prepitaph

snippet by FND May 14, 2026 Everyone’s leaving the dilapidated slop factory.

snippet by FND January 25, 2026 An ill-advised return to the rabbit hole of personal web apps and client-side secrets left me with a series of usability challenges.

snippet by FND September 19, 2025 While I’m generally skeptical of hamburger menus, sometimes they seem unavoidable – or at least pragmatic in a resigned kind of way.

snippet by FND August 31, 2025 I recently helped build a website in stark mode: Intentionally gaudy colors on dark background.

journal by FND June 29, 2025 Joe Lanman’s inquiry about server-side templating prompted me to connect some dots for myself.

by FND June 29, 2025 An effort to escape irksome constraints of enterprise software not only made me appreciate the impact of modern CSS when combined with JavaScript APIs, it also taught me a few things about progressive enhancement, performance and acce…

by FND April 27, 2025 Subpar templating remains an obstacle to generating usable HTML.

snippet by FND March 26, 2025 Strict border controls are an anachronism, so why not have our CSS reflect that?

by cdent February 28, 2025 When creating software, ensure there are working harnesses for testing, installation, and upgrade first.

journal by FND January 4, 2025 I’m in the process of setting up a new-ish MacBook.

snippet by FND December 15, 2024 TIL JavaScript getters can simply be deleted, even if there’s no corresponding setter: let obj = { data: 123, get hash() { return this.data * Math.random(); } }; obj.hash = 666; // 💥 TypeError: setting…

by FND November 22, 2024 Routing HTTP requests is now fairly straightforward in JavaScript thanks to the URL Pattern API.

by FND November 18, 2024 Recently a soon-to-be-ex colleague unexpectedly stated: Thank you for teaching me to regard my own brain’s limitations as a great strength.

by FND November 15, 2024 If you’re forced to use Microsoft’s Outlook/Exchange infrastructure or erroneously employed IMAP, you might need an exit strategy.

by cdent August 5, 2024 I got my first full time remote job in 2004.

by FND July 29, 2024 In order to avoid memory leaks and prevent subtle bugs, we typically need to remove event listeners when the respective DOM element disappears.

journal by FND July 26, 2024 Hot on the heels of yesterday’s inaugural journal, I’ve decided to revisit the handful of bookmarks I currently consider seminal: Pieces I often refer to in discussions, sometimes with myself.

journal by FND July 25, 2024 Loosely inspired by Sara Joy’s Weak Notes, my breakfast brain decided a facile pun was necessary to finally try something I’d been considering for a while: Consciously review stuff I’ve bookmarked, re-assess with some distance…

snippet by FND July 18, 2024 In sharing a technique for determining viewport dimensions with CSS, Temani Afif demonstrated that counters can be used to display the current (numeric) value of custom properties in any given context.

snippet by FND July 17, 2024 Sometimes we need visual feedback beyond what browsers provide for interactive elements by default.

snippet by FND July 13, 2024 CSS nesting syntax is not universally supported yet, so we can either avoid or convert it.

by FND July 10, 2024 CSS allows for arbitrary shapes these days.

by FND May 4, 2024 Turns out the HTML parser and DOM APIs don’t always agree on semantic constraints.

by FND March 29, 2024 The cascade is what makes CSS powerful and special.

snippet by FND March 23, 2024 Given my penchant for minimal test cases and local applications, I sometimes run into situations where I can’t load external JavaScript files.

snippet by FND March 22, 2024 I’ve always liked Python’s defaultdict and occasionally find myself reimplementing it in other languages, notably JavaScript – typically for some kind of dynamic indexing.

by cdent February 27, 2024 In conversation with my wife recently, I mentioned that I’ve been doing software development for more than 40 years.

by FND February 4, 2024 Every so often I create another local web application, for myself or others – mostly because not relying on a server seems more sustainable and eternally trustworthy, especially for personal, single-purpose projects.

snippet by FND January 28, 2024 Scroll shadows are a good hint to users that an element can be scrolled by overlaying shadows on its edges. — Scroll shadows with animation-timeline We’re not actually gonna use that newfangled animation timeline though.

snippet by FND January 24, 2024 TIL color-scheme: dark automatically changes form fields’ appearance.

snippet by FND January 10, 2024 As a big believer in both consistency and individual autonomy1, I consider EditorConfig an important part of projects’ standard setup: # https://editorconfig.org root = true [*] charset = utf-8 end_of_line = lf insert_fina…

snippet by FND January 7, 2024 Prerequisite is PyOTP, which we set up within a virtual environment: $ python3 -m venv .

by FND December 31, 2023 Purveyors of software must exercise reasonable care to guard against decontextualization of architectural choices.

snippet by FND December 19, 2023 Say we have a list of value groups: 📐 30 📏 30 🔗 7 📐 70 📏 43.5 🔗 17 📐 83.5 📏 100 🔗 49 Similar fields should be aligned for visual consistency; vertically stacked (i.e. columns).

snippet by FND December 18, 2023 Sometimes it’s useful to highlight text passages within a web page.

snippet by FND December 17, 2023 I probably create dozens of HTML documents each month, usually for experiments or minimal test cases.

by FND December 10, 2023 JavaScript bundles don’t need to be monolithic, even without surrendering control to inscrutable algorithms.

by FND November 26, 2023 Constructable Style Sheets are useful to inject and control styles via JavaScript.

by FND October 1, 2023 As we’ve learned from the brouhaha around Svelte’s use of TypeScript, JSDoc makes it possible to write plain JavaScript while getting the benefits of static typing.

by FND August 31, 2023 There are many options these days for securely sharing sensitive data, but they typically require some kind of shared infrastructure.

by FND August 17, 2023 Every once in a while, I need to turn HTML strings into DOM nodes.

by FND July 23, 2023 Reading about Excalidraw’s end-to-end encryption a while back piqued my interest: Given my TiddlyWiki background, the idea of using a server to exchange sensitive data without exposing details to anyone else seemed compelling.

by FND July 15, 2023 View transitions are excellent, but might block concurrent animations as well as interactions while transitioning.

by FND May 29, 2023 Having been roped into dealing with the excesses of RxJS lately, I’d been wondering about Angular folks’ excitement about signals.

by FND April 23, 2023 npm is slow, unwieldy and unsafe.

by FND March 30, 2023 being sent to the dictionary is a gift As someone with a reputation for excessive use of abbreviations, I am occasionally asked to compose a list of common acronyms and such, making them easier for people to decode.

by FND March 10, 2023 Allowing users to tinker in private is essential to enabling creativity.

by FND March 3, 2023 Browsers begin rendering HTML even before the document has been fully downloaded, which can greatly improve perceived performance.

by FND February 13, 2023 At face value, An Approach to Lazy Loading Custom Elements appears to propose a solution for on-demand loading of web components.

by FND February 10, 2023 Sometimes I need to generate HTML without relying on external dependencies.