And in the “things I always wanted to have” camp, I just wrote myself a small bookmarklet that switches from a GitHub repository and its Pages back and forth.

You can get it on its GitHub repo: GitHub Toggle

It is not clever, and for now only works with index.html pages, as I didn’t want to use any storage.

Here’s a GIF showing it in action:

As people complained that I post too many links to follow on Twitter (it is my stream of consciousness – as I find it, I post it), I’m starting to release these link lists every few days now. Hopefully that helps.

• Pure CSS Drawing Essentials – the top 5 CSS properties Diana Smith relies on to produce her incredible pure CSS art
• Pure CSS lettering, a bad and fun idea- this is a terrible idea, but shows how powerful generated content is
• “What’s next for CSS? CSS DB is a super useful resource showing the up and coming CSS ideas and their implementation across browsers.
• Using CSS Grid the right way – don’t like the title, but some good research there.
• A look at CSS hyphenation in 2019 – not quite here.
• The only reason your CSS fails – it’s not the language, it is how we learn it. Or fail to learn it.
• Rachel Andrew on how to deal with aspect ratios in CSS
• Start your project with a remedy for the technical debt of CSS.
• Flexbox Case Studies – Flexbox is nowaday one of the problem solvers you should master to help you in your working daily habits. Follow those little demonstrations and case studies to learn more about CSS Flexbox Layout, step by step, and become a Flexbox Ninja!

A few weeks ago I was asked by IT Career Energizer to be a guest on their show. Yesterday they released the podcast.

You can listen to the podcast and see the extensive notes there.

According to them, my best answers were:

• (3.57) CHRIS – “Being flexible in your time and being flexible to actually work across the world is something that a lot of people still have problems with. IT is not a 9 to 5 job.”
• (9.26) CHRIS – “I’m actually very excited that computers are taking over more and more.”
• (9.54) CHRIS – “We should not be bored by writing software. Computers should actually be good enough to write most of the code for themselves.”
• (13.00) CHRIS – “When you join a new company network inside the company.”
• (16.47) CHRIS – “We are reusing 90% of the time what other people have been doing.”

Over on the Codemotion magazine, they just released the video interviews shot at the Berlin edition last year.

I had quite a lot of questions, spanning from AI and ethics, what machine learning means for our market up to how to learn JavaScript. There are two parts to the interview:

In the first, I am answering these three questions:

1. Microsoft has become this year’s top contributor to Github. What do you think about this?
2. You said AI is as intelligent and good as we want it to be”. Are we moving towards a society in which tech is becoming more intelligent at the expense of the human brain?
3. Could you share some tips to make humans less afraid of AI?

In the second interview we concentrated more on JavaScript:

1. JavaScript is richer and messier year after year. Is it successful because it continues to change and evolve or is it becoming confusing and intimidating?
2. Visual Studio Code has become the editor of choice of many web developers. In less than 3 years it is the #1. How can a good tool or toolchain improve your code and coding skill?
3. AI and user interfaces: we are experiencing the launch of new products based on AI and new interface paradigms, f.e. voice or chat interfaces. How can developers use AI to improve the existing (visual) interfaces

A few weeks ago I stumbled across a great resource, a typography cheat sheet explaining the proper names of all the different parts of letters. I thought it would be fun to turn this into an interactive cheat sheet and wondered how much would be involved. Turns out, it wasn’t that much, so here is an interactive typography cheat sheet for you.

The code is available on GitHub and I’d love to see contributions and improvement requests.

One quick note on quality and resources:

I was impressed how easy this was to do as the resource provided by the original creator Martin Silvertant was not only a PDF or JPG, but a cleanly organized AI file. My partner helped me to save it as an SVG and I was off to the races. The exported SVG was big, but it was easy to spot which parts aren’t needed. All I did was to use browser developer tools to see what is what by clicking the paths in the SVG in the source view and seeing them highlighted in the rendered SVG. I added an ID for each element and created a map in JavaScript to define what label to show when each element is clicked.

const information = {
  'e1': 'tittle',
  'e2': 'shoulder',
  'e3': 'aperture',
  'e4': 'stem',
 
/* and so on until */
 
  'e49': 'head serif'
}

The rest of the JavaScript is a pretty straightforward event delegation example. Using a slight transition in the CSS is the reason for the smooth transitions.

Things I’d love to see:

• Pull requests with localized versions (I have no idea what these things are called in other languages) and I will write a contribution guide.

Things I am planning to do:

• Turn this into a quiz/game