25 May 2026
I now have a better understanding of clip-path. My struggle mentioned last
week was due to my ignorance of what is called the winding
rule.
The fill-rule property configures this algorithm and can be set when using
the
path
function: clip-path: path(evenodd, 'M20 20 h50 ...');. Using the evenodd
value on the drawing I was working on would have made my life easier, but
that’s not the default value.
Another thing I’ve found handy and wanted to add to this followup is the use of the developer tools when tweaking the different gradient values to draw such a thing. Using the mouse scroll, I’ve found it easier and faster than hitting save from my code editor, even with live reload on.
21 May 2026
Joao shared interesting results of a bug analysis to the team recently. That revealed flaws in the handling of time in one of our softwares.
Oddly enough, I’ve had a tab left to be read around the traps of time handling for quite a while on my browser. I’ve read it, that’s of course another rabbit hole.
Our bug met at least the wrong assumption number one:
- There are always 24 hours in a day.
🔗 Falsehoods programmers believe about time
That led to another article on the same website where I’ve found this comforting:
When it comes to Web apps, there are two areas that seem to cause more pain than any other: people’s names and the time. These elements are both common, essential to the correct functioning of a system, and shockingly difficult to get right.
01 May 2026
A piece that hits a chord and I’m definitely not the only one. It’s been shared a lot on my feed.
So well articulated, I feel with the author. This technology is pushing out of the industry bright people. The spread of fear and doubt is just heartbreaking.
The whole system is broken; AI alone didn’t break it, but it is widening the cracks. I guess what I’m trying to say is I wish none of us had to live like this. I would like to imagine a future that does not look like this.
20 Apr 2026
For 6 months, I’ve revived this website. I have since then posted something on every Monday and I’m quite happy with that. There’s something empowering with consistency.
This note is published by a cron job, it’s a first! We are in Italy this week and I wanted neither my publishing streak to break nor my laptop to come along. So having this cron job is cool, that kind of frees brain space to prepare upcoming posts without thinking much about the publishing part of things. I simply set the date in the front matter of the content and at the time of the cron job’s execution it publishes all the content up to that date and time.
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.
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.
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.
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:
- Ctrl-F5 toggles VoiceOver
- Ctrl-Opt A reads the entires webpage
02 Feb 2026
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.