I skipped week 5 because all I did in the panna cotta was watch 3 seasons of “how to get away with murder”. It’s a terrible show and I’m not ashamed of it. What is up with that star codex thing? I can’t believe there was a cult of assholes in tech I didn’t know about. I’m obviously not surprised the...

Tahoe (where we currently live during this pannie-d) got a ton of snow this week, so I’ve been in winter mode. Went skiing on Friday, went snowshoeing on Sunday. My calves are on fire. Skiing is pretty safe; everyone is wearing masks, they’ve closed all the lodges, and tbh nobody should be within 6 ...

Monday was off which ruined any routine I had formed. I barely got used to waking up on Mondays to go to work and then bam, 2 weeks in, a Monday off. I had dreams all week about working part time, probably because my brain is clinging desperately to this hope of not having to ever wake up on Mondays...

Still into soups: I made a bomb cream of broccoli. I also bought a new vegan broth base to fuck with because buying the cartons of broth is like buying bottled water aka: bad and wasteful. My dog’s skin is turning grey. I know this sounds funny but it’s like, a thing. There could be a number of reas...

I’ve been thinking for a while about setting this up, and this week seems as good as any. Both Alice and Frances have weekly updates that are a joy to read. Jenn has a live laugh blog. Maybe this is the year of long form tweets? I haven’t touched my site in like 6+ months so when I tried to run jeky...

My one policy about blogging is “write the blog post you wanted to find in the search results”. I spent an inordinate amount of time yesterday trying to get typedoc to only show the docs for the files I’m actually exporting in my library, and didn’t find anything on the internet to help me, so here ...

Back in the day when I worked on Polymer I got used to relying on a bunch of useful CSS classes that at the time we called iron-flex-layout. They were there partly because flexbox was a sadness on IE and you needed to say everything 3 times to maybe get it right twice, and add some very special flex...

img.plot { max-height: 400px !important; } My job nowadays involves a lot of music and JavaScript. You know what musicians really care about? Paychecks (support your local musicians, go to concerts, don’t steal music from indie musicians). But also: keeping time. Keeping time in JavaScript is kind o...

One of the first things you stumble on when you start using TensorFlow.js is that sometimes you need your data as a Tensor, and sometimes you need it as a JavaScript number. Maybe it’s for logging it, maybe it’s for displaying it somewhere during training, maybe it’s because you don’t trust the robo...

Inktober is a project where artists make an ink drawing every day for the whole month of October. This year I did an inktober but ignored all the rules, and made Internet Stuff™️ instead. That experiment lives here, but I want to tell you why I did it before you go ahead and judge it. I think that i...

Magenta.js is a JavaScript library that helps you generate art and music on the web. It’s also the team that I work on now! One of the things that I do whenever I join a new team is learn a bunch of things, and then make a bunch of tutorials that past Monica would’ve loved to stumble over. This is o...

iframe { height: 640px; width: 100%; margin: 0 auto; border: 5px solid #E0F7FA; border-radius: 3px; } Machine Learning (ML) is the dope new thing that everyone’s talking about, because it’s really good at learning from data so that it can predict similar things in the future. Doing ML by hand is pre...

iframe { height: 800px; width: 100%; margin: 0 auto; border: 5px solid #E0F7FA; border-radius: 3px; } When you have a float CSS property on a box (with a value different than none), this box must be laid out according to the float positioning algorithm. Loosely, it says: if the box has float:left, t...

img.otter { max-height: 220px !important; } iframe.otter { height: 800px; width: 100%; margin: 0 auto; border: 5px solid #E0F7FA; border-radius: 3px; } Before I wrote the JavaScripts, I got a master’s in AI (almost a decade ago 🙀), and wrote a thesis on a weird and new area in Reinforcement Learning...

So testing, right? We should do it. The thing is, testing is hard, and good testing is reaaaaaaally hard, and tbh I’m pretty bad at testing. So I end up not testing my apps, and then I feel guilty about it, but I’ll stop you now: you can’t run guilt on Travis. If this sounds familiar, then this blog...

You can tell I hate writing year in reviews because this one is really, really late. I tend to hate bragging, and I definitely hate introspective and, in particular, I always think I am underperforming (and that’s fine). However, that’s usually not true, and writing a year in review forces me to see...

Updated May 18, 2020 (get it? :: ? I made a funny) Shadow DOM is a spec that gives you DOM and style encapsulation. This is great for reusable web components, as it reduces the ability of these components’ styles getting accidentally stomped over (the old “I have a class called “button” and you have...

There’s this thing I hate about the modern web which is that sites are rarely one giant html file filled with goodies. You can’t just “run a site” locally. You need an npm or a gulp step or a docker if you’re lucky. And probably a local server, but not the one you have installed. Which, I mean, make...

Shadow DOM is a fairly recent-ish spec that gives you DOM tree encapsulation – it’s one of the superhero lions in the Voltron of specs called “Web Components”. Web Components let you create reusable, self-contained components in JavaScript; the Shadow DOM bit makes sure that the CSS and markup you b...

.content img:not(.emoji) { border: 1px solid #efefef; margin: 24px 0; } The Meownica Web App Workflow™ goes like this: Write bad code until the file is too long Refactor that code into some web components Repeat steps 1-2 until done Realize you forgot to do the PWA dance, so your app is scoring 45 o...

img.otter { max-height: 220px !important; } iframe.otter { height: 250px; width: 100%; margin: 0 auto; border: 5px solid #E0F7FA; border-radius: 3px; } iframe.otter-two { width: 100%; height: 320px; border: 5px solid #E0F7FA; border-radius: 3px; padding: 0px 10px; } I work on a library called Polyme...

.highlight .err { color: inherit; background-color: inherit; } .highlight .s1, .highlight .s { color: #336699; background: inherit; } pre { margin-bottom: 30px; } pre, code { background: #f4f6f8; } p > code, li > code { font-weight: bold; } pre { border-bottom: solid 1px #CFD8DC; } This is a cheat s...

This year was pretty shit, so I wasn’t very keen on doing one of these posts. So many of my favourite musicians died, so many of my favourite countries made mistakes, so many of my favourite people are worried and sad, and I am worried and sad with them. But this year was not the worst year we’ve ev...

.highlight .err { color: inherit; background-color: inherit; } .highlight .s1, .highlight .s { color: #336699; background: inherit; } pre { margin-bottom: 30px; } pre, code { background: #f4f6f8; } p > code, li > code { font-weight: bold; } pre { border-bottom: solid 1px #CFD8DC; } This is a cheat s...

phantom underlines. isn't this amaaaaaazing. i love waiting for 8 seconds and seeing this. look at it. srsly. looooookat it. I spent a week traveling around Taiwan, on my awesome free roaming 2G data plan, and friends, we need to talk about your web fonts. Also cats. They really love cats there. Any...

You know the scenes in Friends when Ross starts talking about dinosaurs and he’s SUPER excited but everyone else is losing the will to live? This is basically that, only instead of dinosaurs, it’s emoji, and unlike Ross, I have never successfully befriended a monkey. Last month, my coworker casually...

You know that scene in The Rock where Nicolas Cage is super dreamy (like he is) and decides his life mission is to look for VX poison gas and save San Francisco (like he would)? That’s baaaasically me, if by “look for VX poison gas” you mean “nerd out on emoji”, and by “save San Francisco” you mean ...

Here’s the thing: I have this sweet pair of headphones that I got from a friend a gazillion years ago. I’ve always liked them because they were free and they look super quirky but it turns out they were a limited edition done for Ed Banger Records, which is the label that produces Justice and Mr. Oi...

I’ve never really done a year in review. One day, I’d like to open source my goals, but since I’m still a chicken, this is a baby step towards that. Plus, this is one of the first years I’m really proud of, and things that you’re proud of tend to live on the Internet, for posterity. Here’s what my G...

Some people build furniture. Some people knit. Some people have hobbies that don’t involve HTML specs from the 90s. I am not those people. So here’s a story about <input>, how it got to be the jerk that it is, and why it needs to die in a fire. The early years 1995 was a good year. Friends, ER, Xena...