Valentin Jacquemin

Hello, I'm Valentin, a programmer. I live with Nicole my wife in a village close to Bern, Switzerland.

This is my personal website where I post all my articles notes photos and reviews. I like to write about my running adventures too, it's in french over runboyrun.ch .

30 Mar 26

All 10 modules completed

I’ve more than 800 lines of personal notes as I completed this fantastic course. Very comprehensive and so useful for an oldie like me. Heck, the table layout is something I’ve used myself:

In the old days, table layouts were used for just about everything. Nowadays, Flexbox and Grid are better solutions in most situations. We won’t be covering table layouts in this course.

Ouch… When I first learned to build websites, I had frameset elements in my markup, that gives you a bit of an idea what kind of old I am. No worries though, I’ve not been stuck to that old days, in the meantime I’ve enjoyed following the new features in CSS. But for example, Flexbox and Grid were 2 layouts that I did not take the time to study seriously. I think initially when I did find out that Josh would publish such a course, that was my main incentive, to get up to date on those new additions to the CSS world.

The content of this course is split into 10 modules, each one is filled with videos, interactive explanations and exercises. At the end of each module, a workshop helps to internalize all the concepts tackled within that particular module. I plan to redo all of them now that I’ve finished the course.

I particularly appreciated the solution videos of the workshops. Josh is very good at sharing how he would do particular things, what he pays attention to, even how he would approach designers around specific challenges. All this return of experience is extremly valuable. On top of that, I just find it enjoyable to follow, he has a nice way to communicate.

If you are used to his blog posts, you might have notice how Josh gives a particular attention to the details. For example, here’s an extract of his latest post, Sneaky Header Blocker Trick:

This is a fairly subtle thing, and I suspect most readers have never even noticed it. But there’s something about it which just feels so satisfying to me. It’s one of my favourite little bits of polish on this blog.

Just feels so satisfying to me. Yes, you can feel that he just enjoys what he’s doing and that he wants to produce something of quality. You have to appreciate that as it’s definitely not a given these days. That is present in this course too, it’s comprehensive yet approachable. The content is thorough but split in nicely sized chunks.

I leveled up my CSS skills, if you are coming from a Javascript developer perspective and you are eager to improve yours, this course will be a joy to complete. Go get it, it’s available under https://courses.joshwcomeau.com/css-for-js.
26 Mar 26

Terrific job of composition. I recommend to read this, not on a too wide window so to enjoy a fuller version of the illustrations. The Plains of Heaven by John Martin made me pause, such a beautiful piece 🤩

Bespoke, endlessly tweaked, eternally redesigned, built-in-public, surprising UI and delightful UX. The personal website is a staunch undying answer to everything the corporate and industrial web has taken from us.

Thorough–and so nice looking–stand around the question why having your own website.

🔗 A website to destroy all websites.
23 Mar 26
19 Mar 26

A moving introspective from Ana Rodrigues about the seemingly unstoppable nocive effects of AI.

They (and so am I) are disgusted by the lack of ethics, environmental consequences, the horrible uses of AI on the daily, horrible companies, horrible people. And we are looking around and everyone else is eating it up and enjoying it. This is the tipping point. And I get that.

🔗 Overthinking: AI wasn’t the first to break my heart
16 Mar 26

Met those cute small girls, peacefully grazing. Had the idea to go back to this place, it’s years I’ve been there on a run. Part of nature reserve, we’ve had a lovely walk.

7.25583888888889, 46.9790166666667

09 Mar 26

As getting the data from Strava and transforming it is now solved, what’s left is styling the spakline and making it part of an automated publishing process.

By using sal and jq as explained in the last 2 articles, I get a list of points. I can simply visualize the those points, as a sparkline, like so:

<svg>
   <polyline transform="translate(0,30), scale(1, -1)"
      points="0,5 3,8 6,6 9,6 12,7 15,5 18,3 21,11 24,2 27,11 30,8 33,11 36,12 39,13 42,7 45,15 48,5 51,14 54,16 57,21 60,13 63,21 66,21 69,24 72,11 75,6 78,8 81,8 84,5 87,15 90,5 93,4 96,3 99,4 102,2 105,3 108,3 111,4 114,2 117,2 120,4 123,4 126,3 129,3 132,6 135,4 138,8 141,6 144,8 147,7 150,6 153,6"
      fill="transparent"
      stroke="#aaa">
   </polyline>
</svg>

I simplified a tiny bit but the important part is those points. These are what the jq transformation outputs.

02 Mar 26
I have a few decorative SVGs on this website here. How does it fare using a screen reader?

I thought I would quickly try after reading Put aria-hidden=true on decorative SVGs.

On my MacBook, still running Sequoia (for as long as possible), none of LibreWolf, Safari, Chrome or Edge announced the SVG from the header on the homepage of jacquemin.ch.

I’m still going to fix that and add aria-hidden=true. I realized that some image tags would benefit from an alt description too. The usual and too easy mistake.

2 shortcuts I’ve learned along the way:
- Ctrl-F5 toggles VoiceOver
- Ctrl-Opt A reads the entires webpage
23 Feb 26
16 Feb 26
With sal it’s now possible to fetch on demand all my personal Strava activities from the past year. The next step is to transform this raw dataset into a sparkline. But before diving into this, let’s see concretly how to install and start using sal.

Setup walkthrough

sal’s README explains it all, let’s go through this step by step.
1. On Strava, create an API Application.
2. Fetch sal from the GitHub repository’s release section or build it on your machine.
09 Feb 26

Setup walkthrough