For full text search please use the '?' prefix. e.g. ? Onboarding

What I read in 2023

Week 52, 2023

Week 51, 2023

Week 50, 2023

  • How to Use Responsive HTML Video (...and Audio!) 
    <video>
  <source media="(min-width: 2000px)" src="large.webm" type="video/webm" />
  <source media="(min-width: 2000px)" src="large.mp4" type="video/mp4" />
  <source media="(min-width: 1000px)" src="medium.webm" type="video/webm" />
  <source media="(min-width: 1000px)" src="medium.mp4" type="video/mp4" />
  <source src="small.webm" type="video/webm" />
  <source src="small.mp4" type="video/mp4" />
</video>
  • CSS Wrapped: 2023!
  • Why it's essential to excel at the things AI excels at
    • Learning areas that AI excels in, like coding, English, design and data, will provide more opportunities as these re fields where AI is commonly utilized.
    • Relying entirely on external support and outsourcing prevents one from developing self-awareness, confidence and resilience to overcome challenges.
    • Gaining expertise in an AI-strong domain allows one to effectively lead AI-assisted innovations and make the most of AI capabilities.
    • Information alone is insufficient - one must make connections between concepts internally through understanding.
    • Insights emerge from linking disparate ideas, which only occurs through internal reflection not external instruction.
    • Wisdom develops from accumulating insights over time through dedicated study.
    • Specializing in an AI field builds an expertise level others rely on, while AI supports less skilled roles.
    • Psychologically, self-learning builds identity, willpower and problem-solving skills.
    • Opportunities arise from innovating where AI supports human strengths, not replacing them.
    • Mastery requires climbing from foundations, so comprehensively studying AI domains leads to leadership.
  • Open Source Software alternatives to popular projects.

Week 49, 2023

Week 48, 2023

Week 47, 2023

Week 46, 2023

Week 45, 2023

Week 44, 2023

Week 43, 2023

Week 42, 2023

Week 41, 2023

  • A comprehensive guide to the dangers of Regular Expressions in JavaScript explains how certain regex patterns can cause exponential backtracking on long strings, leading to regular expression denial of service (ReDoS) vulnerabilities. Two real world examples caused major outages at Stack Overflow and CloudFlare due to unintentionally vulnerable regex use.
  • JavaScript Hydration Is a Workaround, Not a Solution

    JavaScript hydration is a technique used to add interactivity to server-rendered HTML pages by attaching event handlers to DOM elements on the client-side.
    However, this process requires recovering the necessary information to rebuild the application state and framework state. The document argues that hydration is an overhead because it duplicates the work already done by the server.

    A better approach called resumability avoids this overhead by serializing and transferring the necessary information from server to client. This allows lazy execution of event handlers on the client-side instead of eagerly executing all components.

  • Angular, Qwik Creator on How JS Frameworks Handle Reactivity

    Three approaches: values, signals, and observables.

    Angular and React use values and take a coarse-grained approach, re-rendering everything when data changes.
    Vue is more fine-grained and will skip re-rendering unchanged components.
    Svelte compilers code to be more efficient.
    Qwik downloads only the minimal code needed through signals and resumability, making it highly optimized for start-up performance.
    Solid uses signals to be the most fine-grained, only executing code initially.

  • Speeding up the JavaScript ecosystem - The barrel file debacle

    The use of barrel files, which only re-export other files, is very common in large JavaScript projects. However, they can significantly slow down development tasks by forcing the rebuilding of the entire module graph for every file.

  • AI is an Ideology, Not a Technology argues that artificial intelligence is better understood as an ideology rather than just a technology. It promotes a view of autonomous machine intelligence that could replace humans, but this is a mirage since AI relies heavily on human data and contributions. An alternative view is to focus on how people are central to developing AI systems through providing examples, problem-solving and understanding the technology.
  • Thread-per-core

    The thread-per-core architecture for Rust async programs has been controversial. While it promises better performance and ease of implementation, it may only achieve one, not both. A share-nothing approach keeps data in separate core caches but is complex to implement transactionally.

    The debate isn't about thread-per-core work stealing executors, it's whether async/await is a good abstraction for it in Rust. And the more async code I write the more I feel that it's leaky and hard to program against.

Week 40, 2023

Week 39, 2023

Week 38, 2023

Week 37, 2023

Week 36, 2023

Week 35, 2023

Week 34, 2023

Week 33, 2023

Week 32, 2023

Week 31, 2023

Week 30, 2023

Week 29, 2023

Week 28, 2023

  • JavaScript closest 
    const link = document.querySelector("li a")
const list = a.closest("ul")

Week 27, 2023

Week 26, 2023

Week 25, 2023

  • Handles are the better pointers
  • Microsoft Clarity - Free Heatmaps & Session Recordings
  • Modern CSS in Real Life
    • margin-right: Translated to RTL, spacing problem. use margin-inline-end (or gap).
    • img alt: With that brief information, perhaps someone might be able to, say, recognize the exact pier in the photo if they had been there before or the like.
    • higher layer will win, regardless of specificity.
    • @import url(~) layer; - my @import of Bootstrap is plunked onto a layer. Note: we don’t even have to name it, and we can use this keyword instead of @layer while importing. - my super weak CSS selector in which I’m trying to override header margin does win
    • @layer reset, default, themes, patterns, layouts, components, utilities;
  • Software effort estimation is mostly fake research

    from HK news

    • It's not fake research. It's actually quite an established science in the 24 years I've been doing it.
    • Take your first guess, double it, double it again if the stakeholder is a poser, add 20% per developer less experience than you, subtract 10% for the features you're going to essentially copy paste, add 15% for sick leave (browsing HN) and then double it for every question you have that are unresolved and divide it by the room temperature multiplied by the amount of people with mechanical keyboards.
    • That gives you roughly the right estimate for any job, until the next sprint.
  • My Custom CSS Reset
    • In MacOS Mojave, released in 2018, Apple disabled subpixel antialiasing across the operating system.
    • Confusingly, MacOS browsers like Chrome and Safari still use subpixel antialiasing by default. We need to explicitly turn it off, by setting -webkit-font-smoothing to antialiased.

Week 24, 2023

Week 23, 2023

Week 22, 2023

Week 21, 2023

Week 20, 2023

Week 19, 2023

Week 18, 2023

Week 17, 2023

Week 16, 2023

Week 15, 2023

Week 14, 2023

Week 13, 2023

  • Why You Should Use Bash Over Python
  • SVGOMG is SVGO's Missing GUI, aiming to expose the majority, if not all the configuration options of SVGO.
  • Why Engineers Need To Write

    Writing for a child forces me to keep the words and concepts very, very simple, and to write in a style that builds up usage of the program from first principles. Writing for the grumpy old-timer is a practice in minimizing questions from them, forcing me to do a sort of final pass on the overall design of what I'm writing about, to defend design choices, and to add future improvements to the backlog. Drafting the documentation for semi-finished features that are still in progress has sometimes led me to change the design in order to make writing the docs targeting these two people simpler.
    — albrewer

Week 12, 2023

Week 11, 2023

Week 10, 2023

Week 9, 2023

Week 8, 2023

Week 7, 2023

Week 6, 2023

Week 5, 2023

Week 4, 2023

Week 3, 2023

Week 2, 2023

Week 1, 2023

Backlinks