A year ago, I decided to try Helix.“The joy of learning Helix (and probably other modal, terminal-based editors)”reveals more about the motivations and initial impressions. A few weeks afterplaying around with it, I adopted it as a daily driver. I love Helix, itssimplicity, the set of features it comes with, the documentation, and thecommunity behind it. Learning this tool made me a more efficient programmer, abetter typist, and, due to the underlying technologies, I learned a lot aboutLSPs, Tree-sitter, terminal emulators, and shells.On the way, I hit a few roadblocks, though. A few of these nuanced or lesspopular features can make or break your experience. So, after resisting for awhile, I made the switch to Neovim. It wasn’t love at first sight for sure. Letme share why I abandoned Helix and what my initial impressions of using Neovimare.Missing piece of HelixIt all comes down to a missing package manager. I don’t want to tell you aboutall the occasions I was looking for something a

This is probably the shortest list that I have ever shared with you. I was justtoo busy with work-related stuff, some activities aroundNN1 Dev Club #4 meetup, and my exploration of newsubjects were a bit overshadowed by the fact that I changed a code editor(again). Neovim that is now, and I truly enjoy the ride. I did not forget aboutthe music recommendation, though.Album of the monthMarc Mac came back with his Visioneers project!“Def Radio”is a record that has kept on spinning on my Technics turntable nonstop for thepast month. It is full of incredible funky beats, b-boy breaks, and mellow jazzysounds. One of those records that can play from the very beginning to the end,and your head cannot stop nodding. I need to hunt for some previous releases byVisioneers!Top picks1 dataset. 100 visualizations.How creative that is! A simple dataset represented in 100 different ways, eachof them telling a different story. This is good inspiration for diagram designin your next project. I really lik

An article about a web platform feature feels incomplete without a browser support info. The CanIUse Embed built by Ire Aderinokun is widely used amongst web bloggers. Recently, Rachel Andrew from Google announced an official web component to display the Baseline status.Both of them fetch the results from external resources at runtime. To keep my website trully static, I would prefer to pre-build results at the build time. Stefan Judis uses a custom solution that takes results from the browser-compat-data and wraps it in a beautiful section at the build stage. Chris Swithinbank took an official Google’s <baseline-status> and converted it into an Astro component to avoid client-side JavaScript.I write a ton about the web on this blog, so I finally built a solution for my static website built using Hugo. Let me share a recipe with you.Hugo shortcode to display the Baseline statusFor the sake of simplicity, I chose the Web Platform Status API as the source of data. As Mathias Bynens notic

What a month. When everyone lost hope for the new major release of the most popular Node.js framework of all time, Express v5 just dropped. Deno also released a major version bump, and Evan You founded a company that is going to build the cargo for the JavaScript ecosystem. To top it off, I have some great CSS articles for you all and, of course, as always, a music recommendation from my collection. Enjoy the read ☕Album of the monthI received this album on the 2nd of October, and that was the day I knew what to put in this paragraph at the end of the month. A collaboration between one of my favourite rappers and a producer who is also very high on my favourites list. “The Auditorium Vol. 1” by Common and Pete Rock sounds fresh, like a comeback that good rap deserves. Pete Rock is one of the most versatile producers ever, and he didn’t disappoint on this release. Almost a month after I heard the full album for the first time, I still enjoy it as much, or even more, than before. Solid r

I am a fan of Apple products, both software and hardware. I also like defaults, as you can tell by reading “My defaults 2023”. No surprise here that Safari is my default browser. I sometimes find it’s set of developer tools too limiting or hit some of the feature incompatibility, but I can live with it. Safari is fast, I like its interface, it comes built-in and has a Reading List, a feature that I cannot live without.As a programmer and blogger, I browse all random corners of the web and accumulate stuff for later all the time. It all lands in the Safari Reading List. Again, I like it as it comes built-in and it doesn’t require additional plugins or accounts. It syncs with iCloud (in theory), it is nicely integrated with both mobile and desktop operating systems, and it is pretty effortless to use.As a daily user of this feature and a good web citizen, I decided not to complain about the Reading List on Reddit, but to write a blog post about a few places where it could be improved, an

Another unscheduled, occasional dump of things I recently liked and disliked. In no particular order. Let’s go!LikedBeastie Boys - Fight For Your Right (Revisited) Full LengthMaking Apple Vision ProInsanely Great: The Apple Mac at 40Windows 10 DesktopBob James: Tiny Desk ConcertDisliked“Bug fixes and improvement” kinda release notesPeople watching videos in public transport without headphonesTight socksLondon undergroundWordPress vs. WP Engine noise

End of September! Shocking how quickly time goes. This month for me passed like a blink of an eye, probably because of a pretty intense family holiday and a crazily busy time at work. Nonetheless, I managed to come across a few interesting bits around the web, so I would like to share them with you, as I have done for the past years on every last day of the month. And as always, a little music recommendation nugget from my collection just for you. Enjoy.Album of the monthMy friend from Poland recently released a new album. “Homey Moon” by Plash is very different from anything else he has produced before. Other than the usual very bboying, drum-heavy beats, this one includes some bits of house, jungle, and tons of obscure samples. Absolutely sick production from soup to nuts!Top picksCSS @property and the New StyleThis article by Ryan Mulligan is a great explainer of the powerful @property at-rule. It is a very practical guide as it presents the power of a feature in practice to build a

As a non-native English speaker, I used to use Grammarly as a writing assistant for years. I used it as a last step just before publication to catch misspelled words and grammar issues. Other than that, it provides a lot of suggestions that I rarely care about. Shortening paragraphs, changing the tone of voice, or suggestions to avoid passive voice are not what I need. Overall, it is a helpful tool, and my English has massively improved because of it. It is crazily expensive, though. The premium subscription costs £25 a month, or £10 a month when paid for a year upfront. A pretty steep price for a dictionary on steroids.One thing that I happily pay money for is Raycast. I use this tool all the time! It is a great app launcher, window manager, unit converter, and translator. Extra power comes with plugins, but you should do your due diligence and check it out yourself. As much as I am not a great fan of adding AI features everywhere 1, the AI features integrated with Raycast are solid.W

This quick post tells the story of how I learned that dataset keys are camel-cased. Unfortunately, it is a little rant about implementations that want to provide convenience by extending the standard but make things more confusing.Baseline: Dataset is widely availableGoogle Chrome: 7, 2010.10.19 Microsoft Edge: 12, 2015.07.29 Firefox: 6, 2011.08.16 Safari: 5.1, 2011.07.20 Accessing data-* attributes via datasetHTML data-* attributes allow us to store arbitrary info on element declaration. It is also easy to retrieve these data via JavaScript dataset attribute. The dataset attribute is an object that contains all data-* values. According to the element.dataset specifications, all keys of this object are camel-cased.<div id="coolDiv" data-value="🥑" data-cool-value="🍆"></div>console.log(coolDiv.dataset.value)// 🥑console.log(coolDiv.dataset.coolValue)// 🍆Safari wants to make it easier, but…I don’t work with datasets often, so while implementing some changes on the NN1 Dev Club, I forgo...

I was an early adopter of GitHub Copilot. Initially, I was shocked at how much time I could save by delegating boilerplate code to this tool. But writing code is not the only thing I do, so how about regular writing? ChatGPT made everyone an OK writer. Quality of results aside, it is a fact that generative AI tools generally improve performance. Right?I have a few problems with it thogh. It is not fun! I spent years learning codeing and I am super proud of this skill. A few things became quicker after adopting some AI tools, but tons of fun disappeared. The joy of doing a thing is important, but the mental AI fog that occurred to me was much worse. I like the “mental AI fog” term coined by Garrit Franke on “Mental AI Fog and how to cure it”.Instead of consuming too much AI generated content (which also applies), AI Fog describes the inability to produce content without the help of AI.A few months after I started using GiHub Copilot, I started losing muscle memory for writing basic prog