magnASCII.io Simone Magnaschi
Senior Full Stack Web Dev

The New Skill in AI is Not Prompting, It's Context Engineering

Context Engineering is the new skill in AI. It is about providing the right information and tools, in the right format, at the right time.
Tags: #ai
Saved on: 2025-07-01

Poline

poline is lightweight, dependency free and fast JavaScript function written in TypeScript. It draws lines between anchors over polar coordinates to generate pleasing color palettes.
Saved on: 2025-06-19

Poline

"poline" is an enigmatic color palette generator, that harnesses the mystical witchcraft of polar coordinates. Its methodology, defying conventional color science, is steeped in the esoteric knowledge of the early 20th century.
Saved on: 2025-06-19

A receipt printer cured my procrastination

Why can I focus for hours on a game but procrastinate on simple tasks? I finally cracked the code using thermal receipt printer and game design.
Saved on: 2025-06-12

A receipt printer cured my procrastination

Why can I focus for hours on a game but procrastinate when writing an email? For over 20 years, I've tried everything to boost my productivity. I've read dozens of books and tested many methods. Nothing made a real difference.
Saved on: 2025-06-12

How to Create a RAG Agent with Neuron ADK for PHP

Struggling with RAG? Learn how retrieval work to build intelligent AI agents, then implement your first RAG system with Neuron ADK for PHP
Saved on: 2025-06-11

How to Create a RAG Agent with Neuron ADK for PHP

To be honest, when I first encountered the term “RAG”, I felt like I was staring at a wall of technical jargon. You’ve probably heard a lot of buzzwords floating around the AI Agents topic: vector databases, embeddings, retrieval augmented generation.
Saved on: 2025-06-11

So Long, Figma. Thanks for Everything.

This is your future self. I know it’s weird, but I wanted to send a note back in time to you. Don’t ask me how I did it…let’s just say “It’s complicated.” Now I know you’re scared. I remember the…
Saved on: 2025-06-09

So Long, Figma. Thanks for Everything.

This is your future self. I know it’s weird, but I wanted to send a note back in time to you. Don’t ask me how I did it…let’s just say “It’s complicated.” Now I know you’re scared. I remember the feeling. But everything is okay here in the future.
Saved on: 2025-06-09

Asynchronous Programming in PHP

(Published on June 3, 2025 - Version française)
Saved on: 2025-06-04

Asynchronous Programming in PHP

PHP's traditional execution model is synchronous, which means that each instruction is executed in the order in which it appears in the code. This isn't a problem in itself, as it's often simpler to think synchronously.
Saved on: 2025-06-04

The naked billboard that shocked the establishment – and blazed a trail in the art world

It's been 40 years since the controversial activist group Guerrilla Girls formed. Their most powerful campaign, the "naked poster", broke new ground – and has had a lasting influence.
Saved on: 2025-06-03

The naked billboard that shocked the establishment – and blazed a trail in

It's been 40 years since the controversial activist group Guerrilla Girls formed. Their most powerful campaign, the "naked poster", broke new ground – and has had a lasting influence.
Saved on: 2025-06-03

Progressive JSON

Why streaming isn't enough.
Saved on: 2025-06-02

Progressive JSON

Do you know about Progressive JPEGs? Here’s a nice explanation of what a Progressive JPEG is. The idea is that instead of loading the image top to bottom, the image instead is fuzzy at first and then progressively becomes more crisp. What if we apply the same idea to transferring JSON?
Saved on: 2025-06-02

Root Shell on Credit Card Terminal

In this project, I started to reverse engineer payment card terminals because they seemed to be an interesting target for security research, given the high stakes involved.
Saved on: 2025-06-02

A visual exploration of vector embeddings

For Pycon 2025, I created a poster exploring vector embedding models, which you can download at full-size . In this post, I'll translate ...
Saved on: 2025-05-30

A visual exploration of vector embeddings

For Pycon 2025, I created a poster exploring vector embedding models, which you can download at full-size. In this post, I'll translate that poster into words. A vector embedding is a mapping from an input (like a word, list of words, or image) into a list of floating point numbers.
Saved on: 2025-05-30

The 3 Gurus of 90s Web Design: Zeldman, Siegel, Nielsen

With the rise of Flash and CSS in 1997, three web design philosophies emerged. David Siegel advocated for 'hacks', Jakob Nielsen kept it simple, while Jeffrey Zeldman combined flair with usability.
Saved on: 2025-05-30

The 3 Gurus of 90s Web Design: Zeldman, Siegel, Nielsen

With the rise of Flash and CSS in 1997, three web design philosophies emerged. David Siegel advocated for 'hacks', Jakob Nielsen kept it simple, while Jeffrey Zeldman combined flair with usability.
Saved on: 2025-05-30

code-atlantic/chophper

PHP utility to handle text truncation within HTML while maintaining full tag structure. Truncate by chars, words, sentences or paragraphs. Optionally finish on whole words/sentences. - code-atlanti...
Saved on: 2025-05-27

code-atlantic/chophper

Chophper is a PHP utility for truncating text within HTML to a given length without breaking the HTML tags. Note: This is an alpha version. Use at your own risk, and expect API changes towards simple and more flexible usage before the first stable release.
Saved on: 2025-05-27

No more digital eye strain

Reduce eye strain with regular breaks. LookAway offers a gentle, smart, and fully customizable experience to help you protect your eyes from prolonged screen use
Saved on: 2025-05-26

No more digital eye strain

LookAway puts your mac in rest mode at regular intervals to help you rest your eyes. It's gentle, smart, and fully customizable. For macOS 12.0+
Saved on: 2025-05-26

M3 Expressive: Engaging UX Design

Material’s latest evolution helps you make products even more engaging and easier to use.
Saved on: 2025-05-22

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of an LLM Agent Loop with Tool Use

3.5 is better for this, ime. I hooked claude desktop up to an MCP server to fake claude-code less the extortionate pricing and it works decently.
Saved on: 2025-05-16

billorcutt/i_dropped_my_phone_the_screen_cracked

web audio, cracked
Saved on: 2025-05-16

billorcutt/i_dropped_my_phone_the_screen_cracked

I Dropped My Phone The Screen Cracked is a web audio library that uses method chaining and CSS-style selectors to simplify creating, configuring and connecting audio nodes in the browser. Here's hello world: //create and connect sine and system out. start the sine __().sine().dac().
Saved on: 2025-05-16

The cryptography behind passkeys - The Trail of Bits Blog

This post will examine the cryptography behind passkeys, the guarantees they do or do not give, and interesting cryptographic things you can do with them, such as generating cryptographic keys and storing certificates.
Saved on: 2025-05-15

The cryptography behind passkeys - The Trail of Bits Blog

When most people think of cryptography, the first thing they typically think of is encryption: keeping information confidential. But just as important (if not more) is authenticity: ensuring that information is really coming from an authentic source.
Saved on: 2025-05-15

202 : 1 air traffic control

Saved on: 2025-05-13

202 : 1 air traffic control

Air traffic control has been in the news lately, on account of my country's declining ability to do it.
Saved on: 2025-05-13

Optimizing My Hacker News Experience - Rahul

Background
Saved on: 2025-05-12

Optimizing My Hacker News Experience - Rahul

Like many, I try to stay updated on tech news via Hacker News (HN) posts. I have been using HN actively for slightly more than 5 years now. During weekdays, I usually open or refresh a HN tab in my Chrome browser at least twice in a day.
Saved on: 2025-05-12

Embeddings are underrated

Saved on: 2025-05-12

Embeddings are underrated

Someone asks you to “make some embeddings”. What do you input? You input text.1 You don’t need to provide the same amount of text every time. E.g. sometimes your input is a single paragraph while at other times it’s a few sections, an entire document, or even multiple documents.
Saved on: 2025-05-12

pure.md - global cache between LLMs and the web

Reliably access web content in markdown format by simply prefixing any URL with `pure.md/`. Avoids bot detection, renders JavaScript-heavy websites, and converts HTML, PDFs, images, and more into pure markdown.
Saved on: 2025-05-12

pure.md - global cache between LLMs and the web

Avoid getting flagged as a bot. Our proxy mimics real browser fingerprints and rotates egress IP addresses on every request. If a site can't be reached, we seamlessly fall back to fetching responses from Common Crawl and Internet Archive datasets.
Saved on: 2025-05-12

Plain Vanilla

An explainer for web development using only vanilla techniques.
Saved on: 2025-05-12

Plain Vanilla

An explainer for doing web development using only vanilla techniques. No tools, no frameworks — just HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
Saved on: 2025-05-12

Pixels in Islamic Art: Square Kufic Calligraphy

When I was a little kid whenever we drove by mosques, I would be intrigued by the complex motifs they’re decorated by. I always tried to figure out the pattern; to me it was just a pattern, I never…
Saved on: 2025-05-06

Pixels in Islamic Art: Square Kufic Calligraphy

When I was a little kid whenever we drove by mosques, I would be intrigued by the complex motifs they’re decorated by.
Saved on: 2025-05-06

The vocal effects of Daft Punk

Daft Punk have used a wide variety of vocal effects in their songs. A May 2001 interview in Remix magazine provided a rare insight from Daft Punk themselves on the topic.
Saved on: 2025-05-06

The vocal effects of Daft Punk

Daft Punk have used a wide variety of vocal effects in their songs. A May 2001 interview in Remix magazine provided a rare insight from Daft Punk themselves on the topic. The quote delivers some vital clues, but it’s incomplete, covering only their first two albums.
Saved on: 2025-05-06

Critical CSS : Hacker News

Saved on: 2025-05-06

Critical CSS : Hacker News

Feedback welcome, it's free for now.
Saved on: 2025-05-06

The history of album art

Matt Ström-Awn · Designer, leader, and coach focused on building exceptional products and teams.
Saved on: 2025-05-03

The history of album art

Album art didn’t always exist. In the early 1900s, recorded music was still a novelty, overshadowed by sales of sheet music. Early vinyl records were vastly different from what we think of today: discs were sold individually and could only hold up to four minutes of music per side.
Saved on: 2025-05-03

A Mind Is Born

Saved on: 2025-05-01

A Mind Is Born

Making a demo in just 256 bytes would be a formidable challenge regardless of platform. A Mind Is Born is my attempt to do it on the Commodore 64. In the absence of an actual 256-byte compo, it was submitted to the Oldskool 4K Intro compo at Revision 2017, where it ended up on 1st place.
Saved on: 2025-05-01

Home - Osvaldo Poli

vivo e lavoro a Castel Goffredo ( Mantova ). Sposato, ho due figli. Mi occupo principalmente della consulenza e della formazione dei genitori e della coppia, collaborando con diversi gruppi , istituzioni e riviste.
Saved on: 2025-04-29

Vibe Coding Is Fun—But Vibe Refactoring Pays the Bills - Dawid Makowski

So let’s flip the script to something that actually compounds: vibe refactoring. Same spontaneous energy, but aimed at shrinking technical debt and sharpening your architecture instead of amping up the commit count.
Saved on: 2025-04-29

Vibe Coding Is Fun—But Vibe Refactoring Pays the Bills - Dawid Makowski

There’s a lot of hype about vibe coding—that moment when caffeine hits, your playlist slaps, and you hammer out code like a jazz drummer sprinting through a solo. It’s exhilarating, but relying on that adrenaline burst is like funding your retirement with scratch-offs.
Saved on: 2025-04-29

AI-powered Workflow Automation API

Leverage AI API to streamline workflow in E-Commerce, Marketing, Content Management, HR Tech, Travel, and more.
Saved on: 2025-04-28

AI-powered Workflow Automation API

Integrate with our API, and your app will be so savvy, it will have its own podcast discussing the latest in code elegance and AI research progress. :-) Check out our FAQ section for quick solutions to common queries. If you don't find what you're looking for, feel free to reach out.
Saved on: 2025-04-28

zumerlab/snapdom

snapDOM captures HTML elements as images with exceptional speed and accuracy. - zumerlab/snapdom
Saved on: 2025-04-28

zumerlab/snapdom

snapDOM is a high-fidelity DOM capture tool, developed as part of the animation engine for Zumly — a framework for creating smooth zoom-based view transitions.
Saved on: 2025-04-28

Magnitude

Saved on: 2025-04-26

Magnitude

Saved on: 2025-04-26

AI Horseless Carriages | koomen.dev

An essay about bad AI app design
Saved on: 2025-04-24

CSS Hell

15 puzzles for the masochistic CSS fiend.
Saved on: 2025-04-23

CSS Hell

Web site created using create-react-app
Saved on: 2025-04-23

Autumn Pricing

Autumn is the easiest and most flexible way to add Stripe payments to your SaaS application. It manages your pricing plans, controls feature permissions, enforces usage limits and more!
Saved on: 2025-04-23

Autumn Pricing

An open-source layer over Stripe to create any pricing model, and embed it into your application with a few lines of code. Today, there are more ways than ever to monetize software. Your customers want flexible pricing, but it's a nightmare to build, prone to breaking and expensive to maintain.
Saved on: 2025-04-23

The-Pocket/Tutorial-Codebase-Knowledge

Pocket Flow: Codebase to Tutorial
Saved on: 2025-04-20

The-Pocket/Tutorial-Codebase-Knowledge

Ever stared at a new codebase written by others feeling completely lost? This tutorial shows you how to build an AI agent that analyzes GitHub repositories and creates beginner-friendly tutorials explaining exactly how the code works.
Saved on: 2025-04-20

takaakit/uml-diagram-for-ddd-example-in-evans-book

UML diagram for the DDD example—a cargo shipping system—from Eric Evans' book - takaakit/uml-diagram-for-ddd-example-in-evans-book
Saved on: 2025-04-19

takaakit/uml-diagram-for-ddd-example-in-evans-book

This project uses UML diagrams to illustrate the structure and behavior of the DDD example—a cargo shipping system—from Eric Evans' book (Domain-Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software).
Saved on: 2025-04-19

Origin UI - Beautiful UI components built with Tailwind CSS and Vue | Originui Vue

An open-source collection of copy-and-paste components for quickly building application UIs.
Saved on: 2025-04-18

Origin UI - Beautiful UI components built with Tailwind CSS and Vue | Origi

An open-source collection of copy-and-paste components for quickly building application UIs.
Saved on: 2025-04-18

Reproducing Hacker News writing style fingerprinting

About three years ago I saw a quite curious and interesting post on Hacker News.
Saved on: 2025-04-17

Apache ECharts

Apache ECharts, a powerful, interactive charting and visualization library for browser
Saved on: 2025-04-09

Apache ECharts

Apache ECharts provides more than 20 chart types available out of the box, along with a dozen components, and each of them can be arbitrarily combined to use. Easily switch between Canvas and SVG rendering.
Saved on: 2025-04-09

anime.js

A fast and versatile JavaScript animation library
Saved on: 2025-04-04

anime.js

Anime.js V4 is now in early access for GitHub Sponsors! Anime.js (/ˈæn.ə.meɪ/) is a lightweight JavaScript animation library with a simple, yet powerful API. It works with CSS properties, SVG, DOM attributes and JavaScript Objects.
Saved on: 2025-04-04

shadcn/ui

A set of beautifully-designed, accessible components and a code distribution platform. Works with your favorite frameworks. Open Source. Open Code.
Saved on: 2025-03-18

DSHR's Blog: Archival Storage

I gave a talk at the Berkeley I-school's Information Access Seminar entitled Archival Storage . Below the fold is the text of the talk with...
Saved on: 2025-03-18

Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer

How to figure out what the user experience should be when you don’t have time, budget, or a design team.
Saved on: 2025-03-13

freelancing: How I got clients, part 1 (7min read)

tools, tactics, troubles along the way
Saved on: 2025-02-25

Vietnamese Graphic Design

Saved on: 2025-02-24

European word translator

Translate any word from English to more than 30 other European languages, on a map
Saved on: 2025-02-24

A system to organise your life

Johnny.Decimal is a system to organise your life. Find things, quickly, with more confidence, and less stress. It's free to use and the concepts are the same at home or work.
Saved on: 2025-02-22

React Scan

React Scan automatically detects and highlights components that cause performance issues in your React app. Drop it in anywhere – script tag, npm, you name it!
Saved on: 2025-02-18

uchū

uchū is the color palette for internet lovers, by NetOperator Wibby.
Saved on: 2025-02-17

kuchin/awesome-cto: A curated and opinionated list of resources for Chief Technology Officers, with

A curated and opinionated list of resources for Chief Technology Officers, with the emphasis on startups - kuchin/awesome-cto
Saved on: 2025-02-13

Exploring Concurrent Access Handling

Exploring Concurrent Access Handling (Published on Feb 9, 2025 - Version française)
Saved on: 2025-02-11

We are destroying software

Saved on: 2025-02-09

Deep Dive into LLMs like ChatGPT

This is a general audience deep dive into the Large Language Model (LLM) AI technology that powers ChatGPT and related products. It is covers the full traini...
Saved on: 2025-02-06

Software development topics I've changed my mind on after 10 years in the industry

Software development topics I've changed my mind on over the course of a decade
Saved on: 2025-02-06
❤️
</>
2025