When managing a project of known scope, understanding the time required to complete the project (or a piece of the project) with available resources is critical to the ability to plan effectively and appropriately set expectations with stakeholders.

Naturally, workers of differing skill levels will complete a given task at different rates—i.e. a highly skilled worker will work more quickly than a low skilled worker. This fundamental truth of labor can present a significant challenge when estimating timelines in man-hours, as estimates produced by one worker may not hold true for another.

Story points may be used as an alternative to man-hours when planning projects, but before we start using story points, we must understand what story points are and why they are useful.

Learn how to use story points

Google has a long standing tradition of introducing changes to it’s search engine designed to enhance user experience, and Google’s dominance as a search provider essentially mandates the adoption of Google’s prescribed best practices. AMP promises to make the web faster, but embracing AMP might be more complicated than you would expect.

Learn how AMP impacts content creators.

On Apache servers, a RedirectMap may be used to import bulk redirects. This provides an ideal solution for creating a self-hosted short URL service for any website, particularly static sites generated with Jekyll.

Create your own static site shortener with Jekyll and Apache

Frontend developers have long known that CSS nth-child selectors may be combined to yield interesting and practical results. Most commonly, this technique is applied to select all items in a list when there are more than N children, less than N children, exactly N children, or between N and M children. However these simple selectors may also be combined in other ways to produce even more advanced selectors.

Learn how to use complex CSS nth-child selectors

I care about URLs. I have spent time ensuring the URLs for this site are clean, concise, uniform, readable, and easily sharable. I subscribe to the idea that cool URIs don’t change and that URLs are UI. Even while I recognize that the “appification” of the web has minimized the importance of URLs, and I expect URLs to become increasingly niche as computer interfaces become conversational, the URL remains the defining feature of “the web” as we know it today, and I believe we should design URLs to embolden visitors with confidence.

Learn how to setup a great URL structure