magnASCII.io Simone Magnaschi
Senior Full Stack Web Dev

Unicode characters you can not see

In Unicode there are a lot of invisible characters: regular white-space characters (e.g. U+0020 SPACE), language specific fillers (e.g. U+3164 HANGUL FILLER of the Korean Hangual alphabet), or special characters (e.g. U+2800 BRAILLE PATTERN BLANK).
Saved on: 2022-12-05

ongoing by Tim Bray · Protect Me From What I Want

Over on Mastodon, there are many people who enjoy not being in the grip of software like Facebook or Twitter that single-mindedly tries to maximize “engagement”, which means the amount of time you stare at the screen so they can show you ads.
Saved on: 2022-11-29

A Guide to Google Search Ranking Systems | Google Search Central  |  What's

Google uses automated ranking systems that look at many factors and signals about hundreds of billions of web pages and other content in our Search index to present the most relevant, useful results, all in a fraction of a second.
Saved on: 2022-11-21

Useful Front-End Boilerplates And Starter Kits

23 min read Guides, Tools, Workflow, Templates, Round-Ups, Best Practices Share on Twitter, LinkedIn 11 Habits of Highly Effective Developers Click here to kickstart your project for free in a matter of minutes.
Saved on: 2022-11-20

Why is McDonald's Considered a Real Estate Company?

Consumers think of McDonald’s as a burger restaurant, but in the business world, McDonald’s is considered a real estate company. While the brand has sold more than one billion hamburgers to customers around the world, 85% of its stores are owned by franchisees.
Saved on: 2022-11-19

Tree views in CSS

A tree view (collapsible list) can be created using only HTML and CSS, without the need for JavaScript. Accessibility software will see the tree view as lists nested inside disclosure widgets, and the standard keyboard interaction is supported automatically.
Saved on: 2022-11-19

The 12-bit rainbow palette

I designed the 12-bit rainbow palette for use on National Grid: Live.
Saved on: 2022-11-19

Using :has() as a CSS Parent Selector and much more

It’s been a long-standing dream of front-end developers to have a way to apply CSS to an element based on what’s happening inside that element. Maybe we want to apply one layout to an article element if there’s a hero image at the top, and a different layout if there is no hero image.
Saved on: 2022-11-18

A 900-Page Pre-Pantone Guide to Color from 1692: A Complete Digital Scan |

Human beings got along per­fect­ly well for hun­dreds of mil­len­nia with­out stan­dard­ized tax­onomies of col­or, but they didn’t do so in a glob­al­ly con­nect­ed cul­ture full of logos, brands, and 24/7 screens.
Saved on: 2022-11-17

Twenty Questions

Let’s play a game. I’m thinking of a number from 1 to 100. You guess, and I tell you whether my number is higher or lower. Naturally, your first guess is 50, since you’re trying to cut the possibilities perfectly in half. I tell you it’s higher, so you guess 75. I tell you it’s lower.
Saved on: 2022-11-15

Upbase Plans & Pricing - Free | Premium

Upbase is a unique productivity tool that combines project management and daily planning to boost your daily efficiency. Organize, prioritize, and keep track of what needs to be done.
Saved on: 2022-11-13

Dealing with technical debt during the sprint — Matthias Noback - Blog

It's quite ironic that my most "popular" tweet has been posted while Twitter itself is in such a chaotic phase. It's also quite ironic that I try to provide helpful suggestions for doing a better job as a programmer, yet such a bitter tweet ends up to be so popular.
Saved on: 2022-11-12

How to keep your legacy PHP project working with minimal efforts

So, what is the point? Extremely outdated but excellent working PHP projects are widespread cases in business realities. It’s enough just to open PHP projects listing in Upwork (or any other freelance marketplace) to prove that.
Saved on: 2022-11-11

37signals Dev — Vanilla Rails is plenty

I have often heard this: vanilla Rails can only get you so far. At some point, apps become unmaintainable, and you need a different approach that brings the missing pieces, because Rails encourages a poor separation of concerns at the architectural level.
Saved on: 2022-11-10

Idiot proof git

Functionality in this post is maintained in this Github Repo. PRs welcome! I’m an idiot. And git is hard. A lot of places use a rebase-based Git workflow, and I’ve made git less hard with a set of handy aliases. Put these in your ~/.
Tags: #git
Saved on: 2022-11-10

Audio CD ripping - optical drive accuracy listing

I tend to keep my audio local. Therefore, I need an accurate ripping device for my audio CD collection. Recently I found a neat listing in the dbPowerAmp forum, but I added some information as well as ways to filter and sort. Have fun!
Saved on: 2022-11-07

Almost monospaced: the perfect fonts for writing

Monospaced fonts are the kind that most folks probably associate with a typewriter. It just looks like typewriter text. Programmers often use monospaced fonts in their code editors, which gives monospaced fonts an association of being computer-y text.
Tags: #typography
Saved on: 2022-11-07

MDN => Markdown

In 2021, the Open Web Docs team, with help from Mozilla, the W3C, and the wider web docs community, converted the authoring format for MDN Web Docs - all 11,000 pages of it - from HTML to Markdown. In this post we'll talk about why we did it, how we did it, and how it turned out.
Saved on: 2022-11-05

Holograms, light-leaks and how to build CSS-only shaders.

I might be understating it a bit, but WebGL is a big deal. You only need to spend five minutes on one of the many design awards sites to see site-after-site fully leaning into the power of canvas.
Tags: #css
Saved on: 2022-11-03

My Top 10 Tips for Doing Time In ‘the Hole’ | The Marshall Project

When I went to prison at age 19, my greatest fear was being hurt by other people serving time. So when I passed through the prison gates, I took on the persona of a deadly gangster. I did things that landed me in “the hole” — slang for administrative segregation — over and over.
Saved on: 2022-10-31

Modern PHP features explained - PHP 8.0 and 8.1 | Laravel News

Since its release in late 2020, PHP 8 has been a game changer. In this tutorial, I will walk through all the latest features with real-world examples of when I might choose to use them.
Tags: #php
Saved on: 2022-10-28

Sign in to Visit Go Inside the Great Pyramid of …

Please sign up or login to visit the Guided Tour of the full interior Great Pyramid on the Giza Plateau.
Saved on: 2022-10-28

Shell Script Best Practices — The Sharat's

This article is about a few quick thumb rules I use when writing shell scripts that I’ve come to appreciate over the years. Very opinionated. Use bash. Using zsh or fish or any other, will make it hard for others to understand / collaborate.
Saved on: 2022-10-27

Pokemon Deckz

Saved on: 2022-10-27

I have nothing to declare but my strict types — Webkudu

Learn to improve your PHP code in 1 minute by adding strict types. Adding strict types to your code is stupidly easy. Simply just add the line declare(strict_types=1); to the top of every PHP file you write. It must appear above everything in the file except for the opening <?php tag.
Saved on: 2022-10-26

OKLCH in CSS: why we moved from RGB and HSL

The new CSS Color 4 specification has added the new oklch() notation for declaring colors. In this post, we explain why this is important for design systems and color palettes. So, that’s the short version, but if you want the whole story, let’s start from the beginning in the next section.
Saved on: 2022-10-26

The 37signals Guide to Making Decisions

Below you’ll find a collection of general principles we try to keep in mind at 37signals when making decisions.
Saved on: 2022-10-23

Rare Vintage Toys, Synthesizers and classic Mercedes cars.

When something is created with clear intention the results are often positive. This website explores design intention across a wide range of objects from iconic cars and buildings to electronic gear and even foods. All these unique objects are showcased with original insights and photographs.
Tags: #design
Saved on: 2022-10-22

Blending Modes : Dan Hollick

Jaga @kandros5591
Saved on: 2022-10-22

Learn how to upload files in Laravel like a Pro

One of the things that I see many people struggling with is file uploads.
Tags: #laravel
Saved on: 2022-10-21

We’re drowning | snarfed.org

We live in a golden age of software reuse. We’ve never before had such a wealth of freely available code, in so many languages, so easy to find and install. And yet, we’re drowning.
Saved on: 2022-10-20

A non-trivial Movies app built in multiple frameworks

The Movies App is a non-trivial demo application built on top of the TMDB (The Movie Database) API. It features multiple routes and views, authentication, dark mode and a range of performance optimizations.
Saved on: 2022-10-20

Laravel’s safety mechanisms

Laravel is a mature PHP web application framework with built-in support for almost everything modern applications need.
Tags: #laravel
Saved on: 2022-10-20

How to use the watch as a Compass (Northern Hemisphere for instance)

You can estimate approximate compass directions using the positions of the hour hand and the sun as a guide. Keep in mind that these determinations are approximate as discrepancies can arise at different latitudes and in different seasons. 1.
Saved on: 2022-10-20

Sound – Bartosz Ciechanowski

Invisible and relentless, sound is seemingly just there, traveling through our surroundings to carry beautiful music or annoying noises. In this article I’ll explain what sound is, how it’s created and propagated.
Saved on: 2022-10-19

Simply beautiful open source icons

Feather v4.29.
Saved on: 2022-10-17

Why is z-index not working?! - Explaining CSS Stacking Context - DEV Commun

Dimensions are weird. While most web apps seem to focus on the x and y axis, representing a 2D plane that the user interacts with, there's actually a z-axis that's often ignored. Some browsers, such as Microsoft Edge, even provide a way to see a website blown up into a 3D view:
Tags: #css
Saved on: 2022-10-09

Using Notion as a headless CMS for our blog

Headless CMSes have caught on in popularity recently. When building a CMS for the Data Narratives Blog, we wanted to try one out. While there are plenty of specialized solutions, we went with Notion. It’s stable, everyone is familiar with it, and has a super easy to use API.
Saved on: 2022-10-07

Take advantage of Git rebase | GitLab

These days, developers spend a lot of time reviewing merge requests and taking these reviews into account to improve the code. We'll discuss how Git rebase can help in speeding up these review cycles. But first, let's take a look at some workflow considerations.
Tags: #guide #git
Saved on: 2022-10-06

quine-relay/QR.rb at master · mame/quine-relay

If you are using Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (Noble Numbat), you can follow these steps. First, you need to type the following apt-get command to install them all.
Saved on: 2022-10-06

Example Showcase - Tailwind CSS

You can build anything with Tailwind CSS. Well not quite anything, like you can't build a spaceship with it. But you can definitely build the website for the spaceship — NASA did.
Saved on: 2022-10-06

How fateful? | Hacker News

Tags: #culture
Saved on: 2022-10-05

Modeling a scalable fantasy football database with Amazon DynamoDB | AWS Da

Today’s online games generate more data than ever and have request rates that reach millions per second.
Saved on: 2022-10-03

Templating in HTML | Kitty Giraudel

Some people on HackerNews pointed out that this is actually not “templating” the way Handlebars, Mustache, Twig or whatever else is. Okay? It’s just a title, that doesn’t invalidate the rest of the piece. 🤷‍♀️
Saved on: 2022-10-02

Figtree - Google Fonts

Tags: #typography
Saved on: 2022-10-02

Good design means it's easy-to-change — Matthias Noback - Blog

Software development seems to be about change: the business changes and we need to reflect those changes, so the requirements or specifications change, frameworks and libraries change, so we have to change our integrations with them, etc.
Saved on: 2022-09-28

Experimenting A New Syntax To Write SVG

It's been a while since I introduced a new syntax to the css-doodle project to solve my own problems. While I'm not sure it would be useful elsewhere, I need to make some notes before I forget the details. I always find it a bit hard to write SVG without the help of additional tools or libraries.
Saved on: 2022-09-27

I spent two years trying to do what Backstage does for free

[Ed. note: While we take some time to rest up over the holidays and prepare for next year, we are re-publishing our top ten posts for the year. Please enjoy our favorite work this year and we’ll see you in 2023.
Saved on: 2022-09-22

Walkmp3rson Is An MP3 Player Like Sony Never Made

If you weren’t already well aware, the 90s are like, so hot right now, and that includes cassette tapes for some reason. (Even though we personally didn’t have a CD player until 1998, they were around as early as 1982.
Saved on: 2022-09-22

Introduction

Type-level TypeScript is an online course to take your TypeScript skills from intermediate to advanced. It will give you a solid understanding of the type system's fundamentals and guide you through its most advanced features.
Saved on: 2022-09-21

Algorithms in PHP: Deques (circular buffers & linked lists) – A Walk Within

In the previous post, I talked about priority queues. But in my explanation of an alternative implementation, I neglected to mention a few things:
Saved on: 2022-09-13

Work Is Work

Every time I’ve written or spoken about organizational design, I’ve regretted it. There’s something about staking out a position on it which manages to prove me wrong a few years later. But I’ve been having some long thinks about it again, and here’s what I’ve got. Strap the fuck in.
Saved on: 2022-09-13

Symfony meets WordPress. I call it Sword.

Few months ago I came here to introduce a library to work with WordPress database from a third party app (WordpressInterop). I use it to work in a Sym
Saved on: 2022-09-11

Ask HN: Does anyone have a great public domain list of programming books?

I'd love to import your data into PLDB.com. Will give you many internet points and/or something else that will enrich your life.
Tags: #books
Saved on: 2022-09-10

Mounting Amazon S3 to an Amazon EC2 instance using a private connection to S3 File Gateway

Customers rehosting applications in the cloud that deal with large files and unstructured data can benefit by utilizing object storage from a performance, scalability, and cost perspective, as compared to block or file storage.
Saved on: 2022-09-09

Infinite Scrolling: When to Use It, When to Avoid It

Infinite scrolling is a listing-page design approach which loads content continuously as the user scrolls down. It eliminates the need for pagination  — breaking content up into multiple pages.  Since its invention in 2006, infinite scrolling experienced a steep growth in popularity.
Tags: #frontend
Saved on: 2022-09-08

Critical CSS? Not So Fast! – CSS Wizardry – Web Performance Optimisation

I have long held very strong opinions about the Critical CSS pattern. In theory, in a perfect world, with all things being equal, it’s demonstrably a Good Idea™.
Saved on: 2022-09-07

Why A4? – The Mathematical Beauty of Paper Size - Heidelberg Laureate Forum

Unless you have skipped a lot of school, or work, or both – or you live in the USA – you have probably used an A4 sheet of paper before now. Have you ever wondered why it is the shape or size it is? Time to dust off some high-school level maths to investigate.
Saved on: 2022-09-06

Granular interfaces — Sebastian De Deyne

A few weeks ago a spec change for an application we're working on forced us to refactor part of the codebase. It was food for thought about the flexibility granular interfaces provide, and choosing the right abstraction at the right time.
Tags: #programming
Saved on: 2022-09-06

Patterns.dev - Modern Web App Design Patterns

Patterns.dev is a free online resource on design, rendering, and performance patterns for building powerful web apps with vanilla JavaScript or modern frameworks.
Saved on: 2022-09-06

(...) — USB, Thunderbolt, Displayport & docks

After I recently ordered a new laptop, I have been looking for a USB-C-connected dock to be used with my new laptop.
Saved on: 2022-09-05

Run Stable Diffusion on your M1 Mac’s GPU

Stable Diffusion is open source, so anyone can run and modify it. That’s what has caused the abundance of creations over the past week. You can run Stable Diffusion in the cloud on Replicate, but it’s also possible to run it locally.
Saved on: 2022-09-01

How to offer effective free trials | Upollo

If you could increase the conversion rate of your free trials by 10%, how much of a difference would that make? For most companies, even a 5% boost in their trial-to-paid conversion rate would transform their business. The problem is figuring out how to do that.
Tags: #business
Saved on: 2022-08-31

4.2 Gigabytes, or: How to Draw Anything - ⌨️??‍♂️?

In our world, we can do anything that we want to do here. Any old thing. - Bob Ross, The Joy Of Painting Season 29 Episode 1 Watching a vibrant Seattle sunset the other day, my imagination started running. The otherworldly hue of the sky evoked something from science fiction.
Saved on: 2022-08-30

GitHub does dotfiles - dotfiles.github.io

Your unofficial guide to dotfiles on GitHub. Why would I want my dotfiles on GitHub?
Saved on: 2022-08-29

Keep Your Spotify Playlists Fresh with Auto-Updates

Spotify's Release Radar wasn't catching everything, and when work would get busy, my playlists felt stale. As a software engineer and music enthusiast, I decided to solve this problem. I built Brew.fm to automate playlist updates.
Tags: #tools #music
Saved on: 2022-08-28

The mystery of “when women stopped coding” – the triketora press

NPR did a Planet Money podcast in 2014 posing the mystery of “When Women Stopped Coding”. The writeup online includes a striking graph of the percentages of women in different fields of study, plotted out over the last few decades.
Saved on: 2022-08-27

HN Classics

Saved on: 2022-08-26

The New Normal: The Coming Tsunami of Fakery

The word robot derives from the Slavonic word robota, roughly translating to servitude, forced labor, or drudgery. It came into vogue during the Central European system of serfdom, whereby a tenant’s rent was paid for in forced labor.
Tags: #culture
Saved on: 2022-08-26

Why do arrays start at 0?

I was at my wits end for this newsletter after my first two ideas hit research barriers. Then someone linked me this story about why arrays start at 0 and bam I had my topic. Specifically, arguing that said link is wrong and does not, in fact, fully explain why arrays start at 0.
Tags: #programming
Saved on: 2022-08-25

Git Concepts I Wish I Knew Years Ago - DEV Community

The most used technology by developers is not Javascript. It's not Python or HTML.
Tags: #git
Saved on: 2022-08-24

Crawlee · Build reliable crawlers. Fast. | Crawlee

Crawlee won't fix broken selectors for you (yet), but it helps you build and maintain your crawlers faster. When a website adds JavaScript rendering, you don't have to rewrite everything, only switch to one of the browser crawlers.
Saved on: 2022-08-23

Let it slide

No matter the size of the business, there'll always be an unlimited number of tasks left to do, processes left to improve, and contingencies left to plan. The work is truly never done, so regardless of how much effort is put in, you'll inevitably end the day unfinished.
Saved on: 2022-08-23

UX Core

UX CORE Introduction articlePodcast about UX Core
Saved on: 2022-08-23

Getting Started with TDD in PHP

I will give you a practical introduction to test-driven development in this course. I will show you how to get started, demonstrate the benefits of TDD, and explain why it has become my preferred way of programming.
Tags: #tdd #course
Saved on: 2022-08-21

DDD, Hexagonal, Onion, Clean, CQRS, … How I put it all together – @hgraca

This post is part of The Software Architecture Chronicles, a series of posts about Software Architecture. In them, I write about what I’ve learned about Software Architecture, how I think of it, and how I use that knowledge.
Saved on: 2022-08-17

6 Docker Compose Best Practices for Dev and Prod

Docker solves the "but it runs on my machine" problem by introducing containerization. However, with a multifaceted code base, you must simultaneously run several containers like the back and front end. Further, this will require you to leverage tools such as Docker Compose.
Tags: #docker
Saved on: 2022-08-17

Optimizing circular relationships in Laravel - Jonathan Reinink

In my last article, I explained the importance of pushing database query optimizations to the perimeter of your Laravel applications. As noted then, by doing this, you'll keep your models simpler, since they no longer need to be concerned with performance issues.
Tags: #laravel
Saved on: 2022-08-16

Redis Explained

What is Redis? Redis (“REmote DIctionary Service”) is an open-source key-value database server. The most accurate description of Redis is that it's a data structure server. This specific nature of Redis has led to much of its popularity and adoption amongst developers.
Saved on: 2022-08-16

Strategies for decreasing the number of queries in a Laravel app - Freek Va

Oh Dear is all-in-one solution to monitor your site that my buddy Mattias Geniar and I have created. It can monitoring uptime, certificates, broken links, scheduled jobs, and much more. Under the hood, Oh Dear is a large Laravel application that performs many queries all of the time.
Saved on: 2022-08-16

How Validus Built a Bloomberg Real-Time Market Data Integration on AWS in a

By Fergus Strangways-Dixon, Lead Platform Engineer – Validus Risk Management Ltd.By Nihilson Gnanadason, Sr. Solutions Architect – AWS
Saved on: 2022-08-16

“Code” 2nd Edition Now Available!

August 7, 2022 Roscoe, N.Y.
Saved on: 2022-08-08

Build your own web framework

Have you ever wondered what it takes to build your own web framework that also deploys to edge and serverless infrastructure? What features does a modern framework need to support, and how can we ensure that these features allow us to build a scalable, performant web application?
Saved on: 2022-07-30

The Dynamics of Exploration on Spotify

Digital media platforms give users access to enormous amounts of content. To stay interested in this content, users must explore by seeking variety.
Saved on: 2022-07-30

SPA Alternative

The emerging norm for web development is to build a React single-page application, with server rendering. The two key elements of this architecture are something like: This idea has really swept the internet.
Saved on: 2022-07-20

The Design of Everyday Things — Book Summary & Notes

Good design is harder to notice than poor design, partly because good designs fit our needs so well that the design is invisible, serving us without drawing attention to itself. Bad design screams out its inadequacies, making itself very noticeable.
Tags: #design #art
Saved on: 2022-07-18

Hierarchy of Trust: The 5 Experiential Levels of Website Commitment

In creating transactional web experiences, designers are under constant pressure to reduce friction to conversion, drive people to the next step in the funnel, and collect user information as early as possible. But demands must meet users’ trust needs.
Tags: #ux #design
Saved on: 2022-07-12

Story Points Revisited

I like to say that I may have invented story points, and if I did, I’m sorry now. Let’s explore my current thinking on story points. At least one of us is interested in what I think. Stories, of course, are an XP idea, not a Scrum idea. Somehow, Scrum practitioners have adopted the idea.
Saved on: 2022-07-10

Spotify’s Failed #SquadGoals

Spotify doesn’t use “the Spotify model” and neither should you. Of all the allures of startup culture, few are more desireable than the speed and nimbleness of a small team. Maintaining that feeling as a company grows is a challenge.
Saved on: 2022-07-10

50 Shades of Beige

Assistant Curator Shaz Hussain explores the history of the personal computer to answer the ever important question: why beige? They say black is the chicest colour, it goes with everything. Which is why the sleek, minimalist design of your phone, laptop or tablet fits neatly into your lifestyle.
Saved on: 2022-07-06
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