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CSS background-repeat: round
23.6.2020
The CSS spec is full of gems that sneak their way past most of us web designers and developers. Stuff like :focus-within, prefers-reduced-motion, and prefers-color-scheme suddenly make their way into CSS without us really finding out for months or years. One such example is background-repeat:...
Kotlin Coroutines and Delay
11.6.2020
Whenever I suspect that there’s a timing conflict causing a problem with rendering and directives, I usually opt for a JavaScript setTimeout with a delay. The setTimeout code never makes it to production, but it does help me to understand if my code is the problem or if there’s a timing...
How to Fix ESLint Errors Upon Save in VS Code
6.5.2020
Two of the most prominent utilities in web development today are ESLint and Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code. I enjoy using both, and I love the integration between both tools, but warnings from ESLint inside Visual Studio Code aren’t fulfilling — I’d rather lint errors...
How to Display Mode-Specific Images
4.5.2020
Now that we have most of the basics of HTML and CSS in the browser, we’ve begun implementing new features that I would consider “quality of life” improvements, many of which have been inspired by mobile. One great example is the CSS prefers-color-scheme media query, which allows...
How to Simulate Long HTTP Requests
17.3.2020
It happens less frequently these days but there are times when we need to accommodate for a HTTP request timing out. The service could be down, under heavy traffic, or just poorly coded, or any host of other issues. Whenever I need to simulate a long HTTP request, I use a bit of PHP...
Hex Opacity Table
6.3.2020
We’ve used hex colors for years but 8-digit hexadecimal is still relatively new. While rgba is simple to understand, 8-digit hex is more difficult, as you need to provide a hex representation of a numeric value. The following is a hexadecimal chart of opacity! 100 FF 99 FC 98 FA 97 F7 96...
How to Set a Default Commit Message
2.3.2020
Having a default commit message is really useful for a number of reasons: It can formalize your commit messages It serves as a good reminder for the information you should add to your commit message, like issue number If you set it to “Drunk AF, don’t accept this” To set a default...
How to Specify User Agent with cURL
25.2.2020
Over the years I’ve shared how to perform a number of actions with cURL: how to send POST data, how to retrieve headers, follow redirects, check GZIP encoding, and more. Another useful cURL directive is sending the user agent, as some servers respond with different content or headers...
Override window.alert
11.2.2020
For years the only bit of feedback web developers could get was via alert("{str}") calls. These days we have the web console but, in rare cases, we don’t have a console and alert calls are our only window into a value at a given time. One problem: if an alert sneaks into production code, your...
Git Branch Autocompletion
4.2.2020
Naming git branches is something most of us have down to a science. My branch naming pattern is usually {issue number}-short-feature-description, though many developers prefer to lead with the description and end with the issue. Regardless of the pattern you use, having a feature like autocomplete...
Duplicated Argument Names
6.1.2020
Oftentimes we override or monkey patch functions and, in many cases, there are arguments we don’t care too much about. A common practice for those arguments is using _ for argument names — it’s a generally accepted and known practice for “this isn’t important”....
JavaScript ~~
9.12.2019
JavaScript is loaded with tiny syntax tricks to accomplish useful effects. For example, explore any codebase to see !! being used to convert a value to a boolean value. Have you seen ~~ before? Let’s have a look at what it does! We can employ ~~ to trigger a Math.floor operation with those...
JavaScript waitForTime
6.11.2019
I write a lot of tests for new features within Firefox DevTools. We have hundreds of “mochitests” which open the browser and perform synthetic actions like clicking, typing, and other user actions. I’ve previously written about waitForever which essentially halts following actions...
Promises and Static Values
23.8.2019
Async can throw a real wrench into the cogs of our programming workflows, all despite the fact that async is the modern JavaScript pattern. While async/await helps, there’s sometimes confusion about the way to have a single function that returns a value whether it exists or needs a Promise...
Data URIs
18.8.2019
We’re all familiar with traditional URI protocols like https, http, ftp, and file, but data URIs have become a large part of our online strategy. We can use them to display images, the Mac camera and webcams, and more. But what if we simply want to use a data URI to convey basic data? Typing...
then on Objects
5.8.2019
Promises were a revelation in JavaScript development, allowing us to enjoy async processing and avoid callback hell. Many new APIs like Battery API, Cache API, and others use the promise API. One fact you may not know is that you can add a then method to any object to make it Promise-like!...
CSS Gradient Text
15.7.2019
Web developers know the fight we’ve all had to improve fonts on the web. Whether it be load time, odd strategies for using custom fonts (Cufon, anyone?), or just finding the right font itself, beautifying text on the web has never come easy. That got me thinking about fonts and CSS gradients, since...
Detect if Element is a Web Component
5.6.2019
I’ve advocated for web components since before they became a spec, mostly inspired by the Dojo Toolkit’s dijit framework. Empowering first class JavaScript widgets, as opposed to a mess of DIVs and templates, always made the most sense. Now that web components exist, and awesome...
Recursive Array.flat
17.5.2019
There was much talk about Array.prototype.flat during its early stages, starting with the name alone. Many developers preferred the name flatten but the spec differed from MooTools’ implementation. MooTools would recursively flatten an array but the new, official flat implementation was only...
Using Array reduce
14.5.2019
Every developer who specializes in any programming language will tell you there’s a powerful tool the language provides that they rarely use and wish they knew more about. For me, it’s Array.prototype.reduce. I quite enjoy the other Array methods like map, filter, and find, but reduce...