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…
The Internet Archive also archives physical books. The archive’s 2010 scan of a late 19th century catalogue of colourful granite tiles came to my
An overview of the design of a signal analyzer module for a browser-based digital audio workstation built with modern web tech. The post goes over the specific web tech used (things like SharedArrayBuffer, OffscreenCanvas, WebAssembly, etc.) as well as the code design patterns used to build the interactive…
The TodoMVC implemented in Kobold weighs about 30kb when gzipped over the wire, out of which the gzipped Wasm blob is under 20kb. There are no tricks there . I haven't replaced the default allocator, nor have I minified the JavaScript (although I probably should).
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 .
Bun.js is a new (as of 2023) JavaScript runtime that is still very much in development, with it’s primary focus being on extreme speed. I’ve been following it for a while but until toda…
The first post on this personal blog dates back to December 2012. It’s been more than a decade! As with many others, I’ve always struggled with how to setup my personal website. It is just too enticing to build it “from scratch”, which usually means using a static
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…
Adam Silver – interaction designer – London, UK
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…
It is the result of mistakes made and lessons learned in a range of Django and Python projects over 15+ years.
I’m a hyperlink maximalist: everything should be a hyperlink , including everything that is hyperlinked by the author, everything that isn’t hyperlinked by the author, and perhaps even the hyperlinks themselves. Words should be hyperlinked, but so should be every interesting phrase, quote, name, proper noun…
“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.
The history, facts, and opinions.
I ran into an issue after accidently enabling HSTS for a website on localhost. This was not an issue for the original website that was runni...
Stop trying to make customElement happen. Do this instead.
Back in August 2020 , Google began testing a seemingly Apple Maps-inspired map style that added darker and deeper landcover colors throughout the world:
blog-cells can turn any web page into an interactive code notebook, similar to Jupyter notebooks, but powered by JavaScript and running entirely in the browser.
Hacker News displays comments in a tree. This can be frustrating if you want to keep track of a particular conversation, as you constantly have to seek through the tree to find the latest comment.
I'm trying out TinaCMS to make it faster and easier to post here!
Trying to make web applications federated is a popular effort. Examples include things like the “fediverse”, as well as various other efforts, like attempts to make distributed software forges, and so on. However, all of these efforts suffer from a problem which is fundamental in building federated applications built…
A rough edge with promises that can sneak up on you.
Originally, the domain part of a web address was all ASCII (so no accents, no emojis, no Chinese characters). This was extended a long time ago thanks to something called internationalized domain name (IDN). Today, in theory, you can use any Unicode character you like as part of a domain name, including emojis…
A function that computes to the first color if the used color scheme is light or unknown, or to the second color if the used color scheme is dark.
I started working on Flyaway with the intention of becoming familiar with Wayland, its protocols and extensions, and the wlroots library. Instead, I ended up genuinely liking all three.
John MacFarlane
I've been doing a bit of work cleaning up the CSS on this blog in the past couple days — the CSS is from a template that I copied more than five years ago at this point, and it was pretty crufty even when I first got it.
Project Xanadu as a pattern language, rather than a failed software project
Large language models like GPT-4 are becoming increasingly capable, at an alarming rate. Within a couple of years, we won't need developers any more! …Or at least, that's the narrative going viral on social media. I'm much more optimistic about what these AI advancements mean for the future of software development.
The age of frontend JavaScript frameworks eating the web world didn’t happen simply because some well-meaning developers found great DX. It happened because we were fed a line.
