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Haskell WebAssembly in the Browser
As far as I know this is the first Haskell program compiled to Webassembly (WASM) with mainline ghc and using the browser DOM.
Speeding up the JavaScript ecosystem – Polyfills gone rogue
Many popular npm packages depend on 6-8x more packages than they need to. Most of these are unnecessary polyfills and it's one of the key reasons node_modules folders are so large. The eslint ecosystem seems to be most affected by this.
Most UI applications are broken real-time applications
I’ve been programming for a long time. When I say long time, I mean decades, with an S. Hopefully that’s long enough. In that time my experience has primarily been programming for contemporary platforms, e.g. Linux, Windows, macOS on desktop-class or server-class CPU architectures. Recently, I embarked on building a…
Writing HTML by hand
Behind the scenes - how I'm making redblobgames.com - interactive explanations of game development algorithms and math
Web apps are better than no apps
There’s a certain community in tech that’s very vocal about their preference toward native apps. I share that sentiment, yet sometimes people take this …
What will LLM-powered software look like in the medium-term future?
Recently, I started working on a new LLM-oriented project . It’s currently far from feature-complete and probably filled with bugs, but I’m hoping to use it as a platform for exploring a question I’ve been considering a lot lately: what will LLM-powered software look like in the medium-term future? It seems undeniable…
How far back in time can I take my website's design?
A look back through web-browser history, as I test my site against the browsers of the past.
My Little MillionDollarHomepage Garden
Back around the time I convinced my family to switch from a 56 kb/s dial-up modem to ADSL, the website milliondollarhomepage.com was launched, and quickly became an Internet phenomenon, selling pixels for advertising space on a 1000x1000 canvas. 18 years later, the homepage is still standing, proudly displaying the…
Some notes on local-first development
How local-first software works: sync engines, CRDTs, replicated databases, developer tools, architecture tradeoffs, and when to use each approach.
The Rules of Margin Collapse
“Margin collapse” has a dastardly reputation, one of the trickier parts of CSS. Fortunately, it gets a lot easier once you learn a few rules! In this tutorial, we take a deep dive into the governing principles, and learn how to use them to our advantage.
Notes from building a blog in Django
We launched the Datasette Cloud blog today. The Datasette Cloud site itself is a Django app - it uses Django and PostgreSQL to manage accounts, teams and soon billing and payments, then launches dedicated containers running Datasette for each customer.
I think I kind of hate lazy loading
Yesterday I was on a train. I clicked on a link and my browser loaded a long article for me to read. Halfway through reading it, the train went into a tunnel and I lost signal. That meant I couldn't see the images on the other half of the page for the rest of the journey. I had a sea of broken images. Even though the…
Beyond OpenAPI
Let's write the docs like it's 2023.
Static Hermes: Compile JavaScript to speed it up 300x (in microbenchmarks)
How to speed up a ubenchmark 300x Static Hermes: How to Speed Up a Micro-benchmark by 300x Without Cheating This is th...
“Make” as a static site generator (2022)
Static site generators are in fashion for good reasons. The resulting pages are easy to host, fast and extremely low on maintenance while being sufficient for many use cases. As I learned when setting up my blog , writing a simple script myself is faster and more satisfying than learning one of the other site builders…
An Internet of PHP
Statistics and anecdotes about PHP at scale.
Making sense of React Server Components
This year, the React team unveiled something they've been quietly researching for years: an official way to run React components exclusively on the server. This is a significant paradigm shift, and it's caused a whole lot of confusion in the React community. In this tutorial, we'll explore this new world, and build an…
Turbo 8 is dropping TypeScript
By all accounts, TypeScript has been a big success for Microsoft. I've seen loads of people sparkle with joy from dousing JavaScript with explicit types that can be checked by a compiler. But I've never been a fan. Not after giving it five minutes, not after giving it five years. So it's with great pleasure that I can…
Postmarks – A single-user, fediverse-enabled bookmarking website
The personal blog of Casey Kolderup
Svelte is surprisingly easy to learn
Discover the hidden power of Svelte – the JavaScript framework that feels like déjà vu. Uncover how Svelte simplifies web development, reimagining JS.
Microsoft Edge is starting to annoy me big time
Short article slash rant discussing the Got it! button in a prompt for personalized Web experience in Microsoft Edge, covering user experience interruption, bad design, aggressive marketing, implicit decisions, other annoyances, and more
The Musaicum EU-plus 10M resolution image of Europe
I am pleased to here introduce a new satellite image product that i have been working on for a few months. Development of this has been co-financed by Geofabrik . They are going to offer tile services for web maps based on this image in combination with the Green Marble .
Internals of async / await in JavaScript
If you have ever used JavaScript in the past, there is a high chance you have encountered the async / await syntax. async / a
Browser extensions spy on you, even if its developers don't
I've developed a few browser extensions, and every week I receive numerous emails with "revenue offer". Some experienced developers know that offers like these will inject malware into the browsers of your users, but scammers who make these offers will not tell you about it. They offer "integrations" that don't look…
The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
Google Maps Testing New Apple Maps-Inspired Map Style
Back in August 2020 , Google began testing a seemingly Apple Maps-inspired map style that added darker and deeper landcover colors throughout the world: