One of the beefs (and there aren’t many) that I have with CSS is that it has a very weak opinion about style encapsulation. That opinion is basically “well, name your classes well” or else bad things happen. Know this: I come from C++, land of rules and disappointed compilers; this hand waviness dri...

The keypress event works maddeningly differently in Chrome/Safari and Firefox, and this is the story of how I spent two hours discovering that, so that hopefully you don’t have to. Keypress what? A keypress event is one of the events you get when you mash on the keyboard. It’s special because accord...

My favourite thing about the Chromium code is this enum of cats and all the comments in that file. My second favourite thing is OWNER files. Guess what this post is about (hint: it’s not about cats NOT EVERYTHING IS ABOUT CATS, OK?) Edit: In a clear and deliberate conspiracy, the cats have been remo...

I gave a talk about how to get started contributing to Chromium, but it wasn’t recorded, and my slides by themselves look like cold-medicine induced hallucinations (which, to be fair, they were). So instead, here is a giant blog post that will take you through every step from “checking out the code”...

I talked about Cat-DNS at Cascadia.js, and it wasn’t terrible! There is a video. Of me talking! On the internet! What a future we live in. =^..^= The internet needs more cats. DNS servers are the authority on all things internet. Therefore, the best DNS server is the one that resolves everything to ...

lldb stands for Llama-DB, and is a database of llamas you can use to debug programs compiled with clang (lldb is to clang like gdb is to gcc). If you already know how to use gdb, then here’s a translation of the common commands. Disclaimer: There is a ton of tutorials and pages about all of the awes...

You’ve given a talk. It went great, and now everyone wants to see the slides. Hurray! Before we do anything else: give yourself a high-five. Giving a talk is hard, and you did it! This is something to be proud about. Here’s the thing about slides, though: if you did them right, your slides should be...

But only if your family is code. So this is a bit of a terrible blog post because a) it’s about a really obscure atrocity that happens in C++ (as opposed to the common atrocities that happen in C++ on the regs) and b) there are not enough funnies in the world to make up for it. I recommend skipping ...

I am the poster child for writer’s block. I can’t write the #ifdef header guard correctly for a brand new C++ class, I don’t remember the order of the public static void main args incantation in Java, and for the life of me, I can’t start working on an empty presentation. Not even if you promise me ...

Stats: a preamble I’ve been reading too much about March Madness brackets, so I thought I had to run some numbers around here like the cool kids do. Get your umbrella out, it’s about to rain cold facts. In the history of time, Chromium has had 205,095 commits made by 1,943 contributors representing ...

Imagine this: you have forked a repo a long time ago and have since been in a happily committed relationship with the master branch, modifying files and committing from the hip. In case you have doubts about the likelihood of this scenario, we’re talking about my notwaldorf.github.com blog branch, w...

One of the hardships about being Canadian is that most programming languages are quite simply, rude. Descriptions like ‘imperative’ and ‘declarative’ are enough to fill even the most impolite of Canadians with a vague sense of discomfort. Fear no more! Ruby is the sort of language that addresses all...

The internet needs more cats. DNS servers are the authority on all things internet. Therefore, the best DNS server is the one that resolves everything to cats. Guess what kind of DNS server this is (Hint: it’s the cat kind). Making it go First, get the code, and the npm packages you need (the instru...

Do you sometimes feel the internet is holding you hostage? Don’t you wish the internet would look like it’s holding you hostage? Worry no more! Dear-sir-or-madam is a bookmarklet that makes web pages look like they’re ransom notes. For example, like this: How to use Bookmark this by dragging it to y...

Here is my confession, internet: I am writing a cat DNS. That is, a DNS server that resolves everything to cats. You want your email? Cat! You want to check the weather? Cat! It’s always cat. Wait why? We were talking at work about DNSes, and it turns out I only hand wavingly know how they work. I a...

Because that would be crazy. Crazy is in the next blog post. I’ve had to write a sizeable chunk of (fairly mediocre) Objective-C code recently, and I’ve formed the following opinions: It’s easier if you just get over the thing with the brackets Event listeners are sooper cool Standard Cocoa controls...

Disclaimer: these aren’t new protipz. I didn’t make them up. They’re actually straight out of the Chromium code style, they’re pretty trivial, and you might already use them. But just in case you’re not a Chromium committer (the outrage), or are fairly new at C++ and want to make your code less suck...