2025-02-05 04:18:07
Easily one of the best parts of my atypical brain is its ability to dive deeply into subjects I find interesting. Throughout my life these subjects have been quite varied, with music, movies, art, history, and games all sucking me in at some point in my life.
With the internet it's always been quite easy for me to find stuff to read or watch about what I like. This allowed me to have a pretty in-depth knowledge about a lot of things.
Then, something changed. A change that started happening subtly but that's now pretty hard to ignore. People used to gather online in communities centered about things they liked. They'd be similarly excited about similar things, and discussing those things would usually be a joy.
Now it seems like people only go out of their way if it's to talk about things they hate. Communities centered around something remotely popular are gonna be filled with people complaining and pointing out every single flaw about it.
Why is that? I'm not sure. Maybe because people are so angry all the time? Digital drugs (a.k.a. social media) monetize your anger, so we're naturally more angry if we don't actively fight against it.
It's just something I realized and that made me stop and think about how I approach my interests now. If something brings me joy and I want to keep things that way, then it's just better to avoid online communities about that interest altogether. It just sucks that enjoying something with others is getting increasingly hard.
2025-01-31 20:00:00
Hey there! I hope your 2025 has started on a high note. What about some cool links to read during this weekend?
Henry's personal website is absolutely stunning! It has an unique design that is, above all, fun to explore. I miss exploring websites, instead of being guided through them.
Most of what Neal makes is pure gold and this is no exception. This game is no different than most of what you can find on your App Store, it’s just more honest about it…
Incredible article that not only explains the new-ish text-wrap: balance and text-wrap: pretty CSS properties in-depth, it also goes into the caveats those properties have. It's well-written, well illustrated, and interactive. What else could you want?
Ahmad once again writing the articles I wish I did. Another well-written and interactive article going in-depth on the also new-ish overflow: clip CSS property. clip has helped me implement designs more than once and it's so nice to have something that works just like I always expected overflow: hidden to work.
This month was also a bit short on links as I have been mostly focused on work rather than learning. Here's hoping I can get back to finding more good links soon! 🤞
2024-12-31 20:00:00
Happy Holidays! I have four new links to read while you recharge your batteries from dealing with end-of-year stress or recovering from overeating.
They’re either introspective or retrospective, as is the theme this time of year.
This is such a good article that resonated very deeply with me. As someone who wished could do more to help the world and as a software developer who thinks about scalability, it’s a hard realization when you get older and don’t see yourself as someone who’s made a big difference.
But turns out that caring for someone or something doesn’t scale. It can’t, otherwise it’s not care anymore.
A self-guaranteeing promise does not require you to trust anyone.
Steph Ango is the lead developer behind Obsidian, and I’ve mentioned him before on my Owning your stuff is pretty cool, actually post earlier this year. On this article he talks about how the only way to guarantee ownership of your data is if the service can never access it in the first place. Terms of service guarantees are based on trust that the company’s priorities will never change, and that trust has been broken again and again.
It's always fun to see these "State of..." surveys. Noteworthy thing being Astro completely dominating the framework numbers (except for usage, but I can totally see it becoming #1 soon).
A really well-designed post from the Chrome team showing the coolest new things that were introduced to CSS in 2024. A lot of the things in there are really cool! The sad part is that, unless you're running an up-to-date Chromium browser, you might not be able to see them in action. I initially saw this blog post on my iPhone (which only has access to Safari) and almost none of them worked.
With 2024 over and done, I want to thank you for following me along over here, and I hope you stick around for 2025.
See you next year!
2024-12-27 10:16:57
Last year, I jumped on the trend back then of posting my default apps i.e. the apps I use on a daily basis for most of my activities, both on the computer and phone.
I had kinda forgotten about it this year, until I saw some people posting their updated list of apps before the end of the year. So I decided to do the same! It'll be nice to look back at this list in ~5 years and see how much I've changed.
But, as I updated the list, it looks like... almost nothing changed. I think my time of hopping between apps all the time has ended (or is slowly fading away). I don't see many reasons to change something that works well, so thankfully most of them stayed the same.
I highlighted the services/apps that are new with the ✨ emoji.
2024-12-23 23:16:57
At the end of every year, I write a retrospective of what I did, learned, felt, watched, played or listened to. It's the perfect way to reflect on everything, figure out what was good, bad and what could be better!
If you'd like, you can read my posts for 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023.
Last year I made some predictions (or hopes) of what would happen this year. Did I get anything right?
I expect to take big steps towards owning my own house. I really want to stop paying rent and hopefully get a house instead of an apartment. It’s more work, but it’s more fulfilling and freeing.
Eh, partially, I guess? I did save money towards that end, but a change of plans made me not look into buying anything for now. More on that later.
I expect to write even more on this blog, and continue to expand on the topics I post about. Dev articles aren’t going anywhere, but I don’t always have something to post about in that regard.
✅ I got this one right! I did write more this year, and while the topics didn't get as varied as I'd liked, I'm still happy with what came out of the blog in 2024.
Also, I want to add proper support for categories and filtering, as well as search. As I post more, even I am starting to struggle finding something I wrote in the past to reference. Additionally, some code refactoring is always welcome.
❌ Nope, I did not do that. Not this year at least. I wrote about my desire to redesign my website and all that work has been moved to that redesign. It did not get ready (or started) in time, so that was a wrong prediction.
I also want to travel a bit next year too - either to the US to meet my work colleagues or to Italy to see my brother. And of course, do some sightseeing!
✅ I did travel this year! I traveled to New York and Chicago. More on those trips later.
Not much happened on my personal life this year, now that I think about it. In a good way. I feel like I've been able to mature a lot in the past couple years, after the autism diagnosis, therapy, and coming to terms with who I am and who I can be. Turns out everything gets easier when you learn not only that you should be kind to yourself, but how to be kind to yourself.
Last year, I said I was hoping to either going to the US to meet my work colleagues or to go to Italy to see my brother. Since I already had been to Italy, I chose to go to the US, and it was pretty fun! My wife and I traveled there in August, near the end of summer. We spent ~5 days in New York and ~5 in the Chicago area.
New York City is, no other way of saying it, complete and utter chaos. But in a (mostly) good way! Being so big and having so many people from everywhere in the world, there's just no shortage of things to do and to see.
We went with a mentality that we'd rather do less and have a great time than to try and do everything and get stressed about it. But turns out we were able to do pretty much everything we wanted! We got a lot of tips of the best times to go to each place and were able to plan some of our days accordingly.
We went to some of the most famous places like Rockefeller Center (and went to the Top of the Rock at sunset), the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty and Times Square. Also the Natural History museum and The MET.
Some of the nicer surprises were the experiences based on pop culture stuff. We went to The Friends Experience, an entire place dedicated to the Friends sitcom, with original items used in the show and really faithful recreations of Monica's and Joey's apartments, as well as the Central Perk coffee shop. It was a weird feeling being in that place that I'd never been before, but knew every corner. I was worried it'd be just a shameless cash grab, but it was actually pretty cool.
Being a big Nintendo nerd, we also went to the Nintendo Store. It was, honestly, a bit underwhelming, but still great to see so many things based on games I love.
But nothing we did there can even compare to the experience of going to a Broadway show! We went to see The Great Gatsby, and wow... just wow. It was honestly the most incredible thing I've ever seen, and I don't say that lightly. The music, the scenarios, the performances, and how well all that transitioned in front of your eyes, it's just mind-blowing. I'd never watched a musical play (only movies, which I hated), but it's now one of my favorite things. Too bad there's nothing like that where I live, but whenever I get back to NYC, I'm definitely watching more musicals.
On my birthday, we took a plane to Chicago. We celebrated by having a famous deep-dish pizza at Gino’s East. It’s pretty good, but I’d kinda classify it as a pie and not pizza 😅
The main reason we went to Chicago was because I wanted to finally get to meet my work colleagues in person. Most of them live in the city of Aurora, which is around an hour from Chicago by train.
Meeting them was one of the highlights of the whole trip. It’s nice (and weird) to finally meet people you’ve only spoken to online for the first time. They were really lovely as usual and made us feel very welcome there.
Since we were in Chicago anyway, we did some sightseeing there too. We went to the Field Museum, Shedd Aquarium, the Bean and even went to the top of Willis Tower, which was literally shaking from the wind.
Downtown Chicago is really pretty, way prettier than NY, but understandably there’s a lot less going on. Oh, and it was hot in there. I’ve never felt so hot in my life. It was around 38ºC during the day, but felt like it was over 40ºC. 🥵
2024 unfortunately was the year where the state I live in got hit by a big tragedy, with a lot of consequences to everyone who lives here.
At the beginning of May, the state of Rio Grande do Sul was hit by absurd amounts of rain in the matter of days, which put almost the entire state quite literally underwater. So many people lost their houses, belongings, and even their lives. Entire cities were lost, and so much of our infrastructure was damaged and is still far from being rebuilt.
Luckily, I wasn't personally affected by it (besides the comparatively trivial shipping delays and/or being unable to travel to neighboring cities). My city stands in a mountain range and even though we had a lot of rain, the water naturally flows away down the mountains (and sadly flooded the cities in the valleys or in the river deltas). But it was still heartbreaking to see people suffer so much because of it. And it does hit much harder when these things happen so close to you.
The bright side of it all is how many people came together to help the ones in need, from all over the country. Brazil is enormous and it felt like everyone did their best to help us pull ourselves around. It does help you restore a bit of faith in humanity.
Another good year for the blog! I've published a total of 18 posts so far, not counting this one. It's my record, though 5 of them were the new Cool Links series, which is not really original content. Even if we don't count those, we still have 13, one more than last year!
The big thing this year was the creation of the Cool Links series, a monthly blog post where I put all the best links I've saved during each month. It's a natural evolution of the Reading Recs I started posting last year, and I'm happy with how they're turning out. It's always good to have a chance to link to other websites and comment on them, without having to spin up a blog post for each one of them.
Another new thing is my newsletter, which, to be fair, is more of an email feed of the blog instead of a newsletter. I've started it in October, and it's not being a huge hit but I didn't expect it to. It's meant to be an additional way to subscribe to what I write.
My favorite posts of the year were, once again, the more personal ones: Best longterm goal? Not having one and JOMO is a Beautiful Thing.
Since last year I’ve been working at Useful Group, a lovely agency in Aurora, Illinois, USA. I’ve been pretty happy with my job there, working on nice projects and most importantly with amazing people. It’s so refreshing to find people in the software development industry that are nice and actually care about other people and about doing good work.
On the side projects front, I didn’t do much this year. I worked on the redesign of my website in Figma, but didn’t get to coding it yet. I learned a lot of cool CSS stuff and leaned into Progressive Enhancement as much as possible at work. Wanting to improve our sliders at work, I ended up developing a web component called enhanced-css-slider, which I’ve been using at work for almost a year.
The best part of the year – the fun things I've watched, listened to or played this year.
This year I haven't watched any "serious" TV shows. I haven't really felt like starting to watch something new and instead just re-watched some sitcoms as my "lunch show". What I did watch was a bunch of movies, for which I started writing some quick reviews using the QuickReviews web app. I plan on putting all those quick reviews up on my website eventually, but for now, here's some of the best ones:
Well, first of all the plan for 2025 is to move. We're moving out of Brazil to give living abroad another chance. After the bad experience in 2022 we want to give it a fair try by going to an actual city with actual things to do. The idea is to try Italy and Austria, but we'll see, nothing is set in stone.
Another not-as-big-but-still-big goal is to actually go ahead with my website's redesign. The new design has grown up on me and so I think it is the right choice. The only thing I'm still undecided about is if I should go ahead and do a full rewrite (possibly with Astro) or just update the visuals. 2025 Matt will be wiser and more capable of making that decision.
As for writing more on the blog, I'm not sure this time. Of course I want to, but I think I had a good cadence this year. I definitely want to continue with the monthly links and adding some non-blog content to the site (like the movie quick reviews).
Overall, 2024 was a great year for me. After the chaotic 2022, its two following years were definitely calmer. I think now that 2025 will have a lot more going on, but hopefully I'm better prepared to handle all that now.
See you next year!
2024-12-03 05:26:58
Adding an automatic ellipsis to some text if it overflows its content is simple enough. You just set overflow: hidden to make sure the container doesn't scroll, and then text-overflow: ellipsis to add the ellipsis to the edge of the text.
.example {
text-overflow: ellipsis;
overflow: hidden;
}
But what if you want your text to have multiple lines, but still cut off if it's too big? For example, you want to show the excerpt of a blog post on a blog post card (just like the ones on this blog). You want it to go up to 4 lines, but if the excerpt is bigger than that, you want to add the ellipsis at the end of the 4th line.
Turns out there's a neat little trick, using some -webkit prefixed properties. Don't worry, it works on all modern browsers, including Firefox and Safari.
.example {
text-overflow: ellipsis;
overflow: hidden;
display: -webkit-box;
/* Set this to the max number of lines you want */
-webkit-line-clamp: 4;
-webkit-box-orient: vertical;
}
Here's how it looks like:
Taken from this StackOverflow answer.
