Monica Dinculescu

I keep forgetting to write a post.

An article from 2015 is making the rounds again because the internet has no new ideas and neither do we, that says Shakespeare (yes that Shakespeare) was quite possibly absolutely baked out of his mind the entire time.

A Ritz-Carlton hotel in California closed an entrance after a hummingbird made a nest on a door handle and, amidst all the daily ambient horror of simply being a person with a phone in 2026, it is nice to be reminded of the kinds of small lives we still a…

There’s something good going on with music these days.

Thinking about resuscitating regular written updates.

I have 4 (rounded up) beefs with language-y AI bots that have resulted in me sort of avoiding them altogether: They have the personality of a middle manager who writes Google Docs all day that nobody wants to read They’re reallllly good at guessing but not

Wow, long time, no posts!

(This is a post mostly about art but I swear there’s a moral in here for all you tech readers, or at least a discounted therapy lesson.)

A couple of months ago my friend Jana helped organize HashiConf Europe, and asked me to work on generating custom artwork for each of their speakers.

The last time I changed something big on my site was 3+ years ago.

One of my favourite kinds of art to make involves taking nature and seeing it as simple shapes.

My one policy about blogging is “write the blog post you wanted to find in the search results”.

Back in the day when I worked on Polymer I got used to relying on a bunch of useful CSS classes that at the time we called iron-flex-layout.

My job nowadays involves a lot of music and JavaScript.

One of the first things you stumble on when you start using TensorFlow.js is that sometimes you need your data as a Tensor, and sometimes you need it as a JavaScript number.

Inktober is a project where artists make an ink drawing every day for the whole month of October.

Magenta.js is a JavaScript library that helps you generate art and music on the web.

Machine Learning (ML) is the dope new thing that everyone’s talking about, because it’s really good at learning from data so that it can predict similar things in the future.

When you have a float CSS property on a box (with a value different than none), this box must be laid out according to the float positioning algorithm.

Before I wrote the JavaScripts, I got a master’s in AI (almost a decade ago 🙀), and wrote a thesis on a weird and new area in Reinforcement Learning.

So testing, right?

You can tell I hate writing year in reviews because this one is really, really late.

Updated May 18, 2020 (get it?

There’s this thing I hate about the modern web which is that sites are rarely one giant html file filled with goodies.

Shadow DOM is a fairly recent-ish spec that gives you DOM tree encapsulation – it’s one of the superhero lions in the Voltron of specs called “Web Components”.

The Meownica Web App Workflow™ goes like this: Write bad code until the file is too long Refactor that code into some web components Repeat steps 1-2 until done Realize you forgot to do the PWA dance, so your app is scoring 45 on Lighthouse Make it into a…

I work on a library called Polymer, which helps you write web components faster and easier.

This is a cheat sheet for the Polymer 2.x library.

This year was pretty shit, so I wasn’t very keen on doing one of these posts.

This is a cheat sheet for the Polymer 1.x library.

phantom underlines. isn't this amaaaaaazing. i love waiting for 8 seconds and seeing this. look at it. srsly. looooookat it.

You know the scenes in Friends when Ross starts talking about dinosaurs and he’s SUPER excited but everyone else is losing the will to live?

You know that scene in The Rock where Nicolas Cage is super dreamy (like he is) and decides his life mission is to look for VX poison gas and save San Francisco (like he would)?

Here’s the thing: I have this sweet pair of headphones that I got from a friend a gazillion years ago.

I’ve never really done a year in review.

Some people build furniture.

One of the beefs (and there aren’t many) that I have with CSS is that it has a very weak opinion about style encapsulation.

The keypress event works maddeningly differently in Chrome/Safari and Firefox, and this is the story of how I spent two hours discovering that, so that hopefully you don’t have to.

My favourite thing about the Chromium code is this enum of cats and all the comments in that file.

I gave a talk about how to get started contributing to Chromium, but it wasn’t recorded, and my slides by themselves look like cold-medicine induced hallucinations (which, to be fair, they were).

I talked about Cat-DNS at Cascadia.js, and it wasn’t terrible!

lldb stands for Llama-DB, and is a database of llamas you can use to debug programs compiled with clang (lldb is to clang like gdb is to gcc).

You’ve given a talk.

But only if your family is code.

I am the poster child for writer’s block.

Stats: a preamble I’ve been reading too much about March Madness brackets, so I thought I had to run some numbers around here like the cool kids do.

One of the hardships about being Canadian is that most programming languages are quite simply, rude.

Imagine this: you have forked a repo a long time ago and have since been in a happily committed relationship with the master branch, modifying files and committing from the hip.

The internet needs more cats.

Do you sometimes feel the internet is holding you hostage?