magnASCII.io Simone Magnaschi
Senior Full Stack Web Dev

Modernize Symfony Configs

Symfony configuration is one of the changes that are difficult to spot until they're removed in the next major version. Then you must Google the "invalid option id error message" and hope for a solution. That doesn't sound like an excellent way to spend your weekend, does it?
Saved on: 2024-01-24

Why You Want React Query

It's no secret that I ❤️ React Query for how it simplifies the way we're interacting with asynchronous state in our React applications. And I know a lot of fellow devs feel the same.
Saved on: 2024-01-23

Loadership

LoaderShip is the ultimate CSS-only loader configuration tool that allows you to effortlessly customize and generate stunning loaders for your website. Simply Copy & Paste without any installation or dependency hassle.
Saved on: 2024-01-19

Slashing Data Transfer Costs in AWS by 99% · Bits and Cloud

There are lots of ways to accidentally spend too much money on AWS, and one of the easiest ways is by carelessly transferring data. As of writing, AWS charges the following rates for data transfer: Data transfer from AWS to the public Internet ranges from $0.09/GB in us-east-1 (N. Virginia) to $0.
Saved on: 2024-01-15

git branches: intuition & reality

Hello! I’ve been thinking about git branches a lot, and I keep hearing from people that they find the way git branches work to be counterintuitive. It got me thinking: what might an “intuitive” notion of a branch be, and how is it different from how git actually works?
Saved on: 2024-01-15

3 Signs Your Project is Becoming Legacy - Arrays Creep

In the first post, we looked at the long-term effects of our decisions. Turning a legacy project into a fresh one is a matter of the "just do it" approach. But there are 3 things we should take with care even if our project seems outside the legacy project category. First of those are arrays.
Saved on: 2024-01-09

How Google perfected the web

As the 14th season of Bravo’s Real Housewives of New York City came to a close this fall, I found myself on Reddit, reading rumors about the marriage and divorce timeline of one of the show’s stars.
Saved on: 2024-01-08

HTMX Playground

A simple code sandbox for playing around with HTMX. No setup needed! It allows you to write code in a backend-like environment, running entirely inside the browser. You can define endpoints within server.js and render your own templates.
Saved on: 2024-01-08

An app can be a home-cooked meal

Have you heard about this new app called BoopSnoop? It launched in the first week of January 2020, and almost immediately, it was down­loaded by four people in three different time zones.
Saved on: 2024-01-05

Paper Sizes and Formats Explained: The Difference Between A4 and Letter

The North American paper sizes are based on traditional formats with arbitrary aspect ratios. The most popular formats of the traditional sizes are the Letter (8.5 × 11 inches), Legal (8.5 × 14 inches) and Tabloid (11 × 17 inches) formats.
Saved on: 2024-01-05

Building Maintainable PHP Applications: Over-engineering vs under-engineeri

Overengineering (or over-engineering) is the act of designing a product or providing a solution to a problem in an elaborate or complicated manner, where a simpler solution can be demonstrated to exist with the same efficiency and effectiveness as that of the original design.
Tags: #programming
Saved on: 2023-12-31

10 reasons why Unpoly may be a better choice than htmx | Matteo Contrini

There’s been a trend of developers discovering multi-page applications (MPA) again lately, this time with the help of some JavaScript libraries that add interactivity without having to create a single-page application (SPA).
Saved on: 2023-12-27

Architetture dimenticate: la stazione di servizio AGIP che sembra una navic

Continua il racconto dedicato alle architetture dimenticate, Forgotten Architecture. Oggi parliamo di uno dei primi progetti “dimenticati” di cui mi sono innamorata, l’ex stazione AGIP di viale Certosa, che fa angolo con viale Espinasse.
Tags: #art
Saved on: 2023-12-27

Reminiscing CGI scripts

I’ve always had a thing for old-school web tech. By the time I joined the digital fray, CGI scripts were pretty much relics, but the term kept popping up in tech forums and discussions like ghosts from the past.
Saved on: 2023-12-27

A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors

Hacker News, a simple link aggregator owned and operated by Silicon Valley startup incubator Y Combinator, has had many positive effects on SV startups and engineers as a whole.
Saved on: 2023-12-27

10 Things Software Developers Should Learn about Learning

Learning is necessary for software developers. Change is perpetual: New technologies are frequently invented, and old technologies are repeatedly updated.
Saved on: 2023-12-27

Hacking htmx applications

With the normal flow of frontend frameworks moving from hipster to mainstream in the coming few months, during a test, you bump into this strange application that receives HTML with `hx-` attributes in responses.
Saved on: 2023-12-23

10 Tips For Building SSR/HDA applications

Building web applications using traditional Server-Side Rendering (SSR) or, saying the same thing another way, building Hypermedia-Driven Applications (HDAs) requires a mindset shift when compared with building web applications with Single Page Application frameworks like React.
Saved on: 2023-12-22

Introducing the new Wasmer JS SDK

Dive into a world where running any WASI and WASIX package in your browser is a breeze. Whether it's Python, Bash, FFmpeg, or any package published in the registry, Wasmer Javascript SDK makes it all seamlessly possible.
Saved on: 2023-12-22

Deep Cloning Objects in JavaScript, the Modern Way

Did you know, there's now a native way in JavaScript to do deep copies of objects? Did you notice in the example above we not only copied the object, but also the nested array, and even the Date object?
Saved on: 2023-12-22

SMTP Smuggling - Spoofing E-Mails Worldwide

In the course of a research project in collaboration with the SEC Consult Vulnerability Lab, Timo Longin (@timolongin) - known for his DNS protocol attacks - discovered a novel exploitation technique for yet another Internet protocol - SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol).
Saved on: 2023-12-22

Leonardo Da Vinci’s Self-Powered Cart

In June 2016 I was asked to give a presentation and demonstration of Meccano to a class of children at Charlton Church of England Primary School in Dover, who were looking for inspiration for an in-class construction project.
Saved on: 2023-12-22

About time - how to unit test code that depends on time

Suppose that the logic of your program depends on time. That is, you need to keep track of when something in the past happened, and what time it is now, and the logic of what to do depends on how much time passed between that previous event and now.
Saved on: 2023-12-20

Distill — Latest articles about machine learning

Understanding the building blocks and design choices of graph neural networks. Benjamin Sanchez-Lengeling, Emily Reif, Adam Pearce, and Alexander B. Wiltschko
Saved on: 2023-12-20

The Secret Father of Modern Computing

In September 1974, Ed Roberts was sitting at the bank in a foreclosure meeting. His once-profitable calculator company, Micro Instrument and Telemetry Systems (MITS), had exhausted its $250,000 overdraft and was on the verge of bankruptcy. But Roberts wasn’t getting ready to shut down.
Saved on: 2023-12-19

Best TV Shows of 2023, Ranked – The Hollywood Reporter

An emotional zombie drama, a superior true-crime docuseries, a sidesplitting anti-capitalist satire and two fantastic series finales were among picks from THR's TV critics. When we look back on television in 2023, it’s almost certain to stand out as a year of transition.
Saved on: 2023-12-17

S3 Express One Zone, not quite what I hoped for — Jack Vanlightly

AWS just announced a new lower-latency S3 storage class and for those of us in the data infrastructure business, this is big news. It’s not a secret that a low-latency object storage primitive has the potential to change how we build cloud data systems forever.
Tags: #aws
Saved on: 2023-12-17

Form and Matter: Hylomorphism

Author: Jeremy W. Skrzypek Category: Metaphysics, Historical Philosophy Word Count: 999 words When I order a new dining room table and the shipment arrives at my door, I don’t yet have a dining room table. Something more must be done or added to the contents of that box to produce a table.
Saved on: 2023-12-17

Building a Better PHP Project: What Tools Should I Not Miss?

I've just been handed a PHP project that's a bit of a blank slate – no static analysis, linters, coding standards, or tests have been used so far. N
Saved on: 2023-12-15

Remembering things that haven't happened yet

Jake shows me a photograph from 2015: we’re smiling in the dim light of Back 40, an East Village restaurant.
Saved on: 2023-12-14

Correctly Configure (Pre) Connections – Harry Roberts – Web Performance Con

In the right circumstances, this simple, single line of HTML can make pages hundreds of milliseconds faster! But time and again, I see developers misconfiguring even this most basic of features. Because, as is often the case, there’s much more to this ‘basic feature’ than meets the eye.
Saved on: 2023-12-10

A Matter of Millimeters: The story of Qantas flight 32

On the 4th of November 2010, a Qantas Airbus A380 was rocked by a catastrophic engine failure minutes after takeoff from Singapore, hurling fragments of a turbine disk through its wings and fuselage in multiple locations.
Saved on: 2023-12-10

Scrambling Eggs for Spotify with Knuth's Fibonacci Hashing

Now, at first glance, you might think, “How challenging could it be to shuffle songs in a playlist? Can we not randomly shuffle them out?” You see, that’s precisely the approach Spotify initially took. They used the Fisher–Yates shuffle to do this.
Saved on: 2023-12-09

Christmas on the Moon

This story was funded by our members. Join Longreads and help us to support more writers.
Saved on: 2023-12-09

Pacchetto di CSS: 2023!

Complimenti. Il 2023 è stato un anno fantastico per CSS. Da #Interop2023 a molti nuovi punti di accesso nello spazio CSS e UI che consentono agli sviluppatori di funzionalità una volta che pensavano impossibili sulla piattaforma web.
Tags: #css #webdev
Saved on: 2023-12-08

Goodbye, Clean Code

It was a late evening. My colleague has just checked in the code that they’ve been writing all week. We were working on a graphics editor canvas, and they implemented the ability to resize shapes like rectangles and ovals by dragging small handles at their edges.
Saved on: 2023-12-08

file to life

Welcome to File Life–a tour company and travel blog about letting go of files, giving them a new life in the mountains and the oceans. Follow along as a traveling fileman wanders. Oct 12, 15:16 – Such a contrast to the sandstone towers from a few days ago.
Saved on: 2023-12-06

abracadabra: How does Shazam work?

Your phone's ability to identify any song it listens to is pure technological magic. In this article, I'll show you how one of the most popular apps, Shazam, does it.
Saved on: 2023-12-06

HTML, The Programming Language A Programming Language

HTML, the programming language, is a practical, turing-complete[1], stack-based programming language based on HTML, the markup language. It uses elements defined in HTML, the markup language, in order to do computations. HTML programs are specified in HTML, the markup language.
Saved on: 2023-12-05

EHTML

Saved on: 2023-12-05

Mounting git commits as folders with NFS

Hello! The other day, I started wondering – has anyone ever made a FUSE filesystem for a git repository where all every commit is a folder? It turns out the answer is yes! There’s giblefs, GitMounter, and git9 for Plan 9.
Saved on: 2023-12-05

Let’s learn how modern JavaScript frameworks work by building one

In my day job, I work on a JavaScript framework (LWC). And although I’ve been working on it for almost three years, I still feel like a dilettante. When I read about what’s going on in the larger framework world, I often feel overwhelmed by all the things I don’t know.
Saved on: 2023-12-04

10 Dark Patterns in UX Design and How to Avoid Them

A dark pattern is a term created by designer Harry Brignull. These patterns urge or persuade the user to perform actions or accept conditions they did not intend to. Companies use them to trick users into doing things that can bring them profits.
Saved on: 2023-12-02

Stop building databases

There comes a time in every frontend engineer’s life where we realize we need to cache data from an API. It might start off benign – storing a previous page of data for that instant back button experience, implementing a bit of undo logic, or merging some state from different API requests.
Saved on: 2023-12-02

How to pick more beautiful colors for your data visualizations

Choosing good colors for your charts is hard. This article tries to make it easier. Choosing good colors for your charts is hard. This article tries to make it easier.
Saved on: 2023-12-01

Generative AI for Beginners

Saved on: 2023-11-25

CSS Animations with No-Code

Animotion lets you create CSS animations visually, by dragging, resizing, rotating, clipping, and more, including a keyframes editor, a collection of ready-to-use animations and 29 built-in easings.
Saved on: 2023-11-25

A Complete Guide to CSS Grid

CSS Grid Layout (aka “Grid” or “CSS Grid”), is a two-dimensional grid-based layout system that, compared to any web layout system of the past, completely changes the way we design user interfaces. CSS has always been used to layout our web pages, but it’s never done a very good job of it.
Saved on: 2023-11-24

Hixie's Natural Log: Reflecting on 18 years at Google

I joined Google in October 2005, and handed in my resignation 18 years later. Last week was my last week at Google.
Saved on: 2023-11-23

Email obfuscation: What still works in 2023?

These techniques protect a clickable link that will open the user’s mail client (e.g. email).
Saved on: 2023-11-23

Retries – An interactive study of common retry methods – Encore Blog

Requests over the network can fail. This is something we cannot avoid, and to write robust software we need to handle these failures or else they may be presented to users as errors. One of the most common techniques for handling a failed request is to retry it.
Saved on: 2023-11-23

An Interactive Guide to CSS Grid

CSS Grid is one of the most amazing parts of the CSS language. It gives us a ton of new tools we can use to create sophisticated and fluid layouts. It's also surprisingly complex. It took me quite a while to truly become comfortable with CSS Grid!
Tags: #css #css-grid
Saved on: 2023-11-21

Maschietti – Loris Mag

Maschietti entrano in casa, maschietti entrano in casa. Maschietti, e con essi entrano in casa idee da maschietti (idee grevi, riduttive, inflessibili).
Saved on: 2023-11-21

Why I Tend Not To Use Content Negotiation

I have written a lot about Hypermedia APIs vs. Data (JSON) APIs, including the differences between the two, what REST “really” means and why HATEOAS isn’t so bad as long as your API is interacting with a Hypermedia Client.
Saved on: 2023-11-20

Alan Kay: Doing with Images Makes Symbols Pt 1

Share to Twitter Share to Facebook Share to Reddit Share to Tumblr Share to Pinterest Share to Popcorn Maker Share via email Want more? Advanced embedding details, examples, and help!
Saved on: 2023-11-16

Push Ifs Up And Fors Down

As in the example above, this often comes up with preconditions: a function might check precondition inside and “do nothing” if it doesn’t hold, or it could push the task of precondition checking to its caller, and enforce via types (or an assert) that the precondition holds.
Saved on: 2023-11-16

HTML Web Components

“Web components” sounded like the web platform’s equivalent to “React components”. JSX had <MyComponent> and now the web had <my-component>.
Saved on: 2023-11-14

HTML First

HTML First is a set of principles that aims to make building web software easier, faster, more inclusive, and more maintainable by... The main goal of HTML First is to substantially widen the pool of people who can work on web software codebases.
Saved on: 2023-11-13

How I got here

This post will be relatively long, and not of the technical content that I hope to write about in the future, simply because the tl;dr just doesn’t cut it here. You don’t just throw out words like “dev-log from my prison cell” and not follow through with a story…
Saved on: 2023-11-12

Horrible edge cases to consider when dealing with music

I'm a huge fan of navidrome, and thus spent some time reading its source code, and discussing with Deluan about its data model, making this list of weird edge-cases as we went. Take a look at Musicbrainz' database schema to have a glimpse on how to tame this madness.
Saved on: 2023-11-12

Cheat sheets

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Saved on: 2023-11-11

How to boss without being bossy : Hacker News

Ensure people know what and why something is important, ideally by arriving at that conclusion jointly and as part of an overarching plan that everyone can feel involved in - thus requests shouldn't be a surprise, they aren't coming from you so much as from the plan (nebulous though it may be).
Saved on: 2023-11-11

Monaspace

Since the earliest days of the teletype machine, code has been set in monospaced type — letters, on a grid. Monaspace is a new type system that advances the state of the art for the display of code on screen.
Saved on: 2023-11-10

Sad clown paradox

I think, by the fact that you find you can get laughs when you are in school-and this is where most of the guys start, when they are growing up in the neighbourhood-they're jerking around, doing silly things, interrupting the class.
Saved on: 2023-11-09

Practical Techniques to Reduce the Harm of Active Record : ShawnMc.Cool

Data model objects such as Active Record models have many negative impacts to software. This article presents a few effective mitigation strategies to reduce the negative business impact of this approach.
Saved on: 2023-11-07

In the bad old days we had Punchcards. How did people deal with that?

In the fall of 1976 I started as a Freshman at SUNY Stony Brook intending to major in Math and Computer Science. I took Honors Calculus I and CS 1.
Saved on: 2023-11-07

HTML DOM — Phuoc Nguyen

Web development moves at lightning speed. I still remember when I first started using libraries like jQuery, Prototype, script.aculo.us, Zepto, and many more. Even with modern tools like Angular, VueJS, React, Solid and Svelte, we still have to deal with the Document Object Model (DOM).
Tags: #webdev
Saved on: 2023-11-06

The Ultimate Goutte Cheat Sheet for PHP

Goutte is a battle-tested PHP web scraping library. This comprehensive reference aims to thoroughly cover its capabilities.
Saved on: 2023-11-01

π in Other Universes

Everyone loves $\pi$. It’s usually the first irrational number someone encounters. $\pi$ is conceptually simple enough that it can be explained with basic geometry.
Saved on: 2023-10-30

Making Music with Google Sheets and Web MIDI API

Do you know that the modern web browser can access real musical instruments? With the help of Web MIDI API, we can create a web application that can access MIDI devices connected to our computer.
Saved on: 2023-10-29

Staring at a Wall: Embracing Deliberate Boredom

You should spend more time being bored. I spent twenty minutes staring at a wall. Was it worth my time? Yes. Did I look a little bit crazy doing it? Maybe a little.
Saved on: 2023-10-28

The Negative Impact of Mobile-First Web Design on Desktop

Summary: Mobile-first web designs cause significant usability issues when viewed on desktop. Content becomes overly dispersed across long scrolling pages with expansive white space and enlarged images and fonts, making it difficult for users to consume and understand the information.
Saved on: 2023-10-27

(11) A Philosophy of Software Design | John Ousterhout | Talks at Google -

John Ousterhout, Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, discusses complex techniques on how to become a more confident coder. John is excited to announce that he just published the first edition of a new book on software design, based on material from a software design class he has b
Saved on: 2023-10-25

The Grug Brained Developer

Introduction this collection of thoughts on software development gathered by grug brain developer grug brain developer not so smart, but grug brain developer program many long year and learn some things although mostly still confused grug brain developer try collect learns into small, easily digesti
Tags: #programming
Saved on: 2023-10-25

Calculus Made Easy

Table of Contents Buy paper version On Amazon.com* Second hand from Biblio.com* What next? * Affiliate link About this edition & thanks This text is based on the PDF version from Project Gutenberg converted to html by hand. Thanks to Paula Appling, Don Bindner, Chris Curnow, Andrew D.
Tags: #mathematics
Saved on: 2023-10-25

Before Computers Were Logic Diagrams and Machines

I often think about ancient civilizations. I’m sure you do too. I cogitate and ruminate on all the people who lived, loved, and died, and I’m saddened by the fact that we no longer remember their names.
Saved on: 2023-10-25

There are two sides to an interview

I talk to a lot of software engineers who are gearing up for a job hunt. Sometimes they left willingly, sometimes unwillingly, and sometimes they just anticipate leaving soon.
Saved on: 2023-10-25

(9) Using CSS custom properties like this is a waste - YouTube

If you're interested in checking out ICodeThis, you can find it here: https://icodethis.com/?ref=kevin and if you want to sign up for one of their premium plans, use KEVIN at checkout for an extra 10% off. Custom properties are amazing, but a lot of people don’t take advantage of how awesome they
Tags: #css
Saved on: 2023-10-23

Origins of the 3.5in Floppy Disk - YouTube

I got sucked into researching the origins of the 3.5in floppy disk after looking into one of my recent HP drives. That sent me on a long quest to better understand the format and finding out some very interesting things I didn't even know existed! Chapters: 0:00 Intro 0:43 Precursor History 2:05 3.
Saved on: 2023-10-23

2023-10-22 cooler screens

Audible even over the squeal of an HVAC blower with a suffering belt, the whine of small, high velocity fans pervades the grocery side of this Walgreens. Were they always this loud? I'm not sure; some of the fans sound distinctly unhealthy.
Saved on: 2023-10-23

Base64 Encoding, Explained

When you're programming, it's easy to get by with a superficial understanding of many things. You can easily fool yourself by thinking that you are programming when you are blindly copy + pasting code from Stack Overflow or some random article you stumbled upon.
Tags: #programming
Saved on: 2023-10-23

Build your own BitTorrent | CodeCrafters

Learn about .
Saved on: 2023-10-19

Write more "useless" software

After my last blog post about Hurl, someone asked me, and I quote: "... why?" The simple answer is "for the joke." But the longer answer is that useless software1 is a fantastic way to explore and experience the joy of computing. Play is an important part of exploration and joy.
Tags: #programming
Saved on: 2023-10-19

How Disney Packed Big Emotion Into a Little Robot

On Wednesday, at the 2023 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), in Detroit, a Disney Research team presented a brand new robotic character during their evening keynote address.
Saved on: 2023-10-11

What is in that .git directory?

Well, I think most of you reading this blog use git more or less on a daily basis, but have you ever looked into what is in the .git folder that git creates? Let's explore it together and understand what is going on in there. This is a blog version of a talk that I recently gave.
Saved on: 2023-10-07

Introducing “Database Performance at Scale”: A Free, Open Source Book

So many things have to align perfectly for impressive database performance. You need to think hard about factors like: And that’s just scratching the surface.
Tags: #database
Saved on: 2023-10-06

Color for the Color-challenged

Rather than placing web folks into the bucket Developer or Designer, I think many people would find themselves somewhere in the gray zone in between, not at the extreme ends. I most certainly feel that way about myself.
Saved on: 2023-10-05

fastbootstrap/atlassian-design-for-bootstrap

The most popular Bootstrap UI Kits with Atlassian Design for your next project quickly get you started. This repository is distributed with npm.
Saved on: 2023-10-04

Career Advice

To my great surprise, young people now somewhat frequently contact me in order to solicit career advice. They are usually in college or highschool, and want to know what the best next steps are for a career in security or software development.
Saved on: 2023-10-04

How to Produce a Rich Domain Model with Active Record

You can't. It's not possible. Active Record provides complete access to a database row's fields through an object's public properties (or "attributes" of an "Active Record model", as they're called in both Ruby on Rails' and Laravel's ORMs).
Saved on: 2023-10-04

Choose Boring Technology

This is the spoken word version of my essay, Choose Boring Technology. I have largely come to terms with it and the reality that I will never escape its popularity. Here are my other talks, my website, and some Medium posts.
Tags: #programming
Saved on: 2023-10-02

Goodbye integers. Hello UUIDs!

At Buildkite, we've historically stored our data with with two keys. We use sequential primary keys for efficient indexing, and UUID secondary keys for external use.
Saved on: 2023-10-02

Introducing Enhance Music

Today, the Enhance team is excited to introduce our latest demo app: Enhance Music — a music library and audio player app built with HTML and CSS, and progressively enhanced with a couple pinches of JavaScript.
Saved on: 2023-09-30

Charlie Munger: The Psychology of Human Misjudgement

'The Psychology of Human Misjudgment', a speech given by Charlie Munger in 1995, animated by Tiny and Thinko.
Tags: #videos
Saved on: 2023-09-28

Joins 13 Ways

Relational (inner) joins are really common in the world of databases, and one weird thing about them is that it seems like everyone has a different idea of what they are.
Saved on: 2023-09-26

A literary history of fake texts in Apple's marketing materials

Like a lot of troubled young men, I used to pay close attention to Apple’s developer conferences and special announcements, eagerly anticipating each new generation of iPhone and operating system.
Saved on: 2023-09-25

A hacker's guide to language models [video] | Hacker News

Applications are open for YC Winter 2024
Tags: #ai
Saved on: 2023-09-25

Responsive type scales with composable CSS utilities

If you’ve ever attempted to create responsive type that seamlessly adapts and scales between pre-determined sizes within a type scale based on viewport or container widths, you may have wrestled with JavaScript or wrangled with CSS calculators.
Tags: #css
Saved on: 2023-09-24
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