Monday, 14. July 2025 Week 29

Classic Web

Classic Web – Screenshots of classic websites and blogs from Dot-Com, Web 2.0 and the 2010s.

Classic Web is a fun account to follow on Mastodon. Curator Richard MacManus posts half a dozen or so screenshots per day of, well, classic websites from the late 1990s and 2000s. Makes me feel old and young at the same time.

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Saturday, 12. July 2025 Week 28
Thursday, 10. July 2025 Week 28

New Style

The slides from the Agentic Coding presentation inspired my inner frontend developer and I created a new style for the blog. ✨

Things are still a bit rough, not everything is fitting nicely yet.
General functionality should work, but please let me know if you encounter something that is broken.

I researched various CSS tricks to achieve the design change without changing any HTML.
After recreating the PDF style in CSS, I double-checked the origin of the presentation layout.
And turns out that it is based on the unnamed community theme created by Elio Struyf for Slidev. 😃

Monday, 7. July 2025 Week 28

Purple Links

In spirit of the More Purple Links, Please article, I've added some purple color to the visited link style on the blog.
To blend in with the existing text color, I've used the color-mix() CSS function:

:root {
	--body-text-color: #454545;
	--body-visited-link-color: color-mix(in srgb, var(--body-text-color), #518 75%);
}
a:visited {
	color: var(--body-visited-link-color);
	text-decoration-color: var(--body-visited-link-color);
}
Sunday, 6. July 2025 Week 27

Syntax highlighting with the new CSS Custom Highlight API

Inspired by the post from David Bushell, I spent some time to add syntax highlighting to the blog.
It has been an item on my todolist for a long time.
I've always hesitated as I wanted to avoid having server-side rendering that generates a big amount of HTML tags just to add some color.
But now with the approach of using the new CSS Custom Highlight API, this is no longer an issue, as no additional HTML tags are injected.

To make things easy I built my solution on top of the custom <syntax-highlight> element.
This makes it very smooth to add syntax highlighting in a post.
For example the following is the source code for the helloworld.c post:

<pre><syntax-highlight language="c">void main(){puts("Hello World.\n");}</syntax-highlight></pre>

The custom element uses Prism to tokenize the text, which brings support for over 250 different languagues.
This is great, as I've accumulated quite a collection of different code snippets over the years.
There is some Terraform, Python, Perl, PHP, Bash, CSS, Javascript, HTML, Nginx and plenty of others 😎

Friday, 4. July 2025 Week 27

Agentic Coding

In the Agentic Coding article, Simon Willson talks about the Agentic Coding: The Future of Software Development with Agents YouTube talk from Armin Ronacher.

I picked up a bunch of useful tips from this video:

  • Armin runs Claude Code with the --dangerously-skip-permissions option, and says this unlocks a huge amount of productivity. I haven't been brave enough to do this yet but I'm going to start using that option while running in a Docker container to ensure nothing too bad can happen.
  • When your agentic coding tool can run commands in a terminal you can mostly avoid MCP - instead of adding a new MCP tool, write a script or add a Makefile command and tell the agent to use that instead. The only MCP Armin uses is the Playwright one.
  • Combined logs are a really good idea: have everything log to the same place and give the agent an easy tool to read the most recent N log lines.
  • While running Claude Code, use Gemini CLI to run sub-agents, to perform additional tasks without using up Claude Code's own context
  • Designing additional tools that provide very clear errors, so the agents can recover when something goes wrong.
  • Thanks to Playwright, Armin has Claude Code perform all sorts of automated operations via a signed in browser instance as well. "Claude can debug your CI... it can sign into a browser, click around, debug..." - he also has it use the gh GitHub CLI tool to interact with things like GitHub Actions workflows.

I would add to this list a link to the Agentic Coding Recommendations blog post of Armin.

Agentic Coding: The Future of Software Development with Agents

Local copy of the slides.

Monday, 30. June 2025 Week 27
Saturday, 28. June 2025 Week 26
Wednesday, 25. June 2025 Week 26

rachelbythebay's rollover calculator

I've long had a list of "magic numbers" which show up in a bunch of places, and even made a post about it back in November of 2020. You ever wonder about certain permutations, like 497 days, or 19.6 years, or 5184 hours, and what they actually mean?

I've been doing that stuff by hand in a calculator and finally decided to just do it in Javascript and put it online for anyone to try.

So, here's my latest waste of CPU cycles:

My rollover calculator.

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