Valentin Jacquemin

10 Apr 2026

Polished and well structured walkthrough in this article on building a movie collection in HTML and CSS.

I like the conclusion:

I’m really happy with the result – not just the final page, but how well I understand it. CSS can be tricky to reason about, and writing this step-by-step guide has solidified my mental model.

That’s exactly the kind of benefits I experience after having completed the CSS for JS Developers course from Josh I’ve written about lately.

🔗 The Good, the Bad, and the Gutters

26 Mar 2026

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.

19 Mar 2026

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

02 Mar 2026

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:

02 Feb 2026

Last summer while my father and I were extracting honey at the apiary about a mile southeast of Thacher School, Ojai, California, we noticed a golden eagle teaching its young one to fly. It was about ten o'clock. The mother started from the nest in the crags, and roughly handling the young one, she allowed him to drop, I should say, about ninety feet, then she would swoop down under him, wings spread, and he would alight on her back. She would soar to the top of the range with him and repeat the process. One time she waited perhaps fifteen minutes between flights. I should say the farthest she let him fall was 150 feet. My father and I watched this, spellbound, for over an hour. I do not know whether the young one gained confidence by this method or not. A few days later father and I rode to the cliff and out on Overhanging Rock. The eagle's nest was empty.
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.

05 Jan 2026

Update 🎈 my PR got merged and is availabe in chroma >= v2.22.0, hugo v0.155.0 has been patched. I can remove my local fix.

Code snippets on my blog were sometimes rendered awkwardly, one random line looking bigger.

I use hugo which uses chroma for code highlights. Browsing the open issues quickly revealed that another hugo user was facing this.

I prepared a bug report and submitted it to the webkit bugzilla.

In a short time, I was told that this rendering was due to how text adjusting works, a mobile only feature.

Both MDN and the Apple Documentation describe how to control that adjusting. What I don’t know though, is in what circumstances that algorithm kicks in exactly and why on some code snippet lines that algorithm would render the text bigger and sometimes not.

Anyways, I could quickly fix that on my blog and a coming release of chroma will include a fix too. Here’s my pull request for that.

I don’t think I could mention any CSS property that applies to mobile devices only, that’s the first one I see.

15 Dec 2025

Meet sal a tiny tool I’ve created early this year to fetch my own Strava activities. I’ve used it to daily generate the footer of runboyrun.ch. But I’ll go more into details about that in a coming article.

Github's card of the project sal

12 Oct 2025

TIL: a bash tip I discovered today only, C-x C-e invokes an editor on the current command line.

10 Oct 2025

At 12'37" Zoe Si quotes out of a Skillshare Course some words that made me stop to write them down:

It’s okay to have imperfect work out in the world (but not sloppy!)

– from: Opus Cartooning Presentation

01 Nov 2024

"Don't you miss the days when the web really was the world's greatest decentralized network? Before everything got locked down into a handful of walled gardens? So do we." – https://activitypub.rocks/