Hey there 👋
After the last few weeks with some unplanned events, I spent most of this week recovering from the unproductivity of the last and finishing off some last client work before christmas. Also, I made some progress on a little PHP script to generate SVG charts, which turned out much more difficult to refactor than I initially expected, but is coming together nicely.
Apart from that, our family is getting ready for christmas. We already brought in and decorated our christmas tree from the balcony, and I’m looking forward to some time with family and then a few quiet days up in the mountains.
Here’s some of the things I’ve read this week:
Frontend Development
📱 Lighthouse Simulated Throttling
This article goes into great details of how lighthouse simulates throttling. I always thought that the requests are actually throttled, but it makes complete sense to run the tests as fast as possible and then simulate the results from there.
How does Lighthouse simulated throttling work?
📝 About Removing Comments
What should be commented and what shouldn’t? This is a question that comes up regularly. I agree with Jason, who argues that a comment should add some meaning. Why you did something instead of what a block of code does. Also, comments ≠ documentation, which is the docblock above a function. Of course, as with everything, it depends and sometimes it can be hard to draw the line.
🛤 git rebase vs merge
I work with git every day of the week, and couldn’t imagine touching any code without it, anymore. But I never really went much further than a pretty basic branching strategy. We usually use branches like main and dev to keep the code that runs on production and staging apart and develop new stuff in feature-branches. But to get changes back into dev, I only ever used git merge. This article explains what git rebase is and in which cases they can make sense. It’s part of a series of posts about git, which covers everything from branching strategies to merge conflicts to more advanced topics.
CSS Tricks – Rebase vs. Merge: Integrating Changes in Git
✨ Welcome Wonderful Weirdos of the Web
Lynn Fisher (as every year) rebuilt their website. It’s always fun to see the creative experiments Lynn comes up with. Try resizing it (should work best in Firefox or Edge).
SEO
🔗 Do Links Still Matter for Rankings
Patrick Stox of ahrefs ran an interesting experiment to see whether backlinks are still relevant for your ranking. To test this, they disavowed three popular articles from their blog for a month to see the impact it had on their ranking. Long story short: backlinks do still have an impact, but not always in the ways one would expect.
ahrefs – Do Links Still Matter for Ranking
Other / Random
🧠 A search engine for your mind
Remy Sharp shares his thoughts on why he writes on his own blog. I really like the idea of your blog as a search engine for your own mind, instead of necessarily publishing for others. Also, the goal he set for himself to publish two posts a month and how setting “easy goals” helps to get some writing done resonated very much with me, as it’s pretty much the same reason I started to post those reading lists regularly.
Remy Sharp – Why I write and why I won’t
🎨 Autonomous Generative Art by Rich Tabor
Rich Tabor, well known for the work he’s done with CoBlocks and the Block Editor (among other things), created a simple but beautiful page using WordPress’ full site editing, and very much liked the experience. The site posts generative artworks – created with p5.js – autonomously.
Autonomously created generative art by Rich Tabor
🐙 Ok, that’s it for this week. Have a nice weekend!