Notes

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

I learned about this quote by George Bernard Shaw from Veritasium’s video on The World’s Most Important Machine

It instantly reminded me of the Kaun Hai Tu scene from Gully Boy, where Murad embodies Shaw’s “unreasonable man.” In this scene, Murad is confronted by his father after quitting his job to pursue his dream. The father tries to convince Murad that his dreams need to match his reality. Murad then answers that he will change his reality to match his dreams.

Earlier this month, I noted down Jason’s advice on how to get hired as a developer. I’d also like to add the following point from @brandon:

use the product

this is one of the first questions i ask in the interview anyways, ship and share something you’ve built on top of cloudflare. this alone will set you apart from most of the candidates, and it will show you are genuinely interested.

This complements Jason’s advice well, because it turns “show your work” into something concrete and product-specific.

Today I learned that on macOS, with the default scrollbar setting enabled, classic scrollbars are shown automatically when a mouse is connected. I used to believe that, mouse or not, users needed to explicitly change the scrollbar appearance to get the classic scrollbars.

This is relevant for everyone who builds websites because when classic scrollbars are shown, the value of 100vw includes the scrollbar width. This can cause an unexpected horizontal overflow if the layout relies on 100vw for full-width elements. Additionally, they affect media queries, which assume scrollbars don’t exist when evaluating viewport width.

Having said that, these aren’t new issues. Classic scrollbars are shown by default on Windows, where the same behaviours apply.

Further reading:

• The large, small, and dynamic viewport units | Blog | web.dev
• New CSS Viewport Units Do Not Solve The Classic Scrollbar Problem — Smashing Magazine
• Get the scrollbar width using only CSS
• Full-Bleed Layout with Modern CSS – Frontend Masters Blog

I just watched Homebound, Neeraj Ghaywan’s second feature film. And it left me devastated.

The film is based on Basharat Peer’s article ‘Taking Amrit Home’ (which has since been retitled ‘A Friendship, a Pandemic and a Death Beside the Highway’).

I highly recommend this film. But if you can’t watch it for whatever reason you must read the article.

I’m a web designer-developer who has mostly designed and built marketing websites for small to medium-sized businesses. I started designing because my clients didn’t have a designer and expected me to handle everything. But I’ve always felt like an imposter. It’s not a nice feeling.

I’m really determined to change that, which is why I just bought Scott Riley’s course, Mindful Design. Piccalilli is running a Black Friday sale on all their courses, including Mindful Design, and I can wholeheartedly recommend them.

Today I learned, :root (0-1-0) has a higher specificity than html (0-0-1).

In hindsight, it’s obvious. :root is a CSS pseudo-class selector and, like most pseudo-class selectors, it has the same specificity as a class selector or an attribute selector.

Hot take: Padel is to tennis what bowling with bumpers on is to bowling. Its design choices lead to fewer mistakes and a lower barrier to entry.

I keep forgetting, but the alt attribute of the <img> element is not just useful for users who are visually impaired. It is also useful when the image is not displayed in the browser for whatever reason. For example: the src attribute does not contain a valid path to an image.

John Mayer on how trying and not doing it well enough is a wonderful technique for being yourself:

Failing to sound exactly like the person you want to sound like is a wonderful way to sound like yourself. So I’m not necessarily thinking this thing from scratch, going, Okay, I’m gonna, like, do Jerry-esque things, but I’m still gonna sound like me. No, it’s more like, I want to sound just like Jerry, and then the way I naturally, obviously don’t — that’s your personality. Music doesn’t let you lie. […] You try to sound like who you want to sound like, and you just will always end up sounding like you.

I like this advice. It is an interesting take on the learning by copying method.

I just purchased Josh Comeau’s new course, Whimsical Animations. The course page itself has some delightful animations.

PS: I also discovered Gochi Hand, a cute handwritten font, on the course page.

Just like a word document can be displayed in a word processing application, a web page is simply an HTML document that can be displayed in a web browser. The only difference is that a web page can embed a variety of different types of resources such as styles, fonts, images, scripts, and so on.

Ana Tudor wrote on Mastodon:

Stupid #CSS question because I’m losing my mind here: why isn’t calc(.5*a) working? What am I missing? It doesn’t seem to be working in any browser.

Ana is trying to use calc(.5 * a) as a part of the relative color syntax, presumably to create semi transparent outlines. But it is not working because calc(.5 * a) is an invalid property value. As Valtteri Laitinen replied, it should actually be alpha in there instead of a.

.class {
	outline-color: rgb(from currentcolor r g b / calc(0.5 * a)); /* ❌ invalid */
	outline-color: rgb(
		from currentcolor r g b / calc(0.5 * alpha)
	); /* ✅ valid */
}

I re-read Heydon Pickering’s post on the HTML article element in the middle of writing the markup for a new website.

Heydon’s writing is so sharp and funny. Unmistakably theirs. No one else writes quite like them, and I’m here for it.

I was reading Manuel Matuzovic’s article on meta theme color and came across this snippet:

<style>
	:root {
		--theme: blue;
	}
</style>
<meta name="theme-color" content="var(--theme)" />

I wish it was possible to access custom properties outside the <style> tag in the <head>. It would keep things DRY.

Today I learned, grid-auto-columns and grid-auto-rows size implicit tracks as well as any explicit tracks that are not explicitly sized by by grid-template-rows or grid-template-columns.

Until now, I was under the impression that grid-auto-rows and grid-auto-columns size only implicit grid tracks.

I got the opportunity to proofread Ahmad Shadeed’s latest article on CSS Grid Areas before its release. It inspired me to refactor the code on my site to use grid-template-areas.

Thanks to Kevin Powell, today I learned that the text-underline-offset property is named so because it only applies to underlines and not other text-decoration-line values like overline and line-through.

<a href="https://example.com">Example</a>

a {
	text-decoration-line: underline overline; /* We can set multiple line-decoration properties at once */
	text-underline-offset: 16px; /* Only impacts underline */
}