Hi, I’m Francesco, a Frontend Developer from Munich, Germany. This is my little corner of the web. Thanks for stopping by! 👋
This is why the octopus is such an interesting case – it can be seen as a form of “conscious exotica”, or an example of consciousness very unlike our own, as Halina writes in an essay on the subject. Octopuses are different enough from us that a lot of our assumptions about them have to be questioned – and even our assumptions about ourselves.
Fascinating creatues. Let’s hope plans for the world’s first commerical octopus farm in Spain won’t go ahead. 🤞
A fairy tail about email programs and their default archive folders.
Test mentioning another note.
Thoughts on a 10+ year old side project of mine that just went offline.
Test to see if Mastodon integration works with brid.gy and my website.
Mark Kaufman about a “successful, deceptive PR campaign”. Eye-opening.
British Petroleum, the second largest non-state owned oil company in the world, with 18,700 gas and service stations worldwide, hired the public relations professionals Ogilvy & Mather to promote the slant that climate change is not the fault of an oil giant, but that of individuals.
At the beginning of the year, I decided to volunteer as a senior citizen assistant.
Ivan Demchenko on how to think about Design Systems.
During my time at Personio, I participated in the process of re-thinking the existing Design System. I noticed that dissecting the system into layers helped us answer some tricky questions. So, bear with me.
Sara Soueidan on how she manages her daily time.
I divide my day into “activity blocks” that are then distributed to occupy different time slots across the day.
I’m vaccinated. First shot. Biontech.
I’m having trouble keeping up with my feed reader count of unread articles. Somehow again and again I delay opening up the damn thing and just start reading.
Alex Russell puts into words what the popular phrase “Safari is the new IE6” really means. Insightful.
This is not an exhaustive list, and each entry can block entire classes of applications from credibly being possible on the web. The real world impact is challenging to estimate. Weighing up the deadweight losses in start-ups not attempted and higher prices for small businesses who must pay to develop native apps seems a promising angle for economists to investigate.
Via Daring Fireball: I’m trying out Hello Weather on my iPhone now. I especially like their privacy policy:
We don’t want to know anything about you unless you contact us yourself.
I made a few adjustments to the feeds on my website.
One of the reasons I struggle with writing notes and articles for my blog on a regular basis is the fact that I don’t know who I’m writing for. (That, and an unhealthy mix of impostor syndrome.)
Who reads my content? For which audience do or should I write? Who even cares about the things I think about? Do my ramblings make any iota of meaningful difference in the world?
This thinking isn’t helpful. It’s the opposite. I can feel how it blocks my mind.
That’s why I now try to think of it as I think of good and relevant comments in code: I try to picture myself a few months into the future and document things for my future self. I make implicit knowledge explicit, for myself, in order to be able to remember. I materialize emotions and thoughts I have every day through words I put up on my blog.
The audience is me. Anyone else interested is welcome to join me in reading.
For years now my go-to pattern for CSS hyphenation was always something like this:
p {
/* activate hyphenation */
hyphens: auto;
/* add some sensible settings (http://clagnut.com/blog/2395/) */
hyphenate-limit-chars: 6 3 3;
hyphenate-limit-last: always;
hyphenate-limit-lines: 2;
hyphenate-limit-zone: 8%;
}
@media screen and (min-width: 768px) {
p {
/* deactivate hyphenation for larger viewports */
hyphens: none;
}
}
Today at work we encountered a strange bug in combination with the none keyword. A floated element caused the text paragraphs besides it to create weird and random text breaks. Toggling the none keyword on those text paragraphs caused the bug to disappear.
Upon further inspection I checked out the docs for the hyphens property. For the none value the following is stated:
Words are not broken at line breaks, even if characters inside the words suggest line break points. Lines will only wrap at whitespace.
This seems rather aggressive. What I actually want is what the manual keyword offers (which is also the default value of hyphens):
Words are broken for line-wrapping only where characters inside the word suggest line break opportunities. […]
Adding manual to the text paragraphs fixed the bug. Unfortunately I don’t know what exactly caused the bug, but I guess in certain layout combinations the aggressive nature of none can cause browsers to create weird text flows.
Again what learned, as we like to say in Germany!
I just came across a job offer for a “Frontend Developer”. In it is explicitly stated that you should not apply if you’ve never touched AWS or Kubernetes. I mean: what the actual f.
In April 2021 I will run the Hamburg marathon. It will be my second marathon after the Munich marathon in October 2018, which I ran in a net time of 3 hours and 44 minutes. My goal for 2021 is a net time of 3 hours and 30 minutes, which means I will run an average pace of just under five minutes per kilometer.
So, it’s roughly 36 weeks until the marathon. I’ve been going over my running schedule in my head. According to Herbert Steffny (his website is pretty dope, check it out, I will wait here for you) in order to run a marathon in 3 hours and 30 minutes one should be able to run a distance of 10 kilometers in 45 minutes and a half-marathon in 1 hour and 40 minutes. To bridge the time until the marathon training I thought it would be a good idea to train for and run both the 10k and the 21k distance in the mentioned duration.
This is my schedule:
Since July 10th we have a new four-legged family member, a dog to be precise. Dingo is his name. He is a rescue dog from Romania and his favourite hobbies are: sleeping and snoring.
We got Dingo from the Tierschutzbrücke München. It’s an association which has a close relationship to the animal shelter Casa Cainelui in the city of Timisoara in western Romania since 2001. Dogs are being rescued from local killing shelters (yep, those exist), nursed up and brought to Germany and other countries. In addition, castration campaigns are carried out regularly to get to the root of the problem of the uncontrolled growing number of stray dogs in Romania.
The process of getting Dingo via the Tierschutzbrücke was serious and professional. We were assigned a nice lady who is responsible for the placement of the dogs to Munich. She looked at our living situation and asked us honestly about our motives and experiences with dogs. You can see from the association and the staff that the main concern is animal welfare.
After her “go” we went dog shopping and surrendered to the marketing and products of the dog industry. We didn’t leave anything out: tick tongs, two different lines (a short line and a drag line), three different brushes (underfur brush, normal brush and massage brush), treats and food in different variations (from veggie to meat, from organic to conventional), toys, dog bed, pharmacy bag, dog shampoo, ... After the first big shopping tour I could understand and extrapolate what a gigantic industry this must be. In fact: 4.325 billion Euro turnover, that is the house number of the German pet industry in 2019. Fun fact: there are 10.1 million dogs living in German households. And: “Dog snacks have been growing dynamically for years” is a sentence my brain has never had to process before.
One week after the shopping tour, Dingo arrived. He’s a super nice guy, who always wants to cuddle a lot and whom we took to our hearts very quickly.
The daily rhythm is determined by him since then. Our day is now divided as follows:
What we have already noticed is that, in addition to the time and money involved, normal everyday life has also changed considerably when looking at the usual social activities. Just drive into town quickly for a visit to a restaurant? Not possible, Dingo isn’t used to a restaurant situation and public transport. Spontaneous beer garden session with friends? Dingo on a leash in combination with possibly other dogs nearby still holds too much potential for aggression and too much stress for everyone involved.
We now simply try to approach his education in a calm and step-by-step manner: good leashing, learning the basic commands, learning new situations (driving the bus, going to a restaurant, etc.) and dog training. Along the way Dingo will learn a lot of new things, but we will certainly learn a lot more.
Jay Hoffman teamed up with CSS-Tricks to deliver an ongoing series about the history of the web.
The first chapter is titled “Birth” and speaks about how the WWW came to be. It’s a captivating read. I especially like the quote
Vague, but exciting…
This is a comment by Mike Sendall, who was Berners-Lee’s boss at the time. He wrote it as a note on the first formal proposal for the WWW titled “Information Management, a Proposal” by Berners-Lee from 1989.
Today, as you know, the web is
[…] used by billions of people and runs through everything we do. It is among the most remarkable technological achievements of the 20th century.
Looking forward to this series.