How Core Git Developers Configure Git. Like a lot of folks I learned Git on the job and just the bare minimum to get the job done, so a lot of these cool options went undiscovered. I'm definitely adding a few of these things to my personal Git setup.
AI is Stifling Tech Adoption. All coding assistants have a starting prompt, and that prompt can be biased toward "proven" technologies like React and Tailwind.
Interop 2025 Dashboard. "Interop 2025 is a cross-browser effort to improve the interoperability of the web." Sucks to see my favored browsers lagging so far behind Chrome.
I'm glad I took the off-ramp from software engineering. I see a lot of echoes of my own career here. The industry changes fast and at some point you're competing with younger folks with more time, energy, and willingness to work for less money.
Grind 75. A curated list of 75 leetcode questions that cover basic tech interview patterns. I really don't get the continuing obsession with leetcode in a world of AI coding assistants and snapped-together cloud services.
The Visible Zorker. Game design legend Andrew Plotkin wrote an app that is a version of Zork that reveals the original Infocom source code *as you play the game.Which reminds me: the text adventure game I dreamed up when I was 14 and started rewriting in 2022 using Inform7 has been sitting around waiting for me to finish the last 10%. I should set a deadline and get that done!
I suspect that some firms believe AI allows them to get around the "cheap, fast, good — pick two" dilemma. Especially if the definition of "good" is "works well enough" and doesn't include secure and trustworthy.
Leaving secret access keys out the open is a rookie mistake that should never make it through code review. Yet a security engineer found exactly that when they discovered their fancy high-tech bed was hackable.
I'm not saying the company in question used AI, because I can't possibly know that. But when I see reports like this, it makes me think: did a human review this? Did a human write this? What else is going unnoticed?
As AI empowers firms and inexperienced engineers to hastily slap together an app and rush it to market faster than ever, expect more hacks, data breaches, and other security woes.
Unlike the dry heat of the southwest US, Florida has a wet heat that moistens your skin, and scalp, and underarms, and the areas just beneath your eyesockets. Despite alleged alligator allocations, I didn't see a single alligator in the wild. So enjoy this captive alligator ass, whose owner seemed completely uninterested in any visitors, or turning around, or moving at all.
Back in 2016, I started working on HERETICAL, a short adventure comic. Then, as is the way of things, stuff happened, and as more stuff happened the comic fell lower and lower on my list of priorities. So it sat unfinished for a while—like, as two entire presidential administrations came and went. Then last year I found myself with a bit more free time than I am accustomed to and I basically finished it by grinding out one panel at a time.
As I once told the folks on my newsletter: I have to keep relearning the lesson: the world is always gonna be hot garbage in some way, whether we make art or not. So we may as well make art, and have a hot garbage world with art in it.
I hope you enjoy it! I've already gotten started on the next one. Just don't ask me how long it'll take!
(P.S.: the folks on my newsletter got to see HERETICAL a week ago, and also got to see sketches and process art all last year. If that sounds like your thing, you should subscribe )!
There's actually a LOT of subscriber-only content on Neat Hobby! — bonus comics, a hidden blog, etc. — but the only way to see it was to follow hidden links I only include in the newsletter. Those links are otherwise unprotected and that's fine, I don't mind if they get shared. But what I really wanted was something like what Ghost has, where hidden features and content can be unlocked for subscribers by just checking an email address.
And then something cool happened: Buttondown recently made their API free of charge. Kind of a big deal! Now I can use an edge function to call the API and check if an email is subscribed to the newsletter, then use the Eleveny Edge plugin to conditionally render content based on that check. No password required! Exactly the amount of friction I was aiming for.
Connect your Buttondown newsletter to your Eleventy website and encourage subscriptions with subscribers-only content. - GitHub - scottandrewlepera/netlify-buttondown-11ty: Connect your Buttondown…
If you're like me and create websites with the Eleventy static website generator, you know how cool it is!
You may have also been like me and excited to discover the Eleventy Edge plugin which allows you to create dynamic content on otherwise static websites!
You may have also been like me and disappointed to learn that the plugin was removed from the Eleventy 3.0 release and deprecated.
Unlike me, you may have started writing your own edge integrations, or decided to stick it out with v2.0, or maybe given up.
The layout reconfigures itself based on screen width. On mobile devices it'll be a single column layout with a dropdown menu. On laptops and wider screens it expands to a classic two-column layout.
See a live demo here and download a ZIP containing all of the template files. Feel free to use, modify, and share! And if you make something cool with it, let me know!
I've been loving the renewed interest in making websites a bit easier for people who have little desire to become web developers themselves.
You Might As Well Use a Content Security Policy - Very thorough and well-written overview of CSP, how to deploy it, and why. Plus, I totally missed that you can do this with a <meta> element!
Egoless Engineering - I've been sharing this everywhere. I really good read if you, like me, are often frustrated by teams responsible for a Thing having no power to change the Thing.
unminify - "Free tool to unminify (unpack, deobfuscate) JavaScript, CSS, HTML, XML and JSON code, making it readable and pretty." It all stays in-browser, allegedly.
Frameworkism is now the dominant creed of today's frontend discourse, and it's bullshit. We owe it to ourselves and to our users to reject dogma and embrace engineering as a discipline that strives to serve users first and foremost.
(Emphasis mine.)
I remember the moment I knew we were screwed. I was at our annual developer conference in the early 2010s. Teams usually sent a few devs to demo something cool they were working on.
I started to notice a common narrative from these sessions: we needed front-end, but we didn't have front-end expertise, so React allowed us to do it ourselves. Over and over. By the end of the day one presenter quipped "so, we ended up using React...maybe you've heard of it?" eliciting chuckles from the crowd.
"Front-end engineer" would not become an official role at the company for another five years. It was clear in those early days that React was a way for any engineer to "do" front-end, including those who weren't particularly concerned for the quality of the user experience.
Frameworkism is now the dominant creed of today’s frontend discourse, and it’s bullshit. We owe it to ourselves and to our users to reject dogma and embrace engineering as a discipline that strives to serve users first and foremost.
Welcome to the world of local-first web development. - I didn't know there was a community of devs focused on building web apps that run completely client-side. I'm also wondering why I was surprised by this.
PikaPods - Super-inexpensive ready-to-use hosted apps like RSS readers, blogging software (including Ghost and Wordpress), wikis, notebooks, link sharing and a ton of others. Via Joe Crawford.
PocketBase - an open source fully-contained backend for web apps. You get an SQLite database, authentication, and file storage, wrapped in a single binary with a REST API. Neat! One of the available apps on PikaPods.
Editing Plain Vanilla - a good overview of a VS Code profile for vanilla JS projects. The Plain Vanilla site has a lot of really good and sensible patterns for building sites and apps without frameworks or a huge toolchain, but it's such a bummer to see AI images to adorning their blog posts.
Animate.css - cool library of ready-to-use CSS animations along with best practices. Pull apart to code to see how the animations work.
...and a fun bit of web history: Nifty Corners Cube. A 2006 JavaScript library for creating rounded corners on HTML elements, from the time before border-radius existed. The demos still work! The source code is an interesting time capsule of techniques we needed to hack around poor/missing support of APIs like addEventListener and querySelector.
