All posts by arnorhs

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  1. 2023

    1. Heartbreak - Why gatsby.js failed

      Wed, Feb 1, 2023

      Back in 2017 the world of traditional websites was still dominated by monolithic traditional CMSes - The likes of WordPress, Drupal, Umbraco, WooCommerce, etc - This is the story of how gatsby.js became the love of my life and ultimately how it ended breaking my heart.

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    2. Conversation with ChatGPT on self-improvement

      Mon, Jan 30, 2023

      I've been using ChatGPT a bunch. I generated a job posting with it, made it write some basic descriptions, suggesting code as well. It is genuinely useful. I'm sure most people have tried having fun convos with it involving self-awareness, and it's fun to see how it responds.

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    3. React - Framework or a library?

      Sun, Jan 29, 2023

      I feel like we never really settled debate of whether or not React was a library or a framework - hotly debated topic 10 years ago. Did it matter? Does it matter now? Here are my thoughts

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    4. 2022 in review

      Tue, Jan 3, 2023

      The past couple of years have been pretty intense. In this post I go over the highlights of the last year or so and what Im excited about in 2023

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  1. 2021

    1. 2021 status report

      Fri, Dec 31, 2021

      What excites me most coming into 2022. Solid.js, Astro, Next.js, Remix, Netlify, Cloudflare workers, trpc, magic.link, planetscale, my npm packages and more.

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  1. 2020

  1. 2014

    1. Android deterrent

      Tue, Jan 7, 2014

      We’re in the middle of a huge revolution. We all know that. It’s been said a hundred times. Phones and tablets are taking over. People all over the world, especially in countries that are considered less wealthy, are adopting mobile platforms at a much greater rate than desktop computers. Meanwhile developers continue to be disproportionally excited about web development tools.

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  1. 2013

    1. Language

      Fri, Jul 5, 2013

      I got into an ironic conversation the other day over the usefulness of having multiple languages in the world. I am of the opinion that languages are redundant and they only exist for being the most usable mechanism we have invented for communication so far.

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    2. How to be great at building UI wireframes

      Fri, Apr 26, 2013

      As I tweaked some last bits of code and added a few comments here and there, I realized I was getting excited. This project I had been working on for the last few days was almost done. I was happy about the code I had written and started prepping for a code review. My co-workers had been asking how it's going and wanted to give me feedback, so I pushed and deployed my changes to a staging server. What immediately followed was a humbling experience. "What is this?", "Why did we decide to do it this way?", "Won't this interfere with the rest of the product?", "How about if we do X instead?", "Arnor, what the hell have you been building?"

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    3. Mobile app design: Clutter free using 1% prominence.

      Sat, Apr 13, 2013

      By now, it's no secret that making mobile products has a unique set of design challenges. All companies and individuals making mobile products struggle with this. Finding the right balance between power and ease of use on a 3" - 4" screen is hard. It really all boils down to the natural rule of features: More features => harder to understand, more useful. Fewer features => easier to understand, less useful. So if you just add more features, without applying careful thinking about the whole experience and especially the experience for new users, you'll inevitably make a complicated product.

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    4. The Unclimbable Mountain

      Thu, Mar 14, 2013

      I was reminded once again today how impenetrable the wall of things to do in life is. We had just hit yet another big milestone at work and as soon as we hit it, I started thinking about the next steps. And after that the next steps. Just in the time it took for us to reach this milestone, a list of things to fix and improve before the next milestone was building up. And that list is long enough to take 10 times the time that the original milestone took. We grow up thinking that next year will be better, or this year you will manage to finish X Running a business, or working at one, is about fires. Everything is either falling behind, failing, has always been broken or is unusable. The only tool we have is a limited fire extinguisher to dim down the biggest most obvious fire each time.

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  1. 2012

    1. Comparing the performance of Math.floor(), parseInt and a (bitwise) shift

      Wed, May 30, 2012

      I read somewhere that a bitwise left shift was a faster method of removing a fraction of a floating point number in Javascript than using parseInt or Math.floor(). I wasn't surprised that parseInt was slow, since I think it parses the number as a string, but the left shift being faster than Math.floor() was a bit more puzzling to me. So I decided to make a JSPerf test to compare those three methods. Read on for the full results

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    2. My new Kindle Fire

      Fri, Feb 10, 2012

      Recently I won a Kindle Fire in a Hacker Buddy give away, sponsored by Tokbox. (Hacker Buddy is a site that connects hackers to other hackers with the goal of helping each other out, you should check it out) I wanted to write up a summary of my experience using the device. I'm not going to bore anybody with specs, information or detail. Enough information can be found online, eg. on the Amazon Kindle store.

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    3. Is Node.js the next Ruby on Rails?

      Tue, Jan 31, 2012

      I got into a conversation at work today about whether or not Node.js might become as popular and as ubiquitous as Ruby on Rails has become, or if it's just a fad. At first I was like "It's going to become the most used framework evar!" But then I thought about it a bit more and realized that this might not be the case.

      Read on →

  1. 2011

    1. A bad habit: Getting all the domains! · Sat, Dec 31, 2011
    2. Responsive Grid Framework written in Stylus for Node.js · Fri, Dec 30, 2011
    3. Nobody Likes Annoying Interfaces · Mon, Dec 26, 2011
    4. Open all files from a git diff or git show with this handy command utility · Sun, Dec 25, 2011
    5. Arnor's Handy Bookmarklet for Measuring Page Scroll Performance · Sun, Dec 11, 2011
    6. Possibly the nicest Node.js beginner's guide (and style guide) · Sat, Dec 10, 2011
    7. Diving into Facebook's Timeline UI · Sat, Dec 3, 2011
    8. Echo JS launched · Thu, Dec 1, 2011
    9. Interesting stuff coming up in Firefox 10 (Aurora) · Sat, Nov 12, 2011
    10. Designing User Interfaces for "Normies" · Tue, Oct 25, 2011
    11. The problem with "Lorem Ipsum" and What You Can to Do Instead. · Thu, Oct 20, 2011
    12. I like these fonts · Tue, Oct 18, 2011
    13. Facebook's "Problem" · Sun, Oct 16, 2011
    14. Having problems with motivation and getting things done? These links might help · Sun, Oct 16, 2011
    15. Closures and Other Great Powers of Functions in Javascript · Fri, Oct 14, 2011
    16. A git power feature that helped me 10 mins ago · Sun, Sep 25, 2011
    17. I have arrived in Palo Alto · Tue, Sep 13, 2011
    18. Best vim Cheat Sheet in the World / Planet / Solar system · Fri, Sep 9, 2011
    19. Commands for converting from TextMate to Vim · Mon, Sep 5, 2011
    20. How to Draw an Equilateral Triangle in Photoshop CS5 (updated) · Sun, Sep 4, 2011
    21. Palo Alto · Sat, Sep 3, 2011
    22. VimConf is hopefully coming · Wed, Aug 31, 2011
    23. New Vodafone in Iceland website launched · Thu, Aug 25, 2011
    24. Interesting perspective from a refactoring rails guy · Tue, Aug 23, 2011
    25. Apple's design inspired by Dieter Rams · Wed, Jul 13, 2011
    26. Jakob Nielsen on why the WSJ app gets bad reviews · Tue, Jul 5, 2011
    27. Awesome thoughts on how programmers should think about TIME · Mon, Jul 4, 2011
    28. My trip to San Francisco, Silicon Valley, California, USA · Mon, May 30, 2011
    29. Best guide on using git sub modules is on this awesome vim blog · Sat, May 28, 2011
    30. Change vim tab size · Thu, May 26, 2011
    31. Flexibility, speed to market, performance - pick two · Mon, May 9, 2011
    32. Quick update: I'm coming to Silicon Valley, launched websites, more · Sun, Apr 24, 2011
    33. Nordic Innovation issue #2 is out · Tue, Apr 19, 2011
    34. A Super Sweet Linux-windows Development Environment Setup · Sat, Apr 16, 2011
    35. Interesting - range inputs and putting a bubble on top · Thu, Apr 14, 2011
    36. The IE team throws bricks in a glass house · Tue, Apr 12, 2011
    37. I changed my opinion after seeing this Interview with Color's CEO, Bill Nguyen · Wed, Mar 30, 2011
    38. How to do full text search in MongoDB · Sun, Mar 27, 2011
    39. Patrick McKenzie gives a talk about marketing to under served markets · Sat, Mar 26, 2011
    40. Color, the new amazing mobile app that crashes your phone within minutes · Thu, Mar 24, 2011
    41. Which Javascript Templating Engine Should You Use · Wed, Mar 23, 2011
    42. I adhere to "Programming, Motherf****r" · Wed, Mar 23, 2011
    43. On OOP when you're learning programming · Thu, Mar 17, 2011
    44. What I didn't dislike about Business Catalyst · Wed, Mar 16, 2011
    45. How to Move a Wordpress site Manually from one Location to another · Sun, Mar 13, 2011
    46. Great tip on finding transaction bottlenecks in MySQL · Thu, Mar 10, 2011
    47. Bloomberg interview with Paul Graham on "the bubble", startup valuations etc. · Wed, Mar 9, 2011
    48. Great quote from "The State of HTML5 Audio" · Wed, Mar 9, 2011
    49. SmugMug's Don MacAskill talks about their infrastructure · Tue, Mar 8, 2011
    50. Why is Node.js becoming more popular than Clojure? · Wed, Mar 2, 2011
    51. Node.js surpasses Clojure in popularity · Mon, Feb 28, 2011
    52. My life in the "Cloud" · Thu, Feb 24, 2011
    53. Delivering email with PHP · Mon, Feb 21, 2011
    54. Online Magazine Launched: Nordic Innovation · Thu, Feb 17, 2011
    55. Why a Qwiki will probably be a success · Tue, Feb 1, 2011
    56. 11 Reasons Why Business Catalyst Sucks · Wed, Jan 19, 2011
    57. Cleaning user input/output with javascript and node.js · Fri, Jan 14, 2011
  1. 2010

    1. Interesting find: Sevilla 111 Gigapixels · Mon, Dec 20, 2010
    2. ShortPHP blog moved to arnorhs.com · Sun, Dec 19, 2010
    3. Interesting find: A lot of random links · Sat, Dec 18, 2010
    4. Interesting find: Google Body Browser · Thu, Dec 16, 2010
    5. The Problem with Plans and Ideas · Thu, Nov 25, 2010
    6. Link found: Clojure Web Infrastructure · Sat, Nov 6, 2010
    7. It Doesn't Hurt to Make People Smile · Wed, Nov 3, 2010
    8. Git - removing files permanently - gitignore · Wed, Sep 29, 2010
    9. My Take on css-tricks.com's Group Design Project · Wed, Sep 29, 2010
    10. Programming Language Popularity · Mon, Aug 30, 2010
    11. $5 for unlimited backup storage? Wtf? · Sat, Aug 28, 2010
    12. Designing Great UI is like Cleaning · Fri, Aug 13, 2010
    13. Previewing fonts using Google's font directory · Fri, Jul 23, 2010
    14. Following your dreams · Fri, Jul 23, 2010
    15. Somebody needs to invent this storage device · Mon, Jul 5, 2010
    16. Last night they dug up Bobby Fischer's body · Mon, Jul 5, 2010
    17. Jason Nation - e-mail newsletters still have value · Fri, Jul 2, 2010
    18. Ad Retargeting - An Advertisment's Evil Brother · Fri, Jun 25, 2010
    19. Don't Backup your Projects · Sun, Jun 13, 2010
    20. MySQL Query Cache Resources · Sat, May 29, 2010
    21. Surprising mysql queries in Drupal · Thu, May 27, 2010
    22. Google's new Font Directory is a Disaster · Thu, May 20, 2010
    23. Bit the bullet, redid the layout · Wed, May 19, 2010
    24. 3 things I wish somebody would create · Fri, May 14, 2010
    25. Flash Will Live, HTML5 Will Take Over On-line Video · Tue, May 11, 2010
    26. To Rewrite or Not to Rewrite and The Sunk Code Dilemma · Sun, May 2, 2010
    27. Check out my weekend project: FridgeList todo list · Sun, Apr 25, 2010
    28. Defining "The Cloud" - Hint: SaaS is not Cloud! · Thu, Apr 22, 2010
    29. I just enabled @anywhere for arnorhs.com · Fri, Apr 16, 2010
    30. What Makes a Great Webcast? · Thu, Apr 15, 2010
    31. Digg killed the iFrame toolbar, hackers rejoice · Wed, Apr 7, 2010
    32. My Favorite Tech related Webcasts on Startups and Entrepreneurship · Sun, Mar 28, 2010
    33. My Pragmatic Take on SEO · Wed, Mar 24, 2010
    34. Choosing Recurring or Subscription-based Credit Card Payments · Sun, Mar 21, 2010
    35. Why Flash-based Websites Are Usually a Bad Idea · Sat, Feb 27, 2010
    36. Stats on Spam · Tue, Feb 23, 2010
    37. Where's your logic? · Sat, Feb 20, 2010
    38. Hello world · Sat, Feb 20, 2010
  1. 2009

    1. Great news people.. I had almost given up on getting any spam.... · Thu, Apr 16, 2009
    2. Probably a mistake · Tue, Jan 27, 2009
    3. "holy jizz batman fhawvfgvohWweg Submitted 26. January, 2009 @ 11:03:52" · Mon, Jan 26, 2009
    4. First post · Mon, Jan 26, 2009
    5. Basic functionality · Sun, Jan 25, 2009
    6. Tumblr blog up · Sat, Jan 24, 2009