David Walsh Blog
How to Play Grand Poo World 3
The underground world of creating and streaming Super Mario World-based ROM hacks continues to gain popularity. This popularity is a tribute to the creativity of gamers and the quality of the original 30 year old video game's mechanics. Over the past decade, incredible ROM hacks like...
How to Get the Current Branch Name with git
Most developers spoil themselves with fun command line utilities to make their work easier and more efficient. One such command line helper allows developers to always show the git branch in the command line. How can you get the current branch? With...
AutoSave with VSCode
Visual Studio Code has taken the crown of most used text editor, at least in JavaScript spheres. VSCode is fast, feature-filled, and supports thousands of plugins to boost productivity. Developers can also tweak hundreds of settings to enrich functionality. One such feature is...
How to Detect Failed Requests via Web Extensions
One of the best things that ever happened to t he user experience of the web has been web extensions. Browsers are powerful but extensions bring a new level of functionality. Whether it's crypto wallets, media players, or other popular plugins, web extensions have...
Welcome to the New LimeWire: AI Media Generation
LimeWire was a staple of my youth. LimeWire was software that allowed users to share any type of file during the revolutionary days of file sharing. Fast forward to today and LimeWire is back, again as revolutionary software, but this time in the...
Unveiling 15+ Essential Tools & Resources for Web Designers and Agencies in 2023
You’ve visited countless websites, and now you’re designing your own. Stop and think for a minute about what you’ve liked and didn’t like about some of those you visited. Was it the front page, the layout in general, or the functionalities that either met with your...
Sum an Array of Numbers with JavaScript
It's rare that I'm disappointed by the JavaScript language not having a function that I need. One such case was summing an array of numbers -- I was expecting
Math.sum
or a likewise, baked in API. Fear not -- summing an array of numbers...JavaScript waitFor Polling
As more of the JavaScript developers write becomes asynchronous, it's only natural to need to wait for conditions to be met. This is especially true in a world with asynchronous testing of conditions which don't provide an explicit
await
. I've written aboutwaitForever
,waitForTime
...queryLocalFonts
One of the larger downloads when requesting a webpage are custom fonts. There are many great techniques for lazy loading fonts to improve performance for those on poor connections. By getting insight into what fonts the user has available, we can avoid loading custom fonts.
Use XHR/fetch Breakpoints!
Web debugging tools are so incredibly excellent these days. I remember the days where they didn't exist and debugging was a total nightmare, even for the simplest of problems. A while back I introduced many of you to Logpoints, a way to output...
Popular Features
39 Shirts – Leaving Mozilla
In 2001 I had just graduated from a small town high school and headed off to a small town college. I found myself in the quaint computer lab where the substandard computers featured two browsers: Internet Explorer and Mozilla. It was this lab where I fell...
Interview with a Pornhub Web Developer
Regardless of your stance on pornography, it would be impossible to deny the massive impact the adult website industry has had on pushing the web forward. From pushing the browser's video limits to pushing ads through WebSocket so ad blockers don't detect them, you have...
Welcome to My New Office
My first professional web development was at a small print shop where I sat in a windowless cubical all day. I suffered that boxed in environment for almost five years before I was able to find a remote job where I worked from home. The first...
How to Create a RetroPie on Raspberry Pi – Graphical Guide
Today we get to play amazing games on our super powered game consoles, PCs, VR headsets, and even mobile devices. While I enjoy playing new games these days, I do long for the retro gaming systems I had when I was a kid: the original Nintendo...
Conquering Impostor Syndrome
Two years ago I documented my struggles with Imposter Syndrome and the response was immense. I received messages of support and commiseration from new web developers, veteran engineers, and even persons of all experience levels in other professions. I've even caught myself reading the post...
Being a Dev Dad
I get asked loads of questions every day but I'm always surprised that they're rarely questions about code or even tech -- many of the questions I get are more about non-dev stuff like what my office is like, what software I use, and oftentimes...
JavaScript Promise API
While synchronous code is easier to follow and debug, async is generally better for performance and flexibility. Why "hold up the show" when you can trigger numerous requests at once and then handle them when each is ready? Promises are becoming a big part of the JavaScript world...