Until a few years ago, we mostly had McDonald’s, Burger King, KFC (in bigger cities) and a handful of Starbucks and such around here. I remember when I used to go to the only Subway restaurant in the Netherlands back in 2002: now there are 181 restaurants in our tiny country. Yesterday I passed through […]
Review: Counterpart (2017)
Starz premiered Counterpart in December 2017, and it may just be the best new show of the fall season. For 50% that’s because of the unique storyline, but the other 50% is totally because of J.K. Simmons acting. Set in present day Berlin (but in a different world), there is a portal that leads to […]
Controlling Itho CVE ECO ventilation with Domoticz
For ventilation, our 17-year-old house is equipped with an Itho air handler for mechanical ventilation. Exhausts in the kitchen, toilet, and bathroom make sure that fresh air gets pulled in through ventilation inlets located over the windows. The air handler made a lot of noise for the past few years, so we mostly had it unplugged. Since that’s a terribly […]
Having fun with Sass lists and strings
At SassConf I presented a one hour “featured workshop” on lists, while also touching on new Sass 3.3 features such as maps and string functions. After all, the best way to learn how new functionality works is to toy around with it (and break stuff), so I decided to create an “animation trajectory grid” (or […]
Should you use a Sass mixin or @extend?
If you want to DRY your CSS, the easiest way is to start using a pre-processor like Sass. Specially in the beginning though, you need to regularly look at what your Sass compiles to. By using mixins for instance, you can seriously scale back the amount of code you need to write. But if you […]
The missing media query: element dimensions
A few weeks ago Wes Oudshoorn, a UI/UX designer we’re fortunate to work with on AppSignal, asked if I knew a way to make media queries relative to an element instead of the viewport. I did not, but it didn’t take long for me to understand that this is a feature that would make writing […]
Fostering a development community
Yesterday I wrote a controversial article about how I see and hear that the Ruby community is more and more influenced by poor developers. I knew it would stir up a shit storm, but the amount of tweets and comments on various sites still surprised me. We’re talking 7,000+ unique visitors in the first 18 […]
Will Rails be the new PHP?
UPDATE 2: Here’s a follow-up to this post with some thoughts on how we can turn the tide if what’s to follow below is true. UPDATE: I’m sure this is going to feel like an uncool move, but I’m not only not going to respond to all individual comments, I also closed the thread. Anything […]
Follow-up: Don’t use class names to find HTML elements with JS
This is the follow-up to “Don’t use class names to find HTML elements with JS“, where we take a look at a new test case, with results proving that the negative speed impact of finding elements by data attribute instead of by class name is negligible. The reasons for using this approach are in the […]
My first legally binding contract (at age 11)
Recently my mother, while going through junk accumulated over the past 30 years, found a contract I made at age 11. I’m astonished that 1: it has so little spelling errors, and 2: this seems to be a legally binding contract. It has a date, the city where the document was signed, the names of […]