Cool Links Vol. 8: February, 2025

Hey there! This month I brought a ton of links, probably a result of me trying to make a habit of checking my RSS reader every morning during breakfast. Let's get started!

Fun

XScreenSaver's Privacy Policy, by Jamie Zawinski

Apparently when your indie app does not collect any amount of data, the data reapers get confused.

My Life in Weeks, by Gina Trapani

This is such a cool idea that I definitely want to copy in the future. I'm a bit wary of making so much private information public (especially dates), so I might not ever make this public anywhere. But still, a nice personal exercise and a perfect memento mori.

noclip.website

This is so cool! This website allows you to explore the 3D models of maps from a variety of old-ish games from the Wii, GameCube, DS and PS2 eras. If you’ve played any of them, it might be worth having a look. My favorite ones to explore like this were the maps from Pokémon HeartGold/SoulSilver and Platinum.

I recommend opening the site on a computer though. The touch controls aren’t great.

How To Lose Brain Fat With This Programming Language!

I love those joke programming languages. They're perfect examples that sometimes the only reason you need to build something is that you can.

Dev

View transitions: Handling aspect ratio changes, by Jake Archibald

Jake gives a really thorough explanation on view transitions, showing some of its shortcomings when animating some specific elements and how to fix them. View transitions are so nice 🤩

Faux Containers in CSS Grids, by Tyler Sticka

A fun exercise about making elements “pop out” of their containers with CSS without altering markup. Might not be useful if you can change the markup (as there are easier ways to do that), but learning this kind of approach is always good for expanding your repertoire.

Naming Things In CSS Grid Layout, by Rachel Andrew

That article about the faux containers lead me to this one. I knew about naming CSS grid areas, but I had no idea about the [area-start/end] pattern! You can set those explicitly or have them be automatically added by CSS. This is pretty cool!

Who's Afraid of a Hard Page Load?, by Unplanned Obsolescence

The smoothness of a web application is an anti-indicator of its reliability and predictability as a web page.

your team almost certainly doesn’t have what it takes to out-engineer the browser. The browser will continuously improve the experience of plain HTML, at no cost to you, using a rendering engine that is orders of magnitude more efficient than JavaScript.

I remember when I first learned about SPAs and how amazing it seemed like to be able to have smooth transitions between pages. Then, as I started building and using them, it became apparent that those benefits also brought a lot of issues that took a lot of dev work to fix.

Luckily, with View Transitions, lazy loading, and predictive pre-rendering (start loading a page before you click on its link) that a lot of frameworks have now, we can have most of the SPA benefits without having to reinvent the wheel.

Container Queries Unleashed, by Josh Comeau

I've written about Container Queries before, but this article by Josh Comeau is great at giving even more examples of its utility. It's always nice to see what use cases other developers find for it.

Learning HTML is the best investment I ever did, by Chris Heilmann

HTML and CSS are my favorite parts of web development, and this article gives some great examples of why. Learning HTML is one of the best things you can do for your (web development) career, as it’s the most foundational block of a website and by itself can do most of the functionality you need. From HTML, you can progressively enhance the rest.

Getting stuck: all the ways position:sticky can fail, by Polypane

position: sticky is incredibly useful but I’ve had issues implementing it more than once. This article goes over some of the most common issues we can face with it and how we can fix them.

How to pick a font (or is it a typeface?), by Saron from Not A Designer

Cool article explaining a little bit about fonts and choosing them for your website/app. I’m still overwhelmed by the options, but I found the info in there to be interesting.

Deep Reads

In the Kingdom of the Bored, the One-Armed Bandit Is King, by Nicholas Carr

Abundance breeds boredom. When there’s no end of choices, each choice feels disappointing.

It was once assumed that digitization would liberate cultural artifacts from their physical containers. We’d be able to enjoy the wine without the bottles. What’s actually happened is different. We’ve come, as Goldsmith says, “to prefer the bottles to the wine.”

Worth a read if you use any kind of computer technology, really. It’s so weird how our ancient brain has adapted to the digital world - or maybe hasn’t adapted at all?

I've missed Sam for a long time (or: Pick Your Battles), by Keenan

What a powerful read. Not really tech-related, but as someone who’s seen loved ones go down the same route as Sam did, it’s a very relatable, sad, albeit weirdly comforting, read.

Wrapping up

Phew, that was a lot! Some of them were in my "Read later" queue for a while. I'll keep working on clearing up that queue and let's see how next month goes.

See you then!