Cool Links

As a non-designer that sometimes designs stuff, this is fantastic! A compilation of easy to understand rules you can follow in web design without having to worry too much about context.

Some of them I had already learned elsewhere, but it’s nice to have them all laid out together like this.

This project aims to make it easy for CSS to have access to things only JS could have previously, all through CSS variables. This makes it way easier for CSS to still be responsible for the presentation layer, without having to add animations, transitions and status information through JS.

I gotta point out that the performance on that site specifically is pretty horrid. It’s probably better used sparingly, but I get why the demo site would use it everywhere 😅

Nice, cozy video reflecting on how we are often a distant audience of other people’s lives instead of living our own. It’s definitely that damn phone.

Pretty cool study about how our brains work in finding optimal routes and how surprisingly good we are at it, even when compared to computers. Lots of visual and interactive demos inside!

I found out about this when looking at my website’s analytics: this is cool! It’s an aggregator of cool links from the indie web, where nobody posts anything: every link comes from RSS feeds of various sites, and users upvote the best to make them bubble up to the top. It’s a great way to find new blogs and people to follow.

This is a survey for developers about everything but coding, that is accepting answers up to September 5. If you’re a developer, it’s worth participating! It doesn’t take long to fill and can help understanding the current environment of the dev industry in such chaotic times.

There’s a lot of websites that mimic retro desktops nowadays (they’re cool!), but this one feels truly special by having its own aesthetic, and it feels so fun to explore! I love ghow you can draw your own stamps and leave your own mark on it.

Play a different hole of mini-golf in your browser every day. You can see other people playing as well, and share your play with friends if you’re into that.

OverpAId is not coming for the people who do the actual work. It is coming, with extreme prejudice, for exactly one category of job: the one that spent the last forty years insisting everyone else’s job was replaceable.

This is fantastic.

There will be at many points in your creative process opportunities to bypass the struggle of working and learning, but availing yourself of those shortcuts will gradually undermine your work in subtle ways that you cannot foresee.

So sure, go ahead and use generative fill to clean up your image. No one’s watching. I won’t tell anyone and no one will ever know. But you will pay a very small price in relieving yourself from the duty of learning some new Photoshop skills. You might not need those skills in this precise moment, but as you grow into your craft, those skills might come in handy in other ways that you do not presently anticipate.

While focused on people who do creative work, this video easily applies to everyone. It’s so easy to fall into the trap of letting the sparkles do something for you, and just as easy to prevent yourself from learning and improving because of that.

Even as someone who tries to limit and police my own usage of AI tools, I could see myself in a lot of these examples. Process isn’t only important to creative work; it’s important to our own personal development. AI can produce generic output that anyone else could, but only you, with your unique combination of skills and experiences accumulated over the years, can produce something unique.

Another amazing Josh Comeau post that explains a new concept in a super easy to understand manner and makes me wanna try it out right now? Yes please.

The last time I saw the anchor positioning API, it looked kinda intimidating. Now it sounds so simple! I know there was work on the browser standards side to simplify it, so kudos to them for arriving at what seems to be a really sensible API.

There’s hardly a working day in which Safari doesn’t make my life harder. I’m not the only one who feels like that. Alex Russell goes in great detail on how shitty the situation of Apple’s browser is especially because they block any sort of competition in their main platform.

Apple is consistently out-engineered and out-invested by a non-profit with 1/40th the web-derived revenue.

These large, persistent gaps matter to the mobile and web ecosystems because Apple is unique in denying access to more capable, less-buggy engines and actively erecting unlawful barriers to choice when forced by legislation to enable it.

Don’t let the title turn you off in case these words mean nothing to you — Sophie’s website is a joy to open every time, with multiple fun themes to choose from. And she added a new dynamic element to one of them, making the background reflect the sky of the current time of day.

She noted it was hard to get to this result, but reading it, it feels pretty simple to understand. Which is the mark of a good developer and writer.

Wow! This is a mistake I’d probably have done on my first semester in college. Not when working for FIFA.

Though I do wonder if real humans wrote that code before the fix. My guess is no.

I gotta say this person has a lot of self-control.

Really good article about literal and metaphorical midwinters and (tech) work.

A 3D museum in which you can walk on all about the history of WordPress, with displays for each release, some of the history behind them, all that. Really cool!

Half Life 2 running fully through your browser? Sure! Why not?

Definitely not the best way to do it, but walking around in one of the best games ever on my browser is a pretty cool concept. Especially since there’s no way to run it natively on a Mac nowadays.

I often look at my own posts and think, “There’s nothing novel, or important, or deep in here at all — is this even worth saying?”

Yes! Me too! Lots of drafts got abandoned because I eventually caught myself thinking that while writing it. Past couple years I’ve been trying to detach myself from that way of thinking but it’s a slow process.

Sometimes a blog post will only have a target audience of one (the writer) and that is perfectly fine.

Incredible visual demonstration of how the absurd size of modern SUVs turns them into even deadlier machines. Not only the hood height makes them deadlier in a possible collision, but the vastly increased blind spots make collisions more likely to happen.

This is so cool! TownSquare adds a small virtual square at the footer of a website, on which visitors can walk around, jump, high-five and talk to each other. And this can connect multiple websites together!

Strongly considering adding this somewhere on my website.