Qubyte Codes

Below is a procedural snowman. I'm using a little code to create Christmas cards again this year, and as before I wanted each to be unique! If you received a card from me, you may see something like ?seed=1234567890 in the URL bar. That will be the random seed which generated your snowflake (and it's yours to keep). To see a random snowflake, remove everything after the question mark and hit enter. Refresh the page to see a fresh random snowman…

I went to ffconf 2022 a couple of weeks ago, and two of the talks in particular resonated with me... (more actually, but these felt actionable)…

The :has() CSS pseudo-class opens up all sorts of possibilities. I wanted to see if it could simplify how I handle the ruby text (annotations above or below text to help with reading) in my Japanese notes. It works (in Safari and Chrome at least, and hopefully Firefox soon)…

Below is a procedural snowflake. I'm using a little code to create Christmas cards this year, and I wanted each to be unique! If you received a card from me, you may see something like ?seed=1234567890 in the URL bar. That will be the random seed which generated your snowflake (and it's yours to keep). To see a random snowflake, remove everything after the question mark and hit enter. Refresh the page to see a fresh random snowflake…

A generative patchwork of pastel colours. The colours begin with a randomly picked colour in LCH. Other colours are hue rotations in LCH space so that they're perceptually nice together. Feature detection is used to render using LCH colours when the browser supports them (Safari only at the time of writing), or to pick a close colour in RGB space when LCH is not supported (the code for this is based on code in d3-color). Refreshing generates a new patchwork…

I had some issues getting the v3 AWS SDK for JavaScript to communicate with localstack S3, but I found a solution! With the V2 JS SDK, the configuration object for the S3 client looks like…

This site uses a static site generator to build plain HTML pages. Since there's no database to add, update, or delete pages from, determining when to dispatch mentions can be challenging! Here's how I use a Netlify build plugin and an atom feed to manage it…

I use marked to do the markdown rendering for this blog. A recent feature makes it possible to create custom block types with a little hacking. In this post I show you how…

Based on the last experiment, this one uses hexagonal grids rather than triangular ones. The way the SVG is constructed isn't pretty (a mish-mash of paths) but it gets the job done. I've given the two grids red and blue lines and a black background to make the moiré pattern stand out…

This experiment was inspired by field of twistronics, the study of the intersesting properties of misaligned graphene sheets. The misalignment produces a moiré pattern which echoes the underlying structure. I'm too lazy to do hexagonal grids in an afternoon of tinkering so I used triangular grids instead…

An experiment into generating SVG circles which don't overlap. It was timeboxed to an hour, so it's a little rough around the edges (but I think that adds to its charm)…

It's been a while since my last maths heavy article. I enjoy writing these but struggle to find the time to write many…

The graphic below is generated randomly and rendered as an SVG. Occasionally it glitches, but that's all part of the fun! It was inspired by a graphic seen in Charlotte Dann's ffconf 2019 talk at about 6:25 in. See the next post for a description of the maths I used to do this…

The day was packed with interesting and diverse talks, and there's just too much to talk about in a single post. It's definitely worth searching around for other blog posts to see other's takes on the day…

In the past I used atd to schedule the publication of my blog posts. When I moved to Netlify I lost the ability to schedule posts, and didn't think about it until a recent conversation on twitter with Remy Sharp. Remy asked how to schedule blog posts for static sites and it got me thinking…

I made the source code for this site public! You can find it here. I've written at length about how I've built this, and having the code makes it easier to point to particular lines. I hope it'll inspire you to do the same…

I've made a couple of small contributions to Node.js in the past. These were quite esoteric, and unlikely to be discovered or noticed by most developers. Recently I made a contribution which might be noticed though…

In celebration of the Battenberg theme, here is an animated Battenberg! It's made of two SVG paths composed of lines and arcs. These are calculated using three angles and a bucket load of trigonometry (I'm not as good as I used to be at trig). A requestAnimationFrame loop updates these angles and the paths. Click on start to begin the animation. You can tweak the angular speeds using the three number inputs…

I was recently tripped over by a subtlety in how service worker fetch events and fetch works in conjunction with content security policy (CSP). This happened while adding an image to the about page. This post is the result of a conversation I had with Jake Archibald on twitter (with thanks for helping me to understand what was going on)…

In a recent post I wrote that I had integrated webmentions, and some of that has since changed. Time for an update…

I’ve noticed when helping people to learn JS is that I’m happy to let them learn without any tools. In hindsight this is very strange. I wouldn’t dream of programming like this! I make mistakes all the time, and tools help me to catch them early. Tools also help me to streamline repetitive tasks…

SPOILER ALERT: If you're doing the 2017 Advent of Code, you may not want to read onward…

SPOILER ALERT: If you're doing the advent of code this year, you may not want to read onward. This post does not give any solutions away, but does contain information about how I approached a part of the first challenge…

After some years of browser vendors working out what web components should look like, they're almost ready for the prime time. The part which I find most intriguing (custom elements) has finally stabilised. With custom elements, you can make new HTML elements which have custom behaviour which you define using JavaScript. In this post I'll demonstrate a custom element for fuzzy counting…

I've recently been attempting to code a clone of the classic game asteroids using canvas in the browser. Since this is me, I've been distracted by all sorts of programming detours…

To many experienced Node developers, the title of this post will seem intuitively obvious. Nevertheless, it's useful to see what unexpected behaviour can occur when the two are used together. Here's an example…

When I first put together the CSS for this blog I avoided a fixed header since the header felt a bit large, and I didn't want to take up too much space which could be used for content…

ES2015 bought a Set constructor to JavaScript. It's pretty barebones, consisting of a constructor which creates objects with a few methods for adding, removing, checking if something is a member, and iterating over the set. Instances have the essential quality of a set; an item is a member of the set or not a member. Unlike an array, an item cannot be an element more than once. In other words you can avoid using arrays and doing a lot of indexOf checking…

Just before Christmas I gave a presentation on the upcoming async-await JavaScript language feature, its basis in promises and generators, and finally a tiny server framework (like Express but a lot leaner and more modular) which can make use of async functions as middleware (since an async function is indistinguishable from a normal function which returns a promise). I'll introduce Toisu! in a blog post soon, but until then here's the presentation…

I use instanceof a lot in JavaScript. It's very handy when writing unit tests. It's easier to do an instanceof check than it is to exhaustively probe an object…

This is a short companion to an earlier article I wrote on using WeakMap for private data with JS classes. While private data belongs to instances, private methods can be shared between instances of a class (just like its regular methods). An implementation using ES2015 modules looks like…

Private data has always been awkward in JavaScript. It's particularly difficult when it comes to constructors, and with ES2015 recently published, classes too. Let's say we have an example class, exported by an ES2015 module…