Matthew Lang avatar

Matthew Lang

Family guy and web developer

I had no idea about the “Firefall” that occurs at El Capitan at this time of year.

“Firefall” occurs when the setting sun reflects off of Horsetail Falls at a certain angle, making the waterfall emit a fiery orange glow. It is highly dependent on environmental factors: If the skies are cloudy, that orange light will not hit the east side of El Capitan—the vertical rock formation where the falls are located— and the phenomenon won’t occur.

— Viral photos show Yosemite’s “firefall” phenomenon glowing in California

The pictures of this are just amazing.

Just realised that my bookmarking web app Commonmarks shares the same name as CommonMark, the strongly defined Markdown format. Time for another name change me thinks. I’m open to suggestions. 😉

Cup of coffee on my desk. Pen and paper ready. Text editor open.

My three essentials for weekend hacking on code.

Dark to light

After years of using Solarized Dark as my preferred colour theme for coding, I’m starting to find that I’m now preferring a lighter themes for when I’m writing code. Solarized Light for Sublime Text and Bluloco Light for VS Code.

Solarized Dark is still my preferred color theme for the terminal though.

The perfect album

Sent a few suggestions this morning for the perfect album to my buddy Kurt in Ohio. Suggestions included Bloc Party, Oasis, Massive Attack and Eric Clapton.

Anyone else care to chip in with suggestions for the perfect album?

After a couple of weeks using Stoop, I’ve decided to remove the app from my phone.

The app itself is a novel idea for those who want to read their newsletters outside of their day to day email, but there were a few gripes I had with this app.

The design of the app itself didn’t work for me. The carousel-style of newsletters at the top and the list of newsletters at the bottom wasted a lot of space in the user interface. I would have prefered just a list of newsletters that I could scroll through.

The thought of having an app for newsletters only available on a mobile device was too restrictive. If there’s one activity I don’t mind doing on multiple devices, it’s reading. At least with my newsletters delivered to my inbox or to Feedbin’s newsletter address, I could catch up with newsletters regardless of what device I was near.

Stoop is a nice idea, and might work for those who simply can’t afford to be without their mobile device, but I don’t want to be tied to my iPhone for the sake of a few newsletters.

The web industry debate rages on

The debate about the use of Javascript in the web industry and the role of the front-end developer continues after Chris Coyier’s post, The Great Divide and now a follow-up from Rachel Andrews.

There is something remarkable about the fact that, with everything we have created in the past 20 years or so, I can still take a complete beginner and teach them to build a simple webpage with HTML and CSS, in a day. We don’t need to talk about tools or frameworks, learn how to make a pull request or drag vast amounts of code onto our computer via npm to make that start. We just need a text editor and a few hours. This is how we make things show up on a webpage.

— HTML, CSS and our vanishing industry entry points by Rachel Andrews

Rachel’s post reminds us though that while Javascript frameworks might be all the rage at the moment, we’re neglecting the foundations of the web, HTML and CSS. And how they can still be used to educate those new to the process of creating websites.

Maybe as an industry, we should still be focusing on these fundamentals. Not just for those new to the industry, but for everyone in the industry.