TIL: Today I learned...

Today I learned that sh is not the same thing as bash.

Today I learned that if you have the chrome devtools open, then Chrome will suppress the confirm form resubmission dialog: This threw me off for a minute because I couldn’t figure out how the page was maintaining the state when I would refresh after a post. I couldn’t find it documented anywhere but it’s a nice convenience during development though it could be confusing if you’re unaware of it.

I just recently learned that you can actually cherry pick a range of commits instead of just a single commit: git cherry-pick c1..c3 The above is using the two-dot range notation (..). I was a bit surprised by this because I thought that this was the purpose of rebase --onto — to take a series of commits and apply them one at a time on top of some other commit....

Today I learned that javascript gained a nullish coalescing operator (??) in ECMAScript 2020. const result = potentialEmpty ?? fallbackValue; It return the right operand if the left operand is null or undefined so for me this is a convenient alternative to using the OR (||) operator if I don’t want the fallbackValue on falsy values like 0 or an empty string.

Today I learned that in Git 2.36, the --remerge-diff option was added to git show. This effectively lets you view any merge conflicts that occurred during a merge commit and how they were resolved. So for instance, git show --remerge-diff <commit-message-id> would show something like: Under the hood, it recreates the merge with the conflicts and diffs it with the merge commit so the conflict markers are shown in red since the merge commit removes the conflict markers during resolution....

Today I learned that the viewport units in CSS don’t account for the width of visible classic scrollbars like on Windows. This means that if you use width: 100vw to make an element the full width of the page and then a scrollbar appears, it will cause the element to overflow (by 17px which is apparently the width of Windows scrollbars) and create a horizontal scrollbar. CSS media queries don’t take them into account either, so if the viewport width is close (say within 17px) of a breakpoint then the appearance of a scrollbar will cause it to cross that threshold....

I just heard about a promising new design tool called Penpot that positions itself as an open-source alternative to Figma. They recently added support for CSS grid layout which I’m looking forward to testing out. https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2024/04/penpot-css-grid-layout-designing-superpowers/

Today I learned that the Backwards/forwards cache (BFCache) is a thing. This is the cache where the browser keeps a snapshot of a webpage so that it’s able to display almost instantly when a user clicks the back or forward buttons. This post gives a nice overview of the BFCache and how it works — apparently “Chrome usage data shows that 1 in 10 navigations on desktop and 1 in 5 on mobile are either back or forward”....

Today I learned that if you need to test in older versions of Chrome then you can download prior snapshots of Chromium builds as standalone executables. The tricky part is figuring out which build snapshot corresponds to which version of Chrome, which involves several steps detailed in the Chromium wiki. Fortunately, someone put together a site to lookup by Chrome version and link to the correct build on the archive site....

Today I learned that Podman is a pretty nice alternative to Docker, and in my case was a drop-in-replacement for Docker Desktop. The installation process was smooth and it really tries to guide you through the setup. They even provide cli aliases for docker commands so you don’t have to update any existing scripts. Proponents also argue that it has more secure default feature like rootless containers. Exploring Podman: A More Secure Docker Alternative