Cool Links

A library of ASCII art, but animated! You can browse a ton of scenes and data built with ASCII characters of your choice and even generate your own.

This complements the previous link I shared nicely: most developers don’t properly use the platform, but why? This goes into possible reasons without being judgemental, and to me they make a lot of sense. When I first started going all-in into front-end development I’ve been a part of all of those cases, I guess. In a way, writing less code and relying on the platform are signs of development experience (or battle scars).

Jim gives his notes on an amazing talk by Alexander Petros, and the topic is super relevant for any web dev.

It goes into how many of us, when modernizing our tech stack just for the sake of modernizing it, end up with objectively worse results than we’d have if we stuck to the tried and true.

HTML’s ideological goal is to make websites good for their users. React’s ideological goal is serving Facebook, which mostly wants to serve you ads. Both have completely different priorities.

(I’m linking to Jim’s notes instead of the talk directly because Jim makes great points too! But you should definitely watch the talk if the subject interests you)

This is absolutely incredible! Pick any website you want and control a stick figure while you destroy absolutely everything on it. A good way of getting revenge on the bad websites that have failed you in the past.