These are a few of my favourite programming resources. There are things I use all the time, things that I should use, and some that I’d like to use. I hope you find them useful.

CSS

Utilities

• Easing Wizard
• Cubic Bézier
• Josh Comeau’s guides
  • Grid
  • Flexbox

Fonts

Modern Font Stacks is my go-to for all non-fussy projects.

• Routed Gothic looks like the font from old-school technical drawings
• Atkinson Hyperlegible is what I’d use on this site if it weren’t for Modern Font Stacks
• Departure Mono

Colours

• Flat UI Colors
  • I think I’ve been using this since the very start of my programming days
• Coolors
• Huemint
• Dieter Rams’ Palette
• MSHR CSS Mesh Maker

Icons

Feather Icons covers almost every use case. When needing more, I have turned to…

• Ionicons
• Twemoji (not icons in the strictest sense)
• Simple Icons for Popular Brands
• iconoir

Iconify is also a neat meta-database of icon sets. Ditto Nerd Fonts.

When I need to turn an icon (of any provenance) into a favicon, I use favicon.io.

Frontend Libraries

I’m super intrigued by modern standards-based components, but I haven’t gone all-in on them for a project yet. I really like Chris Ferdinandi’s approach of using them for progressive enhancement.

• Lit makes custom HTML elements a bit easier to work with
• Shoelace
  • Was a library of precooked custom elements
  • More recently acquired and turned into the freemium Web Awesome
• htmx
  • I wish this was a web standard instead of a JavaScript library
• fuzzysort (used by the SORT search in Periscope)

Python

• wat has geen an enourmous help
• Snoop
• strftime
• BeeWare is a cool-but-new UI toolkit made by Perth local Russell Keith-Magee

Database

I don’t relish farting around with databases. These tools promise to make it easier, but I can’t profess to be a heavy user of either:

• Pocketbase (needs a first-party Python client)
• Litestream

Email

• Mailsy for making burner email addresses
• MJML for wrangling email-flavoured HTML

DevOps

• Sentry has a pretty generous free tier that I’m using for most of my projects these days
• bugsink
• GlitchTip

Pictures

Optimisation

• ImageOptim gets my vote because it’s a Mac app
• Squoosh is a web-based replacement from the Chrome team

Illustrations

• Humaans
  • Kinda Corporate Memphis
• Flexiple Illustrations
  • Very corporate-style vector illustrations
• Rough.js also seems cool.

Miscellaneous

• monolith for inlining pages into all-in-one HTML files
• SwiftUI Field Guide