Cool Links

Neat little daily browser puzzle game where you use clues to find out who’s a criminal and who’s innocent.

Ok, this video is amazing. Corridor Crew recreates the amazing practical effects from the first Lord of the Rings movie (the forced perspective ones with Gandalf and the hobbits), but not only that, there’s amazing storytelling on how it was made, all the cinema history before it, and why it has never been done again since then.

Great post about how clients hire experts to solve a problem, then completely ignore their expertise and try to copy what the big ones do. But they’re not big.

The “f*** off contact page” concept is amazing, too. It’s 100% real and out there, with more and more companies doing it (either intentionally or by just wanting to copy what others do).

Also, Nic Chan’s website is a treasure. It’s already been featured as a cool link here before but I wanted to point it out again. So cool!

This is the first article that made me actually understand the use cases for CSS subgrid. I’m still not fully convinced I’m gonna use them often, but it’s nice to understand what problems they solve.

… wow. This is an amazing article that goes a bit into how LLMs work (is an easy-to-understand way), how flawed they are, and how useful they can be. Or dangerous.

Plus, the nurse and surgeon examples are hilarious.

This article walks through how the concept of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) was born, how it inevitably became broken and how easy it is to “win” it, as long as your content is made up and not actual real information.

This Mastodon thread is an amazing tale about game development, physics and time-traveling bugs.

This is a really cool trick. Turns out that it’s possible, with pure CSS, to have border-radius be applied conditionally.

The given example is a perfect one: sometimes we have cards with rounded corners that look good on their own, but if you’re on mobile and have less space and want the cards to take up the full page width, the rounded corners look awful. You can technically write breakpoints for that, but with clamp you can make the border-radius disappear if the card is too close to the viewport edges!

In this awesome post, Ahmad walks through all the possibilities modern CSS offers when building a section layout.

I knew about and have used some of those in the past, but that tip about display: contents was amazing! Never thought of using it like that.

This article has been sitting in my “Read Later” queue for almost 2 years 😳

It is an interesting article for sure, speaking about why speed and optimization has become such a rare thing in software development.

The second part of it, though, has kinda aged like milk, sadly. Developers no longer have a lot of leverage on their jobs, and we now live in a world where the thought of having no human developers involved at all in the code I’m running is real and frankly terrifying.

I’m hopeful companies will eventually figure out that AI-generated crap is still crap when the bubble bursts, but until then, there’s a lot of damage to be done.

Great and to-the-point article with practical examples of when to use (or not use) animations properly in UIs.

I love me some whooshy animations, but they can be a pain in the ass when overused or when used in the wrong moment.

This is a really cool initiative! Kagi has been my search engine of choice for over a year and I’m really happy with how they’re aiming to stop AI slop from taking over their (still great) search results.

In my experience, their results are miles ahead of Google’s, Bing’s or whatever other search engine out there, partly because of their algorithm prioritizes good sites, partly because they allow you to prioritize/deprioritize/block the sites you want.

But a good algorithm only goes so far and with the amount of AI slop hitting the web every day, it’s gonna be harder and harder to avoid them. Now Kagi users can report certain articles as AI-generated so other users can know that beforehand and not click on them, or even block their domains.

The “div vs button” debate was never really a debate because one of the sides is objectively wrong, but this is still a good post to remind you of why it was never a debate in the first place.

Thomas gives a bunch of examples of things you should avoid doing if you want your website to look good on Safari’s new Liquid Glass design. All those don’ts are perfectly illustrated by a website that didn’t take Liquid Glass into account… apple.com.

The new Safari is such an incredible failure.

Yes! Any good developer will tell you that coding is the easiest part of the job. Making software actually go beyond a feature demo is what’s really hard. It’s something I’ve been taught ever since I began working on the field, actually. Learning to code is essential, but learning where to put the code and how to foresee all the hundreds of complexities is my actual job.

Expectations, feature scalability and security are very much human components of the job and can’t be properly done by something that’s not human.

Okay, this is pretty cool. This lil’ website allows you to do quick image edits right on your browser. Nothing new there - except for the fact that it actually works with no account, no ads, no popups, no upsell. Truly a marvel!

The same as Edit Photo, but for Videos!

Another cool little web utility. This one lets you squoosh your image files to greatly reduce their file size without any significant loss in quality. Especially useful if you have a website of your own and want to optimize your images.

Really cool thoughts on the tradeoffs between control and performance in web development, and how whatever you build will never outperform the browser’s built-in APIs.

A really fun web comic of an artist explaining his thoughts about AI art. I think I agree with all the points there.