Full-stack front end development

Hi, I’m Ryan Boone. I’m a web developer and designer from Texas with a passion for open, accessible front end development. I love exploring new ideas and sharing the lessons I’ve learned along the way with others. If you want to work with me, book me for a speaking engagement, or just want to talk shop, drop me a line!

Recent Posts

Cracking the books

Books every software engineer should read in 2024.

Year-end review 2023

I’d say it was better than average.

Year-end review 2022

What. Just. Happened?

From Notion to Eleventy part 2: Building Markdown from JSON

In this continuation of my Notion API series, I explore how to transform a bunch of JSON into a bunch of Markdown.

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Quick tip: Non-standard npm module resolution

You’ve used index.js, but what happens when you can’t? Here’s a quick way to resolve non-standard entry files for Node.js.

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How I solve complex problems

Solving complex problems is something every developer will do. This is my approach.

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Preserve intent with architecture decision records

The first thing I want to do when I dig into a new codebase is learn everything about it. The second thing I want to do is rewrite it. Whether you’re trying to do the former or the latter, architecture decision records (ADRs) can help.

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From Notion to Eleventy part 1: The Notion API

Join me as I begin a new series that explores how to connect Notion to Eleventy. Really it’s just an excuse to improve my personal blogging workflow.

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Brad Frost on how to use Storybook

Brad Frost recently appeared on the new Storytime podcast with Chantastic to talk about how he uses Storybook to build design systems. The show features a great discussion regarding how Frost’s Atomic Design philosophy has been applied to the popular UI development tool. If you haven’t already, I highly recommend checking the episode out.

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The one where 'this' is undefined

Join me in my descent into madness as I troubleshoot this. And maybe, just maybe, we’ll learn a bit about life. But mostly madness.

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How I blog in 2022

I’m starting a new blogging challenge this year.

Year-end review 2021

2021 proved to be an eventful year for many of us. Personally, my year brought tremendous successes, failures, victories, and heartbreak. These last 365 days have felt like an entire lifetime!

Kicking Sass to the curb

Sass has been my go to CSS preprocessor for years, but with a recent CSS feature boom, it’s a good time to revisit whether or not I can lean completely on native CSS for all my Sass.

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Misadventures in web components

I have been thinking about web components a lot lately, and I wanted to see how we could start using them at The Container Store. The idea was to pick a simple component and recreate it as a web component, and the first candidate that came to mind is our frequently-used quantity stepper. The stepper appears in several places throughout the website, and it’s dependent on an embarrassing amount of jQuery.

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Pardon the dust

In case you didn’t notice, I just pushed up the biggest adjustment to the site design since the last redesign in late 2020. I wanted to go through it briefly and talk about what’s next.

The curious case of flexbox gap and Safari

Update at the end The gap property was first introduced to add inner grid spacing but was extended in the spec to work with flexbox. With one line of code, you can replace something like this:

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Baking in syntax highlighting

Another runtime dependency bites the dust. My ongoing work of designing and building this blog continues with moving syntax highlighting from the client-side to Eleventy’s syntax highlighting plugin:

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Native form validation with JavaScript

You don’t need to install a validation library to create rich client-side form validation experiences. HTML5’s native client-side form validation is widely-supported and easy to implement, and while its default functionality is limited, the native Constraint Validation API allows for custom behavior with JavaScript.

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Hold off on optimizing JavaScript performance

As a developer, I love optimizing performance. Learning efficient algorithms makes me feel like a software engineer. But performance is not the only developer concern, nor should it be the first or second. David K. Piano recently pointed this out on Twitter, offering up a suggested framework:

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What I learned blogging daily for a month

I recently challenged myself to write a blog post every day for a month. Up to that point, I had only written eight blog posts for two years. A month later, not only do I have 28 new blog posts, I’ve learned some valuable lessons about my blogging process and my website. I wanted to share things about the experience that worked for me and issues I discovered that need attention.

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For older posts, visit the archive.