Hey friends,

What do you call the following JS pattern?

['hip', 'hip']

...

A hip hip array!

(OK, that was pretty bad...)

Thinking Too Hard 🤔

A few weeks ago, I shared a post about protecting your shed — or maintaining the practice of rolling side projects.

I think it's an important practice, not just for skill development, but also for attitude development. Do you have a place where you can fail and it's okay? Where you can try something out, and if it doesn't work, it's no big deal?

One of the prerequisites of enabling the open mindset is space — the ability to seal yourself off and noodle on something. Life can make it hard to create that space, as we have responsibilities and things with painful consequences for failure. We often cannot seal ourselves off in some hyperbolic chamber, so what does this space look like?

For me, it's a hot dumpster fire of a folder called prototype and a list of weird ideas. Most of these ideas will never see the light of day, but I can go into that folder in between projects, while I'm waiting for a 30-minute build to finish, or in a trapped space between meetings, and it's that place where I can fail safely.

Do you have a space like that?

Interesting Web Bits 🍜

Web Stuff

• Harry shows us that font-family doesn't fallback the way you think it does.
• Kilian Valkhof gives us 7 principles for self-taught developers, but really are good concepts for everyone!
• A fascinating look at a tricky problem solved with anchor positioning.
• Adam Argyle helps increase my feelings of job security with his reasoning on why AI stinks at the front-end.
• TypeScript 7 beta has been announced, which switches to a Go compiler. 10x faster, they say.
• Not really a revelation, but yes not all Github stars are real.
• Though I struggle to find real-world use cases other than intensive visual displays, you can't deny the speed of WASM and WebGPU.

Other Stuff

• For when you need an ABSOLUTELY TINY FONT. (Impressively readable for only 5x5 pixels for each letter
• A theory on the the fact that if America's so rich, how'd it get so sad?

👽 Weird, 📺 Watch, and 🎮 Play

• 🎮 Tiao is sorta like Go, but also sorta like Checkers?.
• 🎮 Thinky Games pays homage to a game I've never heard of?
• Listen to the Flying Robot Orchestra. 🤖🥁
• Watch Maple and Filbert build a dam. 🦫