I’ve been reading up on SVG and Bézier curves for a side project that involves a custom-made chart (blog post about that later!). Funnily enough, this article on Bézier curves popped up on Hacker News earlier this week.
One little animation in the article totally stands out, and helped me make sense of what the control points of a Bézier curve actually do.
Taken from cormullion.github.io
While you’re waiting, have a look at another animation; this is my artist’s impression of the De Casteljau algorithm dividing the control polygons around a Bézier curve as the parameter n moves from 0 to 1. The idea is that as p1 divides A to A1, p2 divides A1 to B1 and p3 divides B1 to B. So, pp1 divides p1 to p2, and pp2 divides p2 to p3. And you keep doing this until you can’t divide any more, and eventually the point P plots the course of the final Bézier curve. The red and blue parts of the curve show that this technique is also a good way to split a single Bézier curve into two separate ones, and the red and blue parts are separate control polygons.
Read the full article on cormullion.github.io.
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When I write a library that’s going to be used by others, I strive for a gentle learning curve. When someone reads code that uses my library, I want them to understand what’s happening without reading a bunch of documentation first. I tend to keep my API’s as explicit as possible, and try to stay away from odd or foreign notations.
My colleague Brent is writing a library to deal with date & time periods in PHP. There was a discussion whether a period’s boundaries should be included in the range or not.
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There are a few fleshed-out articles about why utility-first CSS is a good thing. However, if you’re just a little curious and want a brief introduction, Chris Ferdinandi has your back.
In JavaScript, we create small, modular functions that can be reused throughout the code base to keep our code DRY. In CSS, for some reason, it’s not seen as weird in the slightest to repeat yourself a lot.
Utility classes help keep CSS DRY.
The stylesheet for my website is so small that I can inline all of my CSS still send most of the page in a single HTTP request.
Read the rest of Chris’ article on gomakethings.com.
Hungry for more? Check out In Defense of Utility-First CSS by Sarah Dayan or CSS Utility Classes and “Separation of Concerns” by Adam Wathan.
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Since the first iteration of my blog—some time around 2016—I’ve used highlight.js to highlight code blocks. With highlight.js being so popular, I never really second guessed the idea. It was a given to use JavaScript.
A few weeks ago, TJ Miller introduced me to highlight.php by writing a Parsedown extension for it. Highlight.php does the exact same thing as highlight.js: they both add tags and classes to your code blocks, which enables them to be highlighted with CSS. The difference is, highlight.php does this on the server.
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One of the best things about Vue templates is the special
v-model prop.
v-model allows you two quickly map prop getters and setters without breaking unidirectional data flow.
Props down, events up.Read more
I have a specific pet peeve with user interfaces: things that draw my attention when they don’t need to. In any graphical interface, movement is distraction. Our eyes are naturally drawn to anything in motion.
Motion is a powerful tool. We can abuse this distraction to attract our users to a certain place: a notification, an added list item after a background refresh, etc. Let’s look into the movement behind a form submission. Below are three dummy forms, each with a different server response time.
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In my most recent project at work, I’m experimenting with JSX templates in Vue. Vue offers
first-party support for JSX with near-zero configuration, but it doesn’t seem to be commonly used in the ecosystem.
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Maintaining a number of open source projects comes with a number of issues. Reporting a good issue will result in a more engaged approach from project maintainers. Don’t forget: there’s a human behind every project.
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Code splitting is bundler feature—if you’re using Laravel Mix, you’re bundling your assets with Webpack—that allows you to split application scripts in multiple files. These can then conditionally be loaded at a later stage.
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In a recent Design Details podcast, Guillermo Rauch (@rauchg) shares his thoughts on the web, design, the value of code, type systems, cryptocurrencies and much much more.
I have a lot of respect for Guillermo’s philosophies, and what he’s building with Zeit. An early quote from the interview (paraphrased):
I’ve always had this passion for the hyperlink. My whole thesis is everything that has not yet been hyperlinked, will be hyperlinked. If we step back and take that thesis a little further—you look at GitHub and they but a hyperlink on everything. They put a hyperlink on every per-character diff of your codebase. Every line of code. Every changeset. Everything.
Listen to the full podcast on Spec.fm.
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Server side rendering is a hot topic when it comes to client side applications. Unfortunately, it’s not an easy thing to do, especially if you’re not building things in a Node.js environment.
I published two libraries to enable server side rendering JavaScript from PHP: spatie/server-side-rendering and spatie/laravel-server-side-rendering for Laravel apps.
Let’s review some server side rendering concepts, benefits and tradeoffs, and build a server renderer in PHP from first principles.
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One of the hardest (and sometimes frustrating) tasks in a programmer’s day-to-day workload is naming things. When I have a hard time finding that perfect word, I generally wind up in one of two situations:
- I have a plausible name in mind, but I’m not entirely satisfied with it
- I have no idea what I could possibly name it
Luckily, there are tools out there that can be of help.
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Laravel 5.6 adds the ability to register alias directives for Blade components. Let’s review some background information and examples.
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Laravel quick tip! The
@extends Blade directive accepts a second (undocumented) parameter to pass data to the parent layout.
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