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. Turns out that they both essentially do the same thing (for each commit they call merge-base under the hood and apply a 3-way merge though you can also think of rebase as a series of cherry picks) but one can be more convenient than the other depending on what you’re doing or how you prefer to think of the operation. ...

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.

I used to have tools like CCleaner and Revo uninstaller installed on my windows machines but I recently learned that Microsoft now has their utility called PC Manager that does things like free up some disk space and disable startup apps. Though as this article points out, you can accomplish a lot of similar tasks without a dedicated tool, so it’s more for if you find it convenient.

I learned about the ISO-8601 duration format today. It’s a way to represent a duration of time in a standard format. For example, P3Y6M4DT12H30M5S represents a duration of 3 years, 6 months, 4 days, 12 hours, 30 minutes, and 5 seconds. https://www.digi.com/resources/documentation/digidocs/90001488-13/reference/r_iso_8601_duration_format.htm

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”. ...