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 .

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
02 Feb 26

source: Bulletin 167, United States National Museum, p. 302 (online)

Spellbound, for over an hour. I can imagine! I wish I can one day marvel at such a spectacle.

Setup walkthrough