Ricardo Magalhães
I'm Ricardo, a senior front-end web developer based in Montreal currently working at Mercury. I'm also the former author of the Coffee Table Typography newsletter, and write about life and technical things.
Location
Working for
Previously
Social
I deeply enjoy pairing several disciplines in my work: writing, typography and photography are inseparable from my daily life and fitting them into my workflow is a bliss. React, node.js and TypeScript are my usual tools of the trade. Peace is restored when running, rock-climbing, or picking something from the bookshelf. You can learn more about me.
Some projects
Coffee Table Typography 🦊
Since 2017, I've been maintaining a bi-monthly newsletter about typography, fonts, languages and books. It's long-form, meaning there's no link dumps, with a mandatory coffee article to go with it. With Twitter killing the Revue platform in 2022, it's on hold for the time being.
First Aid Git 🚑
A small pet project from my (very) early React days which, despite unmaintained, still provides a useful resource to fixing most Git mistakes.
Coffee in Literature ☕️
A dead simple single-page app consisting of random quotes mentioning coffee in literature; books I've read, citations people have sent me. Being a coffee-nerd, it has always interested me when authors mentioned coffee in their books, so I began collecting them. This is a simple React-powered website which gives you a different quote every time (shareable, too).
Experiments
CodePen — Mountain CSS Scene 🗻
A small scene, inspired by an Alex Pasquarella illustration, fully recreated in CSS and reinvented with some animation.
OpenType Playground ❡
A sandbox, with examples, of all sorts of OpenType features you can use in your web typography.
React.js Typewriter ✍️
Available in two flavours, React and vanilla JS (hence the name), this is a tiny library that allows you to present text in a page as if it was being typed in a typewriter.
About me
I'm a Portuguese developer, currently living in the cold lands of Montreal, with a love for typography, long-distance running and rock climbing.
For the past few years I've lived in different regions of Portugal, U.K. and Germany, finally settling in Canada where I'm currently doing work for the amazing people of Mercury.
At work, I take accessibility (a11y) pretty darn seriously. We just don't stick a bunch of aria-labels and call it a day; oh no, there's a lot of work to be done and I take great pride on ensuring my team's work works seamlessly with accessibility tools such as VoiceOver.
Away from a keyboard, you'll find me running as much as possible (and that includes during the harsh Canadian winters) and rock-climbing. I'm obsessed with books, typography and coffee, as you can tell by my bookshelf section. I have a technical blog and a personal one on Medium.
Selected articles
Typography on the Subway: A Trip Around the World
Data Immutability with pure JavaScript
Accessibility with aria-describedby and aria-labelledby
About this website
After spending years over-engineering my personal webistes with frameworks and technical experiments, I've gone back to basics. Well, sort of. No framework, down to earth Sass for styling, Webpack for ES2015 transpiling and vanilla JS for basic routing and API calls.
On the bookshelf
Most of my personal projects revolve around words, books, language. This is why I have this sort of bookshelf on a personal website, reading directly from Currently Reads. Let's be book buddies. 📚
Currently Reading
Here's my active Goodreads bookshelf.
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Favourite Books
Haruki Murakami — Wind Up Bird Chronicle
Haruki Murakami — A Wild Sheep's Chase
Blake Crouch — Dark Matter
Emily St. John — Station Eleven
Jeff Vandermeer — Borne
Olivia Laing — The Lonely City
Patti Smith — Just Kids
Richard Bach — Illusions
Jack Kerouac — Dharma Bums
Italo Calvino — Invisible Cities
Heather O'Neill — Lonely Hearts Hotel
Richard Rutter — Web Typography
Ellen Lupton — Thinking About Type