Weeknotes 38

I learnt of the <dialog> element this week via Kevin Powell. A native modal with associated JavaScript API – very cool!

While it isn’t fully supported yet, we’re getting very close to the dialog element being in all modern browsers!

This is great, but there’s a part of me that can’t quite believe that this is only a thing that we can maybe, possibly, start using in 2022. How long have we needed modals? The Web moves both too slowly and too quickly at once.

Sebastien Auriault with a useful tip about Rails template variants. I had no idea this feature existed – I keep discovering new Rails features despite having used the framework for 10+ years at this point – and it looks useful in circumstances where you definitely need separate templates.

I believe that a team should try and communicate “in public” as much as possible because it has a lot of benefits. Information can be picked up by the team organically reducing knowledge silos. People can chip-in and help out if the someone else is not available. Etc, etc.

It’s so hard to stop myself slipping back into communicating over DMs though…

Simon Willison is constantly finding new and interesting ways to use GitHub Actions. He recently created a new tool called shot-scraper for screen scraping that uses Playwright under the hood, and has now combined that with a new GitHub repo template that makes setting up automated screen scraping easy.

His Twitter and website are well worth following.

TJ DeVries continues to release great videos on the latest and greatest in Neovim. This time 2 minutes on a brand new feature: Global Statusline. Looks pretty neat. You see a lot of Redditers moaning about people posting video-only content, many preferring written descriptions, but I find video summaries like this extremely helpful. Bravo, TJ!

Nice tip from @hauleth on making “lockfiles” such as Gemfile.lock, mix.lock, package-lock.json, and yarn.lock less of a hassle to merge by setting the merge=binary attribute against those file types in ~/.config/git/attributes.

It will force Git to treat lock file as a binary file, which mean that it will not modify the file with conflict markers while still marking file as a conflict in stage. Then you can “resolve conflicts” via mix deps.get/mix deps.update

TIL: You can reset the commit date of an existing commit using git commit --amend --date=now. If you made some work-in-progress commits over time, but you want to bring the dates up-to-date after a rebase this is useful.