The blog of arnorhs - the legendary no-stack developer
When a company finds a product market fit - usually what you need to do is to double down on it - you push the gas pedal to the absolute bottom and you do everything to grow your company and the product as fast as possible. In the era of agentic coding, this is no longer the case.
The most valueble code in my repo, is the code I didn't write.
I've noticed that these cli tools are really starting to become popular and judging from the effort put into their respective offerings by the model vendors, it seems to be what they are all betting on now. Even OpenAI released yet another variation of Codex, this time as a terminal based one. But I think the whole thing is wrong...
Back in 2017 the world of traditional websites was still dominated by monolithic traditional CMSes - The likes of WordPress, Drupal, Umbraco, WooCommerce, etc - This is the story of how gatsby.js became the love of my life and ultimately how it ended breaking my heart.
I've been using ChatGPT a bunch. I generated a job posting with it, made it write some basic descriptions, suggesting code as well. It is genuinely useful. I'm sure most people have tried having fun convos with it involving self-awareness, and it's fun to see how it responds.
I feel like we never really settled debate of whether or not React was a library or a framework - hotly debated topic 10 years ago. Did it matter? Does it matter now? Here are my thoughts
The past couple of years have been pretty intense. In this post I go over the highlights of the last year or so and what Im excited about in 2023
What excites me most coming into 2022. Solid.js, Astro, Next.js, Remix, Netlify, Cloudflare workers, trpc, magic.link, planetscale, my npm packages and more.
Recently, a new static site generator (SSG) arrived on the block called Astro. Lets talk a bit about SSGs. What they're good for, what they're not and why I think Astro is a bit of a game changer.
Open for orders
We’re in the middle of a huge revolution. We all know that. It’s been said a hundred times. Phones and tablets are taking over. People all over the world, especially in countries that are considered less wealthy, are adopting mobile platforms at a much greater rate than desktop computers. Meanwhile developers continue to be disproportionally excited about web development tools.
I got into an ironic conversation the other day over the usefulness of having multiple languages in the world. I am of the opinion that languages are redundant and they only exist for being the most usable mechanism we have invented for communication so far.
As I tweaked some last bits of code and added a few comments here and there, I realized I was getting excited. This project I had been working on for the last few days was almost done. I was happy about the code I had written and started prepping for a code review. My co-workers had been asking how it's going and wanted to give me feedback, so I pushed and deployed my changes to a staging server.…
By now, it's no secret that making mobile products has a unique set of design challenges. All companies and individuals making mobile products struggle with this. Finding the right balance between power and ease of use on a 3" - 4" screen is hard. It really all boils down to the natural rule of features: **More features => harder to understand, more useful.** **Fewer features => easier to…
I was reminded once again today how impenetrable the wall of things to do in life is. We had just hit yet another big milestone at work and as soon as we hit it, I started thinking about the next steps. And after that the next steps. Just in the time it took for us to reach this milestone, a list of things to fix and improve before the next milestone was building up. And that list is long enough…
I read somewhere that a bitwise left shift was a faster method of removing a fraction of a floating point number in Javascript than using parseInt or Math.floor(). I wasn't surprised that parseInt was slow, since I think it parses the number as a string, but the left shift being faster than Math.floor() was a bit more puzzling to me. So I decided to make a JSPerf test to compare those three…
LinkedIn is perhaps not known for their development efforts in the open source community. But to my surprise, they have released an open source data store, dubbed "Sensei DB" which I find really in...
Recently I won a Kindle Fire in a Hacker Buddy give away, sponsored by Tokbox. (Hacker Buddy is a site that connects hackers to other hackers with the goal of helping each other out, you should check it out) I wanted to write up a summary of my experience using the device. I'm not going to bore anybody with specs, information or detail. Enough information can be found online, eg. on the Amazon…
I got into a conversation at work today about whether or not Node.js might become as popular and as ubiquitous as Ruby on Rails has become, or if it's just a fad. At first I was like "It's going to become the most used framework evar!" But then I thought about it a bit more and realized that this might not be the case.
I have this horrible habit, where when I have an idea, I usually start by ordering a domain. And when I'm brainstorming, I might come up with around 30 ideas for domain names of a particular idea, which I narrow down to about 3-5. But horribly, I can't decide which one is the best (some people tell me it's because I'm a "libra"), so I end up buying all of them.
I've been hooked on Node.js for the last 2-3 months. I've been doing some small projects for fun in Express, and at first I used the SASS complier that ships with Express by default. That framework is pretty limited and TJ Holowaychuk pointed me towards Stylus, a much better sass complier for Node.js. I tweeted something about Stylus a couple of days ago which resulted in a fellow countryman,…
I came upon this blog post by Seth Hoenig titled "Open letter to sites with annoying interfaces" yesterday. In the article he talkes about how some web sites and/or apps hide user interface actions until a later state. The post is a little bit funny and there might be a little bit of truth to it, but mostly it's inaccurate. The examples he covers are gmail's edit-contact page and the button used…
We use git as our versioning tool at work and I've gradually been learning a few tricks on how to speed up my development time and time spent managing my repo. When jumping between branches, continuing your work from where you stopped last time, etc., you very often open the same files as you were editing in a previous commit. This may not be a problem if you use something like Command-T for vim…
I've been dealing with some unfortunate scroll performance issues at work lately, and to aid me in that task I've been using a handy CSS stress test bookmarklet made by Andy Edinborough. It works by iterating through all your classes and measuring the performance improvement you get from dropping them - thus helping you find out which classes are making your page scroll speed slow. It's handy but…
Felix Geisendörfer, one of the node.js contributers has released what can only be dubbed as the ultimate guide to writing node.js applications. He's launched a site called nodeguide.com which has a beginner's guide, a guide for how to convince your boss you should be using node (kind of funny, but sadly there are people who need this) and a style guide for standardization of indentation, naming,…
A couple of months ago, Facebook started rolling out it's Timeline feature. For those who don't know, it's a new form of a Facebook profile, which displays a user's profile in a very different way, based on their entire life's history. It's a very dramatic thing and is a very impressive endeavor. I signed up the very minute it was announced and have had it as my default profile, though it hasn't…
A new Hacker News-style social news site has been launched focused exclusively around Javascript. It's a nice source for some interesting JS libraries and articles. If you are passionate about Javascript, you should check it out: https://www.echojs.com/
Yesterday, Mozilla announced the availability of Firefox 10 beta, named Aurora. The version introduces a bunch of new HTML5 features and some of them sound very interesting.
When I was working at a small web development shop in Iceland, we developed a lot of applications. Some of those applications were used by what you would consider the "older generation" and/or "normal users". Working at a small company like that you need to wear many hats, so usually what would happen is that I would end up teaching the end users to use most of the applications I developed. I…
Usually when designers are designing both print and website layouts, banner ads and other user interfaces, they need to have some text copy to work with. Most of the time, the client or the company they are working for doesn't have text copy prepared, so designers usually place so called "Lorem Ipsum" content into their designs. Lorem Ipsum has been used for many decades as placeholder content in…
Two fonts I like.
My mom had a birthday gathering the other day (happy 52 mom). It was pretty uneventful as you would expect, but as sometimes happens these days, a conversation about Facebook got started. Most techies you meet would say that they hate listening to normal people talk about anything technical - especially the older generation. I usually find these kinds of conversations rather enjoyable, especially…
These two links are pretty good for helpful motivational tips, tricks and hacks. Read on.
Closures are functions that you define "on the fly" that have access to the same variables (the same [scope](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scope_\(computer_science\))) as they get defined in. You can store them as variables, pass them around between other functions, and generally get treated like a normal variable. In general they are very powerful. Read on for a deeper explanation of how they are…
I was setting up a new git repository (more on that in a later post) and I was using a wrong author, so the name was wrong on all the commits. I googled around and found this command which allow you t...
Good news. I have finally arrived in Palo Alto. I just got to my hotel and I'm getting my apartment later this week (hopefully), so you could say that I've officially moved.
This is awesome for all Vimsters out there. A guy named Michael Pohoreski seems to have had a similar problem to almost every other vim user/beginner out there. He couldn't find a good vim cheat sheet, so he made the mother of all cheat sheets. It's damn ugly, but pretty good:
I saw this post on Hacker News today and thought it might be interesting to the TextMate users out there. It's written by this person, Jack Kinsella and he goes very much in-depth into how to convert yourself from being a TextMates to a vim user. Link: [textmate-to-vim](https://www.jackkinsella.ie/2011/09/05/textmate-to-vim.html)
An [equilateral triangle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equilateral_triangle), in case you've forgotten, is a triangle composed of lines that are all of the same length. For some reason I started thinking about those kinds of triangles the other day and wanted to create one, for use in a pattern or something. I could have opted to just google for an image of one, but I wanted to draw one by hand.…
[](https://arnorhs.com/2011/09/03/palo-alto/) On a professional level, the last year and a half has been pretty interesting. I've been managing my own projects, doing freelancing work, did some traveling, even some classes at a…
As a big fan of the text editor vim. I'm also a bit of a newbie and I'm constantly seeking out some new stuff to learn. Either some key combination I didn't know, some nice nifty plugin to help out, etc. [](https://www.vimconf.org/?s=2E4) That's why I'm excited about this possible online vim conference. It hasn't…
The [Vodafone website in Iceland](https://vodafone.is/ "Visit the Vodafone website") has just undergone a redesign. It was designed by the amazing web agency [Kosmos & Kaos](https://www.kosmosogkaos.is/ "Kosmos & Kaos website"), which is also based in Iceland. I'm very grateful to have been able to partake in the project. I helped with the CSS, initial HTML and most of the Javascript interactions…
I ran into this post on HN today. It's from a guy who often gets brought in to help teams refactor old ruby on rails code. My experience with rails has been that it's pretty good at abstracting most of the crap away from your code base and gives you a nice clean structure for your code, but his argument seems to be that as soon as you start doing some spaghetti stuff, you get into trouble.
Somebody tweeted this link out today: [1960s Braun Products Hold the Secrets to Apple's Future](https://gizmodo.com/343641/1960s-braun-products-hold-the-secrets-to-apples-future). The...
Jakob Nielsen recently published this post, where he (and I guess his team) analyze why the Wall Street Journal mobile app gets such bad customer reviews. It all stems from a horrible interface where the customers are led to believe that they need to pay separately for the monthly subscription to to the mobile app, when in fact it's free for existing subscribers.
I saw this article on Hacker News today. It's very similar to a blog post I was planning to write, but never did.
Last month I went on a trip to the USA with a group of entrepreneurs from Iceland. We are/were all classmates and teachers in Klak - a kind of school for entrepreneurs - and the purpose of the trip was to visit a bunch of companies and schools out in Silicon Valley, the home of the tech industry. So how was it? well...
I found this blog the other day when trying to brush up on my vim knowledge. I'm getting tired of my editor situation (Long story, used to be a scite man, migrated to e-text editor, then to notepad plus plus, all horrible) and wanted a refresh. Anyways, I was going to start to use pathogen, which is a vim plugin that makes it a bit more easy to manage a few vim plugins (so, a "meta" plugin) when I…
If you like vim you probably know this already, but if you don't, here's how you change vim's tab size from the default 8.
I'm busy getting stuff done here in sunny California. I'm sorry that this post is written in haste - I just wanted to make one clear point to everybody interested: If you are doing any kind of development - if you are the developer, the company or whoever, there is a general rule that applies: