Frontend referents: the professionals that taught me

This post is part of a series of posts thanking everyone who helps (or helped) me improve my knowledge and skills on design and development.

Luckily, we live in a day and age where quality information is readily available cheap and fast. You have many options to learn from the best: reading articles, books, watching videos, tutorials, examples...

Here you have a list of the people who unknowingly have helped me shape my perspective on frontend coding. Here you have a list of my frontend teachers.

You can also check my design referents.

Eric Meyer

CSS

He wrote CSS: The definitive guide. That's the go-to resource I recommend for anyone asking to learn CSS. Reading it's second edition is basically how taught me CSS.

Among many other contributions, he's also known his CSS Meyer's reset.

Peter-Paul Koch

Technical info

Back in the olden days, before caniuse.com, we all went to his site quirksmode.org to check if what we were writing in our stylesheets was going to have compatibility issues.

Lea Verou

CSS²

She shared advanced clever techniques to go beyond on styling. I keep using her CSS scrolling shadows with background-attachment: local from 2012! She has published many other useful design / CSS projects at her site.

Sara Soueidan

SVG, accessibility

She has written many amazing articles on advanced use of SVG and CSS, with a special focus on accessibility. An essential blog for your RSS feed.

Ben Frain

Frontend tooling

I think I discovered him when looking for help on static frontend development and ended up in one of his thorough articles about middleman. But the work that has had the most impact on me is the creation my preferred namespacing for HTML/CSS classnames: ECSS. Forget BEM or any other!

Jeffrey Zeldman

Web standards

Zeldman was a referent for the web industry early on, specially pushing for the use of we standards. But I knew him through one of his projects, A list apart — one of the best sites to learn about design and development in any of its subareas.

Chris Coyier

CSS thesaurus

He built CSS-Tricks. For the name you could guess its content, but it goes far beyond "simple" tricks, it's packed with comprehensive guides on many things CSS related. He also co-founded codepen, a useful tool for creating and sharing useful dev snippets, learning, or just bragging about your dev skills (check CSS-Tricks Spark).

Rachel Andrew

Layout

Throughout her career, Andrew has published some of the best articles on mastering layout with CSS.

Jen Simmons

Layout

Currently working at Apple on the Web Developer Experience team for Safari & Webkit; and a member of CSS Working Group. She previously blowed many peoples minds with her layout techniques during her talks. For instance: Intrinsic layouts

Miriam Suzanne

CSS at the edge

She's a core contributor to Sass. Her articles on cutting edge frontend techniques with incoming CSS improvements are a great way to be up to date.