After reading this, I am now of the belief that software is, actually, a good thing. And that programming can be enjoyable.
Seriously, this does such a good job of capturing the feeling of MAGIC that code is capable of -- both in its process and in its output. Textbook "craft". It's hard to experience that sometimes when surrounded by dependency hell, environments, build systems, certain dynamic programming languages, and the modern web ecosystem.
This is so cool. I love this so much. I read the article on my RSS, and then immediately hopped over to HN just so I could upvote.
> Fortunately though, over the course of Bauble’s development, I had produced a comprehensive suite of test scripts with reference images that demonstrated all of the edge cases and problems that I had faced and already fixed and… No, of course not. I can’t even type that with straight fingers. There were no tests.
What RSS reader do you use, may I ask? Mine (readrops for Android) doesn't render the images. It is probably quicker to just review the XML but I'm committed to this comment now.
Nor did mine, interestingly. I'm not entirely sure why, the HTML for the first image seems to render fine on its own. It's a very long <picture> tag, seemingly optimised to return different sizes at different resolutions. It looks like something generated by a web framework. I still hand-write my <img> tags like it's 1999, so I'll leave it to the frontend wizards to explain what the problem here is.
Re my choice of reader, I host FreshRSS[0] on a home server, using the official Docker image.[1] It comes with pretty good in-built webpage change tracking too, for websites that refuse to offer RSS. I don't feel confident enough to expose it to the Internet, though I imagine you could use something like Tailscale to tunnel home securely for it.
Wow. Very impressive work and a very readable and interesting summary. You should be immensely proud.
Personally, it is reassuring to know there are still people out there capable of doing such complicated and quality work. After seeing my 1000th $19/month thin wrapper over uncredited AI, I had doubts.
This is very nice. I remember first watching Inigo Quilez videos and they are extremely impressive but this, obviously, gives a little more insight into making something work. Well done.
Seriously, this does such a good job of capturing the feeling of MAGIC that code is capable of -- both in its process and in its output. Textbook "craft". It's hard to experience that sometimes when surrounded by dependency hell, environments, build systems, certain dynamic programming languages, and the modern web ecosystem.
reply