Author Archives: Bramus!

ES-Everything: an ECMA Explainer

Matthew Gerstman explaining a lot of terms that evolve around JavaScript: ECMA, TC39, Babel, Polyfills, … So you Google how to make your app work in IE 10, or 11, or whatever. You’re quickly flooded with acronyms and terms you’ve never heard before ES5, ES6, ESNext, ES2020, TC39, ECMA. What’s a transpiler? People are debating […]

Test an IMAP connection with cURL

Today I needed to debug an IMAP problem. I got reports from a user (whose password I recently rotated) that Outlook wouldn’t connect, even though they entered the correct new password. The connection to the server was made, but the login attempt always failed. As I didn’t want to add the account to my local […]

Squash all Git commits with git squash-all

Freek just shared his workflow to squash all git commits into one single commit — Handy for when you’re pushing a first public release of a project. His process involves removing the .git folder and starting off fresh again with a git init. Wondering if there are handier/shorter ways to achieve this I set off […]

Tiny Helpers – A collection of useful online web development tools

Nice new single-purpose site by Stefan Judis, which lists single-purpose web development tools – such as the aforementioned CSS Grid Generator and Smooth Shadow Generator for example – in one single place. As detailed in a Twitter thread, the site is built using Eleventy, deployed to Zeit, and screenshots of the sites are automatically taken […]

Should you self-host Google Fonts?

Google Fonts is great, but it also has a downside: it affects your page’s waterfall (during which some render-blocking may occur, as it involves CSS) as explained by Barry Pollard: The problem is that your website (say www.example.com) loads the stylesheet from fonts.googleapis.com, which returns some CSS made up of font-face declarations. This means you […]

Watch PIP YouTube videos on macOS with pipcorn

With pipcorn you can spawn a picture-in-picture YouTube player on your Mac without installing anything! Install it globally using npm, or run it directly using npx: npx pipcorn https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ Basically it’s a wrapper around ytdl (to get the MP4 URL) and open-pip-cli (to open a PIP player). Love the name, too. pipcorn Source (GitHub) →

Wombat Dressing Room, an npm publication proxy on GCP

When automating the publishing of an NPM package, 2FA can get in the way, as you can’t really automate entering a 2FA auth code off a cellphone. Enter Wombat Dressing Room from Google: With Wombat Dressing Room, rather than an individual configuring two factor authentication in an authenticator app, 2FA is managed by a shared […]

Building mobile-first web animations in React

Talk by Alex Holachek, as brought forward at React Conf 2019: As the technology to create Progressive Web Apps continues to mature, React developers have the opportunity to write web apps that in some cases can rival native ones in terms of speed and convenience. However, one barrier to feature parity is the difficulty of […]