How Lucasfilm used Unreal Engine to make The Mandalorian

The Mandalorian’s set used some serious Danger Room/Holodeck stuff to pull off a virtual shot-on-location feel for its many different settings, and powering the world projected on its giant LED wall was none other than Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 4. The setup allowed the cast to shoot in multiple locations in a single day, to …

Why you should probably avoid using <input type="number" />

The fine folks at GOV.UK: Until now, the GOV.UK Design System date input component used the HTML element <input type=”number” /> to provide a number keypad when a user enters dates. However, we recently moved away from <input type="number"> to <input type="text" inputmode="numeric" pattern="[0-9]*"> Why the GOV.UK Design System team changed the input type for …

Creating a 4 Corner Gradient in CSS

Nice demo by Adam Argyle to create a 4 Corner Gradient in CSS: Even though working with gradients has gotten some improvements, you’ll still need a trick to achieve this one: stack 2 simple linear gradients and use a linear mask to blend them together: mask-image: linear-gradient(to bottom, transparent, black);

Rome – An experimental JavaScript toolchain

I’ve been following Sebastian on Twitter for quite some time and am very excited to see that Rome – which he has been talking about for quite some time – has been released into the open … Rome, an experimental JavaScript toolchain, is now open source and available for contributors 🥳🏛️📜 It's far from production …

Fixing ab (ApacheBench) Error "apr_socket_connect(): Invalid argument (22)"

Note to self: when running ApacheBench it does not know how to resolve localhost. Instead you’ll have to use 127.0.0.1. I seem to forget this every single time I use it 🤦‍♂️ ~ Won’t work: localhost $ ab -n 5000 -c 50 http://localhost:8080/ This is ApacheBench, Version 2.3 <$Revision: 1843412 $> Copyright 1996 Adam Twiss, …

You shall not open links in a new window or tab

Something we already knew, but that’s now written down by Adrian Roselli in a nice post: Regardless of what accessibility conformance level you target, do not arbitrarily open links in a new window or tab. If you are required to do so anyway, inform users in text. Great to see that the statement is backed …

Automatically buy a Twilio phone number and forward calls/SMS to another number with `create-phone-number-forwarding`

Stefan Judis, devrel at Twilio, has created a CLI tool named create-phone-number-forwarding: A small CLI utility that buys a Twilio number and forwards incoming calls/SMS to your own number I like the fact that at its core it’s basically a shell script wrapping around the twilio binary (combined with tools like jq), also making use …