A site for cataloging the many technical musing of Andy Desmarais

An article by Rob Allen

Just another boring blog

Server automation now plays an essential role in systems administration, due to the disposable nature of modern application environments. Configuration management tools such…

A journey through the perils of haphazardly managing state with Boolean flags, to the tranquility of using reducers and state machines.

Use SQL queries to solve the murder mystery. Suitable for beginners or experienced SQL sleuths.

Anna Debenham harnesses up the huskies and puts them to work to figure out how teams distributed across multiple locations can work effectively to all pull in the same direction. With modern workforces distributed from north pole to south, can they all be kept running in step?

The frontend of an example fullstack app built using vue and node - TahaSh/vue-forum-app

You Don't Know JS Ebooks. GitHub Gist: instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

Always switching between Vue and Nuxt projects? I keep these diagrams in sight when I do… download your copy of both #vuejs and #nuxt application folder structure explainer... ✍️ https://t.co/FHc1o0fJ7t ✍️ https://t.co/zHowru9dZV

I remember when I first discovered automated testing. I immediately wanted to apply it to all the projects that I was working on, but it didn't work as well as I expected. In fact, it was a disaster,

Let's Learn About php 7.4 and its new features! Lesson 1: Class property typing (easy casting) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DG9raLLgQjI&list=PLNuh5_K9dfQ1...

Two years ago I wrote an impactful article on union and intersection types. It helped the PHP community to familiarize themselves with these concepts which eventually led to intersection types…

This article shows you how to overlap images with CSS Grid and provides a fallback for IE and browsers that do not support CSS Grid.

We improve the lives of professional developers. We create timely, practical books on classic and cutting-edge topics to help you learn and practice your craft, and accelerate your career. Come learn with us.

Step by step guides and paths to learn different tools or technologies

I have been doing more screencasting lately, so I thought I'd share some recipes here, for my own future use and in case anyone else wants to use them. I capture my videos using Kazam on Ubuntu, usually by resizing my second monitor to 800x600 and then capturing that. Kinda eye-bleeding to record

We are going to rewrite React from scratch. Step by step. Following the architecture from the real React code but without all the…

Follow along with one of our 8,000+ development and sysadmin tutorials.

Keeping code clean is not easy. That’s why in this article, I present some useful tools which can help you with PHP static code analysis. Learn more.

Google, the real Aggregator, is squeezing OTAs, which acted like Aggregators while depending on Google for demand. It’s easy to say Google is being unfair, but this may be better for consumer…

How does mentoring work? I asked this question ten years into my software engineering career when I joined Uber. Until then, I've never received or done mentoring, or at least never put this label on any activity I've done before. Uber, however, had an official mentoring program. Almost every engineer I met had a mentor. Mentorship is an expectation for senior and above engineers, it being listed in our engineering competencies. Since working here, I've been mentored, been a mentor, and have ob

As software developers we are fortunate to have many useful best practices for productive and fun coding like the SOLID principles, GRASP patterns, or STUPID anti-patterns. These principles are…

Over the last several years, the way I write CSS has transitioned from a "semantic" approach to something more like what people call "functional CSS." In this post I explain how I got to this point and share some of the lessons and insights I've picked up along the way.

Create beautiful Tailwind templates in minutes

Let’s Refactor Code and Orgs to a Sustainable Pace! This blog features stories, best practices, and guides to help all technical agile coaches, whether veteran or aspiring, to set the world of software to a sustainable pace.

UPDATE (10/28/2019): We've revised the 2nd and 3rd bullet points in the section "How to Prepare; Known Complexities" below. In May, Chrome ...

An upcoming book by Brent Roose

ITCSS is an answer to the question: How do I make my CSS scalable and maintainable? It’s a concern for every front-end developer.

An article by Rob Allen

Object oriented PHP tutorials. This playlist covers Object-Oriented PHP in details. Starting with very basics: Creating classes and objects. ending with much...

How we designed a color system with hand-picked, vibrant colors that also met standards for accessibility and contrast.

This isn’t my first rodeo with large datasets. The authentication and product management database that I have designed for the largest UK public Wi-Fi provider had impressive volumes too. We were…

Before I start going into any details in this blog post, I want us to have the same definition of the meaning of "simplicity" and "simple" that I am referring to in this article. I have created many online video courses over the last couple of years, have given on-site trainings…

Learn how to decouple Vue.js components from the Vuex store by using a provider abstraction.

Voltaire said, “le sens commun est fort rare”—common sense is very rare. Perhaps to realize that a certain decision is common sense, one has to have enough life experience to know the right path to…

Introduction Whatever you do, it's always beneficial to have the right tools at your dispo...

By naming lines when setting up our CSS Grid layouts, we can tap into some interesting and useful features of Grid — features that become even more powerful when we introduce subgrids. In this article, Rachel Andrew is going to demonstrate an approach to this kind of editorial design, which builds on a few techniques. In addition to this being a nice way to name sections of your layout, this technique exposes a whole bunch of interesting things about Grid Layout which you may find useful in creating your own layout patterns.

Last year we wrote a blogpost about our setup we use for Oh Dear! with Gitlab, and how we use their pipelines for running our CI tests.

The home of alternative design, code and content on the world wide web.

Andy Bell rings out a call for a more flexible method of achieving consistent vertical rhythm across components within a page. Using a technique of CSS custom properties to establish spacing inherited through the cascade, you can make sure your choir are all singing from the same song sheet.

A simple guide to HTML elements

I’m in the middle of three multi-month to a year projects right now: Writing a book Running a marathon Building a ...

Learn how to conveniently inject dependencies into Vue.js components via props and a functional wrapper component.

In this series, we explore the benefits of .NET Core and how it can help not only .NET developers, but all technologists who need to bring robust, performant and economical solutions to market.

Flyout menus! The second you need to implement a menu that uses a hover event to display more menu items, you're in tricky territory. For one, they should

You might be seeing the term JAMstack popping up more and more frequently. I’ve been a fan of it as an approach for some time.

Use scoped slots to create a data provider in Vue.js

🐳 Production Grade, Rootless, and Optimized PHP Container Image Template for Cloud-Native Deployments and Kubernetes. - sherifabdlnaby/kubephp

Presento - Transformer & Presenter Package for PHP - nahid/presento

This up votes itself, I made an open-source laptop from scratch, If YouTube had actual channels, A retro video game console I've been working on in my free time, Redbean – Single-file distributable web server, Non.io, a Reddit-like platform Ive been working on for the last 4 years, I may have created a new type of puzzle, I 3D scanned the interior of the Great Pyramid at Giza, Web Design in 4 minutes, I made a site where you practice typing by retyping entire novels, I got laid off from Meta and created a minor hit on Steam, Airmash – Multiplayer Missile Warfare HTML5 Game, Beeper Mini – iMessage client for Android, Can’t afford Bloomberg Terminal? No prob, I built the next best thing, GPT-4-powered web searches for developers, I built a Rotten Tomatoes-style platform for durable products, Meteor, a realtime JavaScript framework, Obsidian Canvas – An infinite space for your ideas, 40k HN comments mentioning books, extracted using deep learning, I'm building an open-source Amazon, Show HN, Portable Secret – How I store my secrets and communicate privately, Tetris in a PDF, Bel, 3 years and 1M users later, I just open-sourced my "Internet OS", Sorting Two Metric Tons of Lego, Looptap – A minimal game to waste your time, SHA-256 explained step-by-step visually, Wave function collapse algorithm, Imba – I have spent 7 years creating a programming language for the web, Spot the Drowning Child, Make your site’s pages instant in one minute, I built an app to stop me doomscrolling by touching grass, Lofi.cafe, Privacy-focused, ad-free, non-tracking torrent search engine, We built an end-to-end encrypted alternative to Google Photos, Six Degrees of Wikipedia, Make a programmable mirror, Alacritty, a GPU-accelerated terminal emulator written in Rust, Boring Report, a news app that uses AI to desensationalize the news, A friend and I spent 6 years making a simulation game, finally released, I created an After Effects alternative, Trading cards made with e-ink displays, InstantDB – A Modern Firebase, I made a web game called Almost Pong, Clippy – 90s UI for local LLMs, I built another house optimized for LAN parties, A visual guide to the most popular CSS properties, I wrote my own RTS game engine in C, Get Paid to Build Your Next Side Project, New AI edits images based on text instructions, Monica, an open-source CRM to manage friends and family, Open Hunt – an open and community-run alternative to Product Hunt, Obsidian – A knowledge base that works on local Markdown files, RoughJS – Create hand-drawn graphics using JavaScript, I taught my little brother JS, and he made this videogame in a week, My wife is pregnant; naturally I made a baby-name app to prepare, I'm 12, learning JS, and wrote Wolfram's cellular automaton in Node, Web browser to help programmers think clearly, Markov chains explained visually, Heynote – A dedicated scratchpad for developers, I made a puzzle game that gently introduces my favorite math mysteries, SHA-256 Animation, OneBody Church Directory software I've been hacking on for 7 years, htmz – a low power tool for HTML, I got hacked, felt paranoid, made an app – GlassWire, Generating fantasy maps – an interactive exploration, Workout.lol – a web app to easily create a workout routine, I'm 48 and finally learning how to be a game developer, I built a hardware processor that runs Python, I made a modern web UI for Wikipedia, A basketball hoop to maximize shots that go in [video], I made a privacy-first minimalist Google Analytics, Browsh – A modern, text-based browser, I made a website to find best bus seat to avoid the sun while traveling, Beeper – All Your Chats in One App, This Word Does Not Exist, XKCD-inspired StackSort, EdgeDB 1.0, Warp, a Rust-based terminal, I made an alternative platform for professional profiles, Hacker News user blogroll, Sublime Merge – A Git client from the makers of Sublime Text, Unsure Calculator – back-of-a-napkin probabilistic calculator, iFixit created a new USB-C, repairable soldering system, Wealthfolio: Private, open-source investment tracker, I built an AI that turns GitHub codebases into easy tutorials, I wrote a book about Go, Markwhen: Markdown for Timelines, Your Social Media Fingerprint maybe NSFW, Primitive Pictures, A web debugger an ex-Cloudflare team has been working on for 4 years, I made a new sensor out of 3D printer filament for my PhD, Lorem Picsum – Lorem Ipsum but for photos, Long Range E-Bike, I built an After Effects for dummies, My embarrassing personal website from the 90s, iPod.js – An online iPod that connects to Spotify and Apple Music, I wrote a free eBook about many lesser-known/secret database tricks, Hacker News Classics

Create amazing color sets superfast.

With a simple CSS trick, we can get fine-tuned control over how shadows are rendered, and create richer and more realistic 3D effects

This is a tutorial to help you write comprehensive unit test suites.

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I had my fair share in designing and building large systems. I've taken part in rewriting Uber's distributed payment systems [https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/distributed-architecture-concepts-i-have-learned-while-building-payments-systems/] , designing and shipping Skype on Xbox One and open-sourcing RIBs [https://github.com/uber/RIBs], Uber's mobile architecture framework. All of these systems had thorough designs, going through multiple iterations and had lots of whiteboarding and discussio

Component Composition can be understood in two ways. Usually people think about composing a component using mixins (and soon composition functions thanks to the upcoming Composition API). However, what I would like to talk about is composition where we connect several components together to form a new one that combines the functionalities of the smaller components. But let’s start from the beginning – the why.

The tech stack of Listen Notes, the best podcast search engine and database.

Explore the fundamentals of music via Ableton's interactive website. Experiment with beats, melody, harmony, basslines, and song structure in your web browser.

Full featured drag & drop enabled Vue file upload component with previews and upload progress - safrazik/vue-file-agent

Read this page on the Filament Group website

Summary of the book The Pragmatic Programmer by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas - HugoMatilla/The-Pragmatic-Programmer

A little while back I wrote a blog post about how "CSRF is dead". It focused on SameSite cookies, a powerful yet simple feature to protect your website against CSRF attacks. As powerful as it was, and as much as it will kill CSRF, you had to enable it on your site, and that was the problem. Now, we're solving that problem. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- SameSite Cookies To understand the problem of CSRF and the solution that SameSite Cookie

The recording of our August 20 webinar, TDD and the Terminator - An introduction to Test Driven Development, with Layla Porter, is now available. Subscribe to our community newsletter to receive notif

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If editing hosts.conf does not work, try visiting your gateway IP with appropriate port where your web server is running on your Mac. In my case http://10.0.2.2:9080 is equivalent to…

This is a mildly edited transcript of my JSConf Australia talk. Watch the whole talk on YouTube. A sequel to this post is available over here. Hello, I used to build very large JavaScript…

20 years ago Amazon went through a major transformation. Here’s what we learned about building modern applications along the way.