Intros are hard

Infinite Jest is my white whale. I've tried to read it so many times but I always get stuck. I don't know what it is, loving the book on principle but being humbled by its reality. Relevant to us, though, is it's huge number of footnotes. It's a key feature of the book, where the content of the footnotes sometimes take us the audience on a journey far away from the context of the page that it is pretending to help explain. Indeed, some of the footnotes have their own footnotes…

Years ago, back when I was in undergrad, I wanted to write a simple command line application. This application needed to have persistent data, and for that I would need some sort of database. The specifics of that application aren't important, just know I wanted the database to:

1. Start up when the program started up and shut down when the program shut down
2. Startup should be as fast as possible, shutdown could take however long…

I just added in the ability to render videos in my blog, and in so doing came across a question I hadn't considered before: how do I reserve space for a video that loads after the page does? Also, are videos loaded after page load, or what's the deal there?

Turns out: yes! You can reserve space for a video. In my case…

I'm sure fjall-rs isn't the first tech blog to implement a dynamic reading progress bar, but it's the first the caught my eye. Implementing it was trivially easy, though there are some browser pitfalls to be aware of.

I'm sure fjall-rs isn't the first tech blog to implement a dynamic reading progress bar, but it's the first the caught my eye. Implementing it was trivially easy, though there are some browser pitfalls to be aware of.

Zola is wonderful. It builds quickly, it's extremely configurable, but it is (by design) not well suited for interactive elements or complex JavaScript. I hadn't thought I wanted that until I saw some on Amos's site. He ended up using iframes to manage that integration, which is a perfectly acceptable solution. But it did make me wonder: can we accomplish the same result without all of that nasty ugly HTML? Can we just write some clean JS and call it a day?

Let's find out…

Backstory

I have a groups of friends from college that have a Secret Santa event every year. Even after we all moved apart we've kept it up, jumping to Zoom to unwrap our gifts and guess who was our gifter. One of my most favorite traditions, a delight tempered only by the daunting task of logistics. You see, there are some constraints

The Motivation

Svelte is like Rust for me in that I had heard good things for years before I even gave it a try.

Svelte is like Rust for me in that I loved it immediately.

It's really very simple to write in, the basic idea is engaging, and after trying it I wanted so badly for it to succeed. For context I have professional experience with vanilla JavaScript, React, and Angular. After transitioning a small app from Angular to Svelte, here were my takeaways…