Hello Hacker News,

I recently rebuilt my blog https://chris.lu to be static first, easy to maintain, and provide a great developer experience. While doing so, I also wrote a tutorial that can be found in my https://chris.lu/web_development section. I covered all the steps from building a solid foundation using Next.js (14.x) and React (18.x) . Several chapters about adding MDX support (using @next/mdx) and several plugins to improve authoring tech articles, like a plugin for beautiful code blocks or another one to automatize the creation of a dynamic table of contents for each post. There are also chapters about improving linting so that ESLint does not just lint the code but also the MDX content, increasing security with CSP headers, optimizing loading times using @next/image and @next/fonts, and a few more.

As chris.lu is a side project, I've had the freedom to experiment with new technologies, such as WebGL, which I've used to build the header (click on 'PRESS START' to give it a try). I've also explored new CSS features, like the extended web color palette (display-p3), to create a neon 80s-style theme that fully utilizes the potential of modern screens. It's been exciting to see that for some UI elements, like a dialog or modal box, we no longer need to rely on jQuery plugins or React components. The native dialog HTML element now offers a viable solution, especially with good browser support if you can afford to not support IE 11. The source code for chris.lu is available on GitHub at https://github.com/chrisweb/chris.lu/.

Also, I'm currently for hire, serious offers are welcome. My areas of expertise are Javascript (Typescript) development, team building, and management. You can contact me on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisdotlu/ or look at my projects on GitHub at https://github.com/chrisweb.

I like it, worked well for the few tests I did, however the main form needs some small UX improvements, I chose a start airport and destination airport but then the search button was disabled, leaving me clueless about what field was not filled out correctly, I quickly noticed it must be the date field, but still to me disabling a submit button of a form seems like a bad idea because if disable it you also remove the display of potential error messages related to the form failing validation, which to me is a UX no go (take my opinion with a grain of salt, I'm not a UX guy). The second thing that bothers me is that none of the form fields actually tells you which ones are mandatory and which ones are not

Take that to the Feedback form, I'm sure the product team would appreciate such detailed feedback.

good idea, thx, done

Not to ding on you, but rather to make a general observation:

There is certain irony to posting a strong "allergic" reaction to a rather mundane phrase in discussion of propaganda. One could say there was effective propaganda for the phrase to become a thought-terminating cliche.

I had similar thoughts, you don't need a permit to buy a gun but your kids need one if they want to fly their small toy drone, well that makes totally sense :D

I liked the humor in this piece a lot, I would not have read it until the end if it wasn't for the funny bits

There's a difference between offering physical goods (like McDonalds and Starbucks) vs. digital goods. Both Google and Apple don't allow circumventing their payment mechanism for anything digital (e-books, music, etc.), while showing some lenience for physical ones.

> Update 2 > Fortnite is currently unavailable on Google Play. More information will be forthcoming soon.

> Update 1 > Apple has blocked your access to Fortnite on iOS devices! Take Action! #FreeFortnite

... well that answers a some of my questions ;)

As far as I'm aware of, Microsoft is not even trying to put their own services forward. For example neither Github nor Azure are the defaults in VSCode. Go to the source control section and use what ever source control tool you want, VSCode does not even suggest you use Github. They also don't bundle extensions like LiveShare with VSCode, by including it into the VSCode installer they distribute on their own website.

This is why I disagree with your claim that Microsoft is giving away VSCode away for free to promote their own proprietary tools. You can shame Microsoft for trying to improve their image by making VSCode, Typescript, ... opensource. To me this is totally different from bundling your own Browser into an operating system to increase artificially your market share, you can't compare the two.

There is nothing bad about not blindly trusting a big corporation like Microsoft, but I dislike it when people are so desperate to blame Microsoft for mistakes it did in the past, that they write articles that are (deliberately?) misleading. In this case, by saying parts of VSCode are opensource when it is just some extensions. This is putting VSCode on a pedestal with Chrome, but the comparaison is all wrong, Chrome includes lots of proprietary parts, while chromium is the opensource variant you can build yourself, but for VSCode this is completely different as the version distributed on the Microsoft website doesn't include anything besides the opensource code from Github repository.

> but I dislike it when people are so desperate to blame Microsoft for mistakes it did in the past

I find it a bit weird when people anthropomorphize corporations and feel bad for/protective of them.

And let's be honest, we're not talking about "mistakes", we're talking about a decades-long strategy which was methodically executed to cultivate good will, and then take advantage of it to destroy competitors.

Conversely, I find it a bit weird when people anthropomorphize corporations as if they have personalities and traits that somehow live beyond an almost 100% turnover in staff and senior management changes.

The MS of today isn’t the MS of the 90s. That’s not to say they’re virtuous and wonderful today, just that banging on about the past doesn’t really feel relevant.

> 100% turnover in staff and senior management

So, I just checked https://news.microsoft.com/leadership/. The vast majority of the people there joined Microsoft in the 80s or 90s. Two or three in the early 2000, and one after 2010. For one person it was unclear when they joined.

So, an overwhelming majority of the senior management were perfectly happy to work for the "MS of the 90s". Therefore, it's hard to see that they'd be particularly uncomfortable with the ethics of the "MS of the 90s".

> I find it a bit weird when people anthropomorphize corporations as if they have personalities and traits that somehow live beyond an almost 100% turnover in staff and senior management changes.

Companies definitely have personalities and traits that last longer than their constituent members, that's what's called a culture. Just like a nation has defining features that will still be around when every single currently living member is dead, so have companies. In particular old, large ones.

That's not to say that they can't change, and Microsoft definitely has changed since the 90s, but the past is not irrelevant.

I've observed that people in my environment that used to not like Microsoft still don't today while they are completely oblivious to the conduct of Google, Facebook or Amazon at the same time.

I see it as reminder to frequently check whether my opinions on different things are still valid.

I thought the same, the article title is (deliberately) misleading by using the word "parts" instead of being clear and stating that some extensions that you can get from the store might not be opensource ... I had never heard of LiveShare before and have no need for it, I have lots of extensions installed and don't think any of them is proprietary

Haha :)