cheat sheet: http://reactcheatsheet.com/
CSS
Flexbox Froggy – learn flexbox with a fun game: http://flexboxfroggy.com/
Flexbox support is pretty good, except for IE: http://caniuse.com/#feat=flexbox
And there’s now an IE 8/9 polyfill: https://github.com/10up/flexibility
Web components that can be built purely using css, NO Javascript: http://technical.nailfashionsweden.se/web-components-that-can-be-built-purely-using-css-no-javascript/
“Just add water” CSS animations: https://daneden.github.io/animate.css/
Tools and resources
Security Panel debuts in Chrome DevTools: https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2015/12/security-panel
Dictionaries and Word Lists for Programmers: http://organicdonut.com/2015/12/dictionaries-and-word-lists-for-programmers/
Some good videos to watch, mostly JavaScript: http://fettblog.eu/top-talks-to-watch-2015/
Big list of “free for development” services: https://github.com/ripienaar/free-for-dev
Use console.table for easier logging: https://umaar.com/dev-tips/82-console-table/
SpaceHolder – A space-themed image placeholder service: https://spaceholder.cc/
How to use Chrome DevTools like a Pro: https://medium.com/jotform-form-builder/how-to-use-chrome-devtools-like-a-pro-b9bd414870e3
Each year this online advent calendar has fantastic articles: https://24ways.org
And so does this performance-specific advent calendar: http://calendar.perfplanet.com/
And finally
History of the web: http://www.w3.org/2012/08/history-of-the-web/origins.htm
See websites in old – I mean REALLY old – browsers: http://oldweb.today/WWW/20151225064327/http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html
GCHQ going open source? https://github.com/GovernmentCommunicationsHeadquarters
zty.pe, a typing game: http://zty.pe/
For the geek in your life: Star Wars Kama Sutra: http://www.amazon.com/dp/1519483058/