Bookmarks

Working with stacked branches in Git is easier with --update-refs

Walkthrough of a new option in Git rebasing, why it is helpful for working with "stacked branches" (branch off a branch off a branch) and how to use it. I'm pretty convinced this will be better, as I tend to like working with stacked branches. And as a bonus, it's possible to set it as a default option, so all rebases have this behaviour.

6 days ago
Departure Mono

Interesting pixel-style monospaced font. Surprisingly looks pretty good for code samples.

7 days ago
Practical SVG by Chris Coyier

The entirety of Chris' book on using SVGs on the web. It's a few years old now, but I enjoyed the paper copy and thought it was a good summary of when to reach for SVGs, particularly around icons.

28 days ago
Your Engineers Do Need Communication Skills. So Teach Them about Rhetorical Situations (Part 2)

Great post outlining the concept of a "rhetorical situation", a specific structure that can be used to break down and analyse individual pieces of communication - in the context of software engineering, many of the examples revolve around code review. It could be a useful tool for making communication more effective by ensuring all pieces of the structure have been considered.

5 days ago
color × color

One of those tools to generate a range of colours based on starting and ending input colours. Seems like it has quite a lot of pre-written curves to generate the colours.

26 days ago
The Ultimate Collection of CSS-only Shapes

Pretty much does what it says on the tin. Possibly useful if for some reason an icon isn't viable.

26 days ago
Icônes

Nice & lightweight icon search across a large number of icon collections.

9 days ago
Designing better target sizes

Good article on increasing touch target sizes, particularly for mobile. There's a big grab bag of potential problems and solutions. The first section in particular is more general UX principles, then going onto looking in detail at CSS implementation details.

9 days ago
Robots.txt API

Interesting API to provide robots.txt output to block (known) various web scrapers, including those from AI bots.

28 days ago
On popover accessibility: what the browser does and doesn’t do

Clear description of the behaviours of the new popover attribute, particularly focused on the "accessibility guardrails" that it automatically applies. Will be useful reference for what precisely the behaviours are.

29 days ago
Steal this popover code

Adam Argyle has written the CSS for animating one of the elements with the new popover attribute so that we don't have to. It's pretty clean too!

29 days ago
SVG Icons with CSS Masks

Interesting new technique to use the mask property to link to an SVG to create icons. I think I'd want to test this without the pseudo element though.

April 2024
Two Types of Composition

Nice practical description of composition and comparison of the different ways it can be implemented.

April 2024
Some little ways I’m using CSS :has() in the real world

Useful and practical uses for the new :has() selector

April 2024
All About Career History Interviews

Brief (and unfortunately cut off for non-subscribers) description of a format of a technical (IC or leadership) interview they call "Career History". The summary is that you find 3 - 4 roles in their history then ask the same rough set of questions about those roles with a view to discovering what the trajectory of their career is. There's also a description of red flags to watch out for (mostly lack of improvement and lack of empathy). The structure intentionally doesn't follow questions that the interviewee may have polished, prepared answers for, which I can see the value of but worry isn't the best for neurodivergent candidates.

March 2024
Internationalize your keyboard controls - Mozilla Hacks

Thorough explanation of how different physical and virtual keyboards (such as French AZERTY and German QWERTZ keyboards) can affect the KeyboardEvent events.

December 2023
Shortery

Utility Mac app that adds various Shortcuts automations, so it could run a Shortcut on a time schedule or when connecting to wifi or when folder contents change etc.

November 2023
Uncut.wtf

Open source font chooser/display with no cruft.

October 2023
Obsidian Google Calendar Plugin

Create views into the your Google Calendar from Obsidian. Looks like it also supports creation of notes that are linked to calendar events. Possibly also useful for a "Dashboard" note showing some top level info.

October 2023
The Next Larger Context

Article from Camille Fournier, giving advice to senior engineers about how they can get to the next level by considering the "next larger context". This seems like a really good framing of the problem, so useful to keep in mind for career progression conversations.

October 2023