I participated in my first pixel art jam! It was a Game Boy themed one. It was a lot of fun to work with such a limited palette. The theme was Three, and I went with three player ships from SpaceDeck X. I was happy to see how well my sprites translate into the Game Boy's original colors. Once I fini...

I love vertical tabs. I used Tree Style Tab for years, then switched to Sidebery and recently to Firefox's native vertical tabs. I like them, but I was annoyed by the pinned tabs appearance. By default they are collapsed with only their favicon visible: Luckily, there is a way to change that by addi...

I love vertical tabs. I used Tree Style Tab for years, then switched to Sidebery and recently to Firefox's native vertical tabs. I like them, but I was annoyed how pinned tabs looked. By default they are collapsed, side by side, with only their favicon visible: Luckily, there is a way to change that...

I've been developing SpaceDeck X since December last year. It started as me playing with a random framework I found fun, and it grew so much that I'm now working towards releasing it on Steam. I kept a devlog on Itch, but I feel like it is time to bring it to my own website. Especially considering t...

I want your coins! I'm making a game. It is called SpaceDeck X and you can try it online. But thanks to Amsterdam Indie Arcade, it will be available on a physical arcade cabinet at Blast Galaxy. It will be released on the 14th of June with a small release party and hi-score tournament. If you are in...

If you've ever used Web Workers (or any other event-based communication), you probably noticed that this kind of code can be hard to read and reason about. You also have to implement some kind of identifier for each message to recognize which worker response corresponds to which request. To simplify...

After almost two years (life and other projects happened), I finally plotted something new. I resurrected the Moon project, cleaned it up and published it online. Using a technical pen allowed me to add more detail to the image. It reminded me why I love pen plotting so much, and I hope to plot more...

This is an interactive article. To fully experience it, you'll need to turn JavaScript on. I recently made the Space Invader Generator for Creative Coding Amsterdam code challenge. I made it for fun of course... and galactic domination too! You can see how it looks below and in this post I'll show y...

Before we start, here is a demo of the counter (you can also check it out on CodePen): 12345678910-+ This idea started with a space invaders generator I recently made. If you look at the randomize button, you'll notice the number on the dice changes from five to three when you hover over it. A frien...

This is a simple origami frog that jumps when you press on it. I was taught to make it by my parents when I was really young, so it holds a very dear place in my heart. There are other versions on the internet, but I think this one jumps better. It is actually simpler than the ones on the internet (...

SVGs support non-scaling strokes using the vector-effect attribute, which we can even use to draw non-scaling rectangles and circles. For example, in graphs and charts, text can become too small or too large, so it would be really nice to make it non-scaling. But unfortunately, there is no native so...

On my current project, I'm making a Progressive Web App (PWA) and I was really annoyed that the status bar on iOS was completely transparentAlthough the option is called black-translucent. When the content scrolls behind it, it blends with the status bar elements, and it doesn't look great. I couldn...

Let me show you how I created a CSS-only image glitch effect. I was working on the robot poet and wanted my robotic bard to glitch - because it felt fitting given the quality of poetry it generates. Here's the final result: The effect involves quite a bit of HTML and CSS but no JavaScript. I did use...

This is a simple formatting trick I use to make regular expressions more readable. The secret? Break them into multiple lines. To achieve this, format the regex as an array of strings and then concatenate the array into a single regex string. Example # Compare this example, written in a single line:...

While I was writing this post, I wanted to create an image comparison component. I made one with just a few lines of JavaScript, but I didn't include it in the post. Here is the finished slider, with images from the book Letters from Sarajevo. If you want to play with the code, you can find it on Co...

I love 3D printing. It feels like magic - we are able to design and create physical things in a matter of hours, in our homes. I understand the underlying technology, but it still blows my mind when I think about it. It makes me a bit sad that more people aren't fascinated by it. Let's see what my l...

If you are interested in how I over-engineered the process of making a tiny book for my wife, using AI, a pen plotter, a 3D printer, and a lot of time, you are in the right place. The book is titled The Tiny Book of Great JoysMala Knjiga Velikih Radosti in Serbian, and here is how it turned out: My ...

A lot of us as developers have hi-DPI screens, and we can easily forget to test the websites we build on low-DPI screens. One common issue I noticed is that thin font weights can be hard to read on low-DPI screens. Since there are fewer pixels to render details, fine lines can appear blurry due to a...

I've seen this challenge on Herman's blog. I liked it, so I decided to do my own version, even though I'm not using the bear blog. For the same reason, I slightly adapted the original questions. Why did you make the blog in the first place? # Since I first got online, I've wanted a personal website ...

I just released @stanko/dual-range-input - a native dual-range input. Here is how it looks with the default styles: The "native" part is somewhat open for discussion. I call it native because the library uses two native HTML range inputs. This means that all of the native interactions and accessibil...

When an HTML element becomes too narrow, its content starts to wrap into multiple lines. This is intended behavior and works well in many cases. However, for short text, it doesn't look great when the last word or icon drops to the next line, becoming an orphan. For example, you might see something ...

I want to share some really nice open-source applications I use on a daily basis. I did a similar post about six years ago, so I felt there is a need for an updated one. I focused on the apps that I feel are really convenient but less known. All of the applications listed are free and open source. F...

If you encountered a case where you wanted to run multiple commands in parallel, the usual suggestion is to use the shell's & operator to send commands to the background. This approach kind of works, but it has its quirks. I often ended up with a process hanging in the background, multiple outputs b...

HTML inert is a relatively new property, but it is supported in all major browsers since April this year. When you set inert on an element, the browser will ignore all user events on it, including tabbing into elements. It will also hide it from screen readers. I like to think of it as a "reversed f...

It is incredibly hard to take a good photo of these. Colors have metallic reflection which I wasn’t able to capture, but it is very prominent in person. They are plotted using five different color markers. I framed them separately and plan to take a better photo once they are on the wall. Code is av...

What if I told you that we can make a timer without using setTimeout, setInterval or requestAnimationFrame? JavaScript is still necessary, but we can create the timer just by toggling some CSS classes. While I was working on an autoplay feature for a carousel, I thought to myself - CSS animations ar...

I started drawing these little houses a while ago, but never finished the project. Meanwhile, I decided to participate in Plot Party postcard exchange. So, I came back to my houses and used them to generate little towns as postcards. At the moment, they are on their way to five different countries, ...

I recently learned about the pseudo CSS class :placeholder-shown. Obviously, it is a class that is added only when input placeholder is shown. But what that also means is that the input is empty: /* Input is empty */ input:placeholder-shown By negating it with :not() we can detect if the input has v...

Recently, a colleague asked me if there is a way to customize an input caret using CSS. I knew you could change the color of it, but it got me thinking if we could completely replace it. The problem seemed interesting to solve. But before we jump into the implementation, allow me to show you what I ...