Top all-time · #875
Ahmad Shadeed
Personal blog · ishadeed.com/articles · on HN as shadeed9webdesign
Ahmad Shadeed's personal blog at ishadeed.com covers web and design. Since 2016, 75 different Hacker News readers have linked it 121 times, most often “CSS Relative Colors”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-15, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (11) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Ahmad Shadeed's articles as a frontend and CSS resource, especially his pieces on how large sites like Facebook built specific features and his advanced CSS write-ups.
- Recommended for · 4 comments
- Called a favourite for frontend writing and a great advanced CSS resource, especially articles on how Facebook and other big sites implemented features.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 11 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Deep-dive CSS articles, modern CSS and visual CSS explanations.
Most-linked posts?
- CSS Relative Colors5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2025-03-10
- CSS Findings from the New Facebook Design5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2020-04-02
- CSS: Has() Interactive Guide4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2024-02-24
- CSS Masking4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2023-03-31
- Defensive CSS4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2021-12-08
- First Look at the Modern Attr()3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-04-03
- The CSS Behind Figma3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2022-07-12
- The Virtual Keyboard API3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-07-31
- The Guide to Responsive Design in 2023 and Beyond3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-02-01
- New Viewport Units3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-07-11
What Hacker News says?
I quite like Tailwind. I've had great experiences with it, especially on projects where the skill level of contributors was highly variable. That said, Tailwind is not as powerful as plain old CSS. It's a bit like training wheels for CSS—you gain some guardrails and prevent newbies from messing things up too badly, but you also give up the power modern CSS affords you. E.g. I invite you to look at some of Ahmed Shad…
Comment linking /
on “Shopify acquires Tailwind”Submitted Defensive CSS as a story · 408 points
HN discussionNot linear but I recommend: for HTML read chapter 3 & 4 of HTML spec - https://html.spec.whatwg.org/ For CSS I recommend Wes Bos tutorials about flexbox and grid - https://wesbos.com/courses and this blog: https://ishadeed.com/articles/
Comment linking /articles/
on “HTML Tips (2020)”Submitted CSS Grid Areas as a story · 327 points
HN discussionPersonally I think the most useful 'new' things in CSS that hardly anyone uses yet are the min, max, and Clamp functions. I wrote about them here https://blog.logrocket.com/min-max-clamp-css-functions/ - there are some real embarrassments in that article (probably due to me being busy with other things at the time of writing, and being outside my comfort zone [dealing with design]) - example silly statement: "these…
Comment linking /article/css-min-max-clamp/
on “Aspect-ratio is great”Submitted The CSS Behind Figma as a story · 156 points
HN discussionSome of my favorites more Frontend leaning: - https://www.joshwcomeau.com/ - https://jhey.dev/writing/ - https://varun.ca/writing - https://ishadeed.com/articles/
Comment linking /articles/
on “Ask HN: Great Blogs by Programmers”Submitted CSS Cap Unit as a story · 49 points
HN discussionThis is an inaccurate over-simplification. If you just use HTML and CSS, you can also have really bad Lighthouse scores. For example, vanilla `<img>` will ship the same image to every device, regardless of viewport size. Vanilla `<img>` doesn't enforce setting `width` and `height`, which makes your layouts shift. Slow-loading images and layout shifts are the very things that will downgrade the "100" score he's curre…
Comment linking /article/new-facebook-css
on “My stack is HTML+CSS”Submitted Better Icon and Label Alignment as a story · 43 points
HN discussionWhile I haven’t read his book [0], I always enjoy the articles by Ahmad Shadeed [1][2]. The ones that focus on how big websites like Facebook implemented specific functionality and how he would have tackled it are a great resource in advanced CSS. I would also recommend the “thinking of ways to solve…” gui challenges [3] YouTube videos and web.dev articles by Adam Argyle. Others have mentioned Josh W Comeau who defi…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Recommendation for Intermediate CSS Course?”Submitted Uncommon Use Cases for Pseudo Elements as a story · 43 points
HN discussionI feel like this article doesn't explain how `nth-last-child` works clearly. The example uses (n + 3) in a list of five items. Start counting from the 3rd item - ok, the visualization[1] shows us counting from the 3rd-from-last, so now I'm already confused. And then we count "until the end", which actually shows us counting back toward the beginning[2]. And we end up with 3 items. Are they the last 3? The first 3? I…
Comment linking /assets/css-has-nth-last-child/nth-last-child-3.png
on “Conditional CSS with:has and:nth-last-child”Submitted Future CSS: State Container Queries as a story · 26 points
HN discussion> - Everything trying to look like a smartphone app, no matter the viewing device. I have a high resolution screen and a high precision pointing device in front of me. Why are half the webpages and many apps presenting buttons the size of texas? You're making a very broad assumption here that everyone is like you. The fact is, they aren't. Big click targets are important for accessibility (if you want to read more,…
Comment linking /article/clickable-area/
on “The UX Research Reckoning is Here”Submitted First Look At The CSS object-view-box Property as a story · 26 points
HN discussion> Statistically, we do. Sass won the precprocessor wars and nearly every developer prefer SCSS variables over the var(--oh-god) that is CSS syntax. This isn't about which preprocessor is the most popular; it's about the syntax that's going to be used for CSS that we're going to have to live with for a long time. Look, best practices come and go. Table-based layouts, 960 grid [4], Dreamweaver, special hacks for IE6—w…
Comment linking /article/practical-css-variables/
on “Help choose the syntax for CSS Nesting”Submitted Use Cases For CSS fit-content as a story · 26 points
HN discussion> I always tell myself that I should use backwards-compatible CSS only. > > I vividly remember IE and many hacks to have css elements properly working in it… The common advice now is to only use CSS that is supported in the last two major versions of each major browser. You can check any css property's support here: https://caniuse.com/ > Imho this is a reason why markdown and other rich-textual formats appeared. Ma…
Comment linking /
on “CSS Properties You Should Know for Better Text Designs”Submitted Conditional CSS with:has and:nth-last-child as a story · 14 points
HN discussionTIL about the dvh units used for the splash. The article even has a video of scrolling down with it. https://ishadeed.com/article/new-viewport-units/ https://caniuse.com/viewport-unit-variants
Comment linking /article/new-viewport-units/
on “CSS Findings from the Threads App”Submitted Rebuilding a featured news section with modern CSS: Vox news as a story · 14 points
HN discussionSubmitted CSS Cascade Layers as a story · 11 points
HN discussionSubmitted Defensive CSS as a story · 8 points
HN discussionSubmitted CSS Relative Colors as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSubmitted CSS Writing Mode as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Basics of Anchor Positioning as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Defensive CSS as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted The State of Pixel Perfection as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted CSS Findings from the New Facebook Design as a story · 4 points
HN discussion
