All posts by arnorhs

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  1. 2025

    1. Why are coding agents all going to the terminal?

      Sat, Oct 11, 2025

      I've noticed that these cli tools are really starting to become popular and judging from the effort put into their respective offerings by the model vendors, it seems to be what they are all betting on now. Even OpenAI released yet another variation of Codex, this time as a terminal based one. But I think the whole thing is wrong...

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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. Sensei DB

      Sat, Feb 18, 2012

      LinkedIn is perhaps not known for their development efforts in the open source community. But to my surprise, they have released an open source data store, dubbed "Sensei DB" which I find really in...

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    3. 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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    4. 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.

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  1. 2011

    1. A bad habit: Getting all the domains!

      Sat, Dec 31, 2011

      I have this horrible habit, where when I have an idea, I usually start by ordering a domain. And when I'm brainstorming, I might come up with around 30 ideas for domain names of a particular idea, which I narrow down to about 3-5. But horribly, I can't decide which one is the best (some people tell me it's because I'm a "libra"), so I end up buying all of them.

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    2. Responsive Grid Framework written in Stylus for Node.js

      Fri, Dec 30, 2011

      I've been hooked on Node.js for the last 2-3 months. I've been doing some small projects for fun in Express, and at first I used the SASS complier that ships with Express by default. That framework is pretty limited and TJ Holowaychuk pointed me towards Stylus, a much better sass complier for Node.js. I tweeted something about Stylus a couple of days ago which resulted in a fellow countryman, named Jokull Solberg (www.solberg.is), showing me a responsive grid framework he made in Stylus.

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    3. Nobody Likes Annoying Interfaces

      Mon, Dec 26, 2011

      I came upon this blog post by Seth Hoenig titled "Open letter to sites with annoying interfaces" yesterday. In the article he talkes about how some web sites and/or apps hide user interface actions until a later state. The post is a little bit funny and there might be a little bit of truth to it, but mostly it's inaccurate. The examples he covers are gmail's edit-contact page and the button used to edit a project's description on github. I'd like to talk a little bit about those and then give another perspective on hiding UI elements.

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