Henrik Nyh suggests to make comments more resilient to change with double-entry bookkeeping.

- $timeoutMs = 1000; // Equals 1 second
+ $timeoutMs = 1000; // 1000ms equals 1 second
- $timeoutMs = 1000; // Equals 1 second
+ $timeoutMs = 1000; // 1000ms equals 1 second

Whether the discrepancy is caught immediately by the author, or in review, or by another developer far down the line, it will be explicitly clear that the comment was not intended for the current value.

This lowers the odds that a comment will get out of sync, especially useful in configuration files.

For more context head to Henrik’s blog, The Pug Automatic.

When I set up a new Mac, there are a few things that make it immediately feel “off” to me. These are the small System Preferences tweaks I make that my muscle memory relies on.

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Around the end of January, I decided to take a break from Twitter for an undetermined amount of time. Twitter was my main source of distraction, and I wanted to find out how much it affects my productivity.

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RoyalSloth reviews the three most common patterns to model interconnected state in a user interface.

• Connect the boxes: create the user avatar component and pass its instance to the inventory table component
• Lift the state up: move the internal state of the user avatar component and the state of the inventory table into a separate box/class
• Introduce a message bus: connect the inventory table and the user avatar component to the shared pipe that is used for distributing events in the application

Connect the boxes and lift the state up seem to be the most common choices for React apps; respectively prop drilling and context or single state trees (like Redux).

There’s no silver bullet to UI complexity, all methods have their caveats.

Read the full article on blog.royalsloth.eu.

I rediscovered jq the other day, a little command line tool to format, read, and transform JSON from the command line.

Jq falls into one of my favorite categories of tools: the “simple and do one thing good” category—the Unix philosophy at its finest.

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There are two bike stalls near my apartment. One is right in front of the door, the other around the corner. The one in front of the door is closest, so when I can, I store my bike there. However, most of the time that stall is full, and I need to go around the corner instead.

That’s fine. Until a next morning–when I’m still in a daze because I’m not a morning person–I take the walk around the corner, only to realise my bike was actually in front of the door. The day before was one of those lucky days I could store my bike in front of the door.

I quit using the front stall. The less choices I have to make, the more room I have for important things.

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Type inference is the ability to derive types from other pieces of code. TypeScript’s type inference is very powerful, even a minimal amount of typing adds a lot of assertions.

Just because you don’t need to add types, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t. This is how I decide when or when not to explicitly add types in TypeScript.

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Google went down today. Downtime at this scale doesn’t happen often, but when it rains, it pours. Google going down doesn’t only affect Google products, it also affect products connected to Google. App that require authentication with your Google account weren’t available, unless you were already logged in.

Coïncidentally, I came across a compelling article about local-first software. From a SaaS point of view, before the internet all we had local-first.

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Masonry layout support has been added to the CSS grid specification! 🎉

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Today, my colleague Freek asked for help embedding the webview of an email campaign in an iframe. He needed it in an iframe because embedding the HTML directly caused layout issues because the website’s CSS clashed with it.

After setting up the iframe, we needed to find a way to dynamically resize it based on its contents to avoid double scrollbars on the page. While possible, it required some icky scripting.

I took a step back. The problem at hand was that the CSS needed to be scoped somehow. While iframes were the only solution for a long time, these days we have the shadow DOM.

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