Last September, I was approached by Alex Duloz, who invited me to take part in his ambitious new venture, The Pastry Box Project. Its goal was to gather 30 people (“bakers”) every year who are influential in their field and ask them to share twelve thoughts — one per month. For 2012, that field would [...]
A common dilemma while teaching (I’m not only talking about teaching in a school or university; talks and workshops are also teaching), is whether it’s better to first teach some easy special cases and then generalize, or first the general case and then present special cases as merely shortcuts. I’ve been revisiting this dilemma recently, [...]
One of the first things a software engineer learns is “don’t reinvent the wheel”. If something is already made, use that instead of writing your own. “Stand on the shoulders of giants, they know what they’re doing better than you”. Writing your own tools and libraries, even when one already exists, is labelled “NIH syndrome” [...]
Yesterday, I released dabblet. One of its aspects that I took extra care of, is it’s keyboard navigation. I used many of the commonly established application shortcuts to navigate and perform actions in it. Some of these naturally collided with the native browser shortcuts and I got a few bug reports about that. Actually, overriding [...]
Edit: This was originally written to be posted in www-style, the mailing list for CSS development. I thought it might be a good idea to post it here as other people might be interested too. It wasn’t. Most people commenting didn’t really get the point of the article and thought I’m suggesting we should simply [...]
Yesterday, I was watching some season 6 episodes of Futurama (btw, this is their best season ever!) and I noticed the URLs in the website I was in (let’s call it foo.com). They were like: http://foo.com/futurama/season/6/episode/9 I thought to myself “hey, this looks very clean and readable”. And then I noticed that it only has [...]
This post is about an idea I’ve had for ages, but never found the time to actually start working on it. Maybe because it looks like a quite big project if done properly, so it’s scary to do it on my own without any help. jQuery has a huge amount of code that deals with [...]
I recently posted my first suggestion to www-style, the official W3 mailing list for CSS development. It was about allowing attr() values inside calc(). In this post I’ll describe in greater detail why I believe this is necessary, since not everyone follows www-style. If anyone has something to add in the discussion, you may post [...]
A couple hours ago, I received a notification email from Goodreads and unlike usually, I decided to actually visit the site (by the way, I believe that Goodreads, i.e. a last.fm for books, is an awesome idea but poorly implemented).When I did, I was quite annoyed to find out that I wasn’t already logged in, so [...]
There has been a recent flood of CSS experiments that utilize CSS3 features to convert some meaningless markup to spectacular pictures. It all started when David Desandro used CSS3 to draw the Opera logo. This seemed to inspire lots of other folks who created similar demos: Pure CSS icons Create Social Media Icons in pure [...]