Cool Links

… is just to be alive.

Beautiful reminder of why chasing goals and meaning only leads us away from them. A bit related to my longterm goals post from last year.

One of capitalism’s greatest successes is that it’s robbed us of imagination.

We struggle to imagine what life could look like under a different system. How it would be better. How it would be worse. How it would be different.

Utopias don’t exist. They never will. But I refuse to accept this system we toil under—while better than monarchies and fiefdoms—is as good as it gets.

Time and time again, we’ve been seeing companies that go all-in on AI in hopes of not falling behind or standing out while the bubble doesn’t burst. This article has some real life testimonies of employees that are being forced to use AI in their work - even if it makes things harder and makes the results worse.

Obsidian, my note-taking, second-brain, CMS app just got a huge feature: Notion-like databases, here simply called Bases. You can use them with any files in your vault and in my initial testing, it’s pretty powerful!

I’m already using it to manage Cool Links, and looking forward to use it for more of my stuff in the future.

What exactly is this site? I don’t know. But it looks awesome.

I always have trouble understanding SVGs, but thanks to this article, I will have teensy bit less trouble than before. Josh’s articles are always a gem with all the interactivity and this is no exception.

CSS is finally getting functions! And if you’re struggling to think of good use cases for them or thinks they don’t make sense at all Una will change your mind real quick.

Too bad they’re still only supported in Chromium and are probably ways off from being usable in production. But it’s nice to get a glimpse of what the future holds.

Sharing Ahmad Shadeed’s posts here kinda feel like cheating at this point. They’re always a gem!

This one goes extremely in-depth into redesigning the hero layout of Time.com. Ahmad explains his thought process on every step of the way, and dives into a lot of fun, new-ish CSS principles like container and style queries, :has, grid and even text wrapping!

A masterclass, really.

Finally! I’ve been using uBlock Origin on my desktop browsers since it’s existed, and it makes the commercial web usable. Now it’s finally available for iOS Safari (maybe on the Mac too?)

Safari has had some ad blockers for a while, but none were as good as this one. This one blocks ads, trackers, and even allows hiding some page elements you select, just like the desktop version.

A must-have in all my web browsers.

This article (in Brazilian Portuguese) was a huge inspiration to me in reworking how I save my Cool Links, starting this month. I’m using the Obsidian Web Clipper instead of the custom solution the author had, but the principles are still the same.

Building up a weekly routine to organize things has also been a good change, as I don’t have a lot to do at the end of the month when I’m putting this post together.

This is what the web was made for. Just draw a fish. Then watch your creation swim with fishes from all over the world. Beautiful.

Neat article in which Jim explains why a seemingly harmless CSS transition property (using height) was spiking up CPU usage. It goes through the thought process of identifying the issue, understanding it, and solving it. (spoiler: animating transform is much cheaper!)

I know SVGs are amazing, and I’ve done some cool things with them. But I never really knew what I was doing. This fantastic post by Josh Comeau goes over the basics and focuses on SVGs you can create yourself through code, instead of relying on vector editing softwares like Figma or Illustrator.

I haven’t tried these tips in practice yet, but hopefully I’ll have a neat idea I can use them on soon 👀

This article talks a bit about the Netstuck effect, you when feel forced to use a service or platform just because everyone is there, and how that’s different from a monopoly.

As someone with no commercial social media accounts, I relate to this a lot. And even though I can live without a Facebook or Instagram account, I tried not using WhatsApp in Brazil for a couple years and just had to concede at some point, because there’s just no way of getting in contact with anyone (especially businesses) in here without it.

This game tests your knowledge on JavaScript’s Date class. It’s funny because it’s sad.

Came across this website on Mastodon and oh wow, it’s so nice! I’ve seen a bunch of websites trying to mimic the old Windows vibes, but this one did it in a way that makes sense. Content is well laid-out and it doesn’t go too far into the “mimicking Windows” aspect.

Amazing video about the internet we’ve lost (or rather, was taken from us), and how we can rebuild it.

Absolute fan of Sarah’s storytelling here, the way she weaves through the topics and links (hah!) them to that Hypnospace game is amazing!

I learned about separation of concerns over a decade ago, when I was still learning how to code. On the web side, it would very often be related to what language you were using; HTML is for markup, CSS for styles, JS for interactivity, whatever-backend-language-you-use for business logic. That made sense back then but now the lines have become much blurrier.

Brad Frost goes a bit into what a more modern version of that separation of concerns might look like. I haven’t tried out his course, so I can’t comment on how good it is. But I’m a big fan of his atomic design principles so I’d say it might be a good one!

I’ve been subscribed to this newsletter for over a year and it never occurred to me to recommend it here. Stefan Judis does a weekly roundup of web dev-related things and puts them out in a nice, easy-to-read, lighthearted newsletter. It’s been one of my favorites for a while and if you’re reading this, chances are you’ll enjoy his content too!

As a bilingual person that’s soon moving to another country I really struggle with websites and apps that keep trying to serve you content in a specific language instead of the one you choose. Google is one of the worst in this regard.

Even worse is when the content is translated automatically. It sucks! Google again sucks at this. It keeps reverting things to Portuguese and even re-enabling automatic dubbing (gross, I know) on videos, even though I explicitly have my device, browser, and Google account set to English.