Community Feed

Your story Log in to post
J

A teaspoon of neutron star material would weigh about six billion tonnes on Earth.

The star has squeezed a mass larger than the sun into something the size of Eldoret.

A

A password field that blocks pasting is actively making things worse. It stops password managers and it stops nobody else.

H

Underrated skill: writing the message that goes with the bug report. "It is broken" costs somebody an hour. "It 500s when the title has an apostrophe" costs them four minutes.

M

The best code review question is not "is this right". It is "what happens when this gets something it did not expect".

D

Worship and work both get easier when you stop performing them for whoever might be watching.

E

The best hour of my week is the one where I close everything and read code I did not write. No goal, no ticket.

O

If you can describe your project in one sentence that a non-technical friend understands, you are further along than most funded startups.

E

Kusoma documentation ni kama kuuliza njia. Inachukua dakika mbili, inakuokoa saa mbili.

O

Wanasema usilale na shida. Mimi nalala na bug. Asubuhi inakuwa imejisuluhisha ama imeleta marafiki.

J

The best thing about building for the web is that you can fix it after. The worst thing about building for the web is that everyone knows you can fix it after.

K

Dark mode is not inverting the colours. Pure white on pure black is harder to read than either, and your shadows all disappear. Soften both ends.

Y

Gratitude is not pretending things are fine. It is noticing what is working while you fix what is not.

L

A password field that blocks paste is a password field that guarantees weak passwords. People use the manager or they use the dog's name.

J

Accessibility is not charity. Captions help in a noisy matatu. Big tap targets help with one hand holding shopping. Contrast helps in the sun. You are building for yourself on a bad day.

B

Eldoret has more printing shops per street than anywhere I have been, and almost none of them are findable online. Somebody is going to build that directory and do very well.

S

Who else keeps a graveyard folder of projects they abandoned? Mine has eleven. Three of them were good ideas I quit two weeks too early.

J

Star Rating

A star rating that works on hover and on click, drawn with one SVG path reused five times.

The clearing on mouseleave matters: without it the stars stay wherever your cursor last was and nobody trusts the value. ...

Run
O

Long one about failing.

My first business lasted eleven months. Printing and branding, 2022. We were good at the work and terrible at being paid for it, which turns out to be the entire job....

E

Design opinion that costs me friends: most sites do not need an animation on scroll. They need the text to be bigger.

A

Every API you depend on will be down one day. Decide now what your page does on that day, because deciding later means deciding in front of a customer.

J

Nilikuwa nafikiria niko busy. Nikaangalia screen time report. Sikuwa busy, nilikuwa tu naskiza TikTok.

S

Bamboo can grow close to a metre in a day. Some species. You can nearly watch it happen.

J

What is the oldest piece of code you still have running somewhere? Mine is a PHP contact form from 2021 that I am slightly afraid to open.

E

What I wish someone had told me earlier: you do not need to finish the tutorial. Take the one idea you came for and go build something with it. The rest of the video is for somebody else.

J

Drag To Order

A sortable list using the browser's own drag and drop. Pick an item up and drop it where you want it.

The placeholder is the dragged element itself with a class on it, so nothing is cloned and nothing gets out of step. ...

Run
J

The honest version of a side project timeline:

Week one, electric. Week two, the hard part. Week three, silence. Week six, you open it again and it is closer to done than you remembered....

Post image
O

Every framework you learn teaches you the framework. Every bug you chase to the bottom teaches you the machine. Chase more bugs.

Y

Rate limiting is not an advanced topic. It is the difference between a login form and a free password guessing service. Five tries, then slow down.

Y

If a stranger cannot work out what your project does from the first screen, the problem is not marketing.

M

An hour offline, on purpose, with something that has no notifications in it.

I come back to the keyboard sharper every single time and I still forget to do it for weeks on end.

Post image
E

The single best thing you can do for a slow page is not a faster server. It is sending less. Fewer requests, smaller images, less JavaScript.

N

Saturn is less dense than water. If you had an ocean big enough it would float, leaving a ring.

J

Ice is slippery because the pressure and friction melt a microscopically thin film of water under whatever is sliding on it. You skate on water, not ice.

S

Your first language does not matter nearly as much as finishing something in it.

B

Serving an image at 3000 pixels wide into a 400 pixel slot is the single most common performance mistake I see, and the easiest to fix.

M

Long one, about money.

My first paid project, I quoted 8,000 bob for something that took me three weeks. I was so happy to be paid at all that I did not do the maths until afterwards....

M ✓

A lightning bolt heats the air around it to about 30,000 degrees. That is five times the surface of the sun, for a few millionths of a second. The thunder is the air slamming back.