AI (more precisely LLMs) have been developing very rapidly lately, and it is hard to avoid them in everyday life - they have been integrated into Google search, our email, browser, mobile phone, social media, and they come across whether we like it or not. For some time now, it has also been said that they will replace programmers, and the term vibe coding has also appeared, which refers to developers only providing the vibe, and the AI writing the code.

I have been using it since the beginning (when I got the beta Copilot, quite early on), mainly as a smarter code completion tool, and recently I have occasionally asked it about topics that I rarely need to deal with and do not remember the details exactly, but I have never generated complete programs or larger code snippets with it. Until around the beginning of this year, I considered vibe coding mainly as a game, and most of the stories I came across on social media were more funny or interesting than serious - for example, someone created a complete service with AI assistance without any programming knowledge, just by “vibing”, and is already making money with it, then a few days later reported that their service was hacked and they had no idea what to do since they had clients, where could they get help, …

Then around the beginning of this year, some professionals whose opinions I value (e.g. Armin Ronacher) also spoke positively about the topic, and credible stories also appeared on Reddit, so at the end of spring I decided to embark on an experiment and vibe code a simpler web application. I leave everything possible to AI agents, and only touch the code if absolutely necessary.

TL;DR: I was skeptical at first, but now I have a new friend, Claude, who develops my live-tracker project in the evenings while we tinker in the garden or during long boring meetings.

HTMX is a small (~14k), dependency-free, extendable frontend framework, with a very straightforward approach. It extends the Hypertext capabilities of HTML, without the need of using JavaScript.

Basic concepts:

• Any DOM element can trigger HTTP requests
• Any HTTP methods can be used (not just GET and POST)
• The response from the server is HTML or HTML fragment
• State management is is server-side, frontend is simple and dummy

The security of websites was always an important topic, and in my opinion it’s still a bit neglected by some developers. We have plenty of new tools, browsers try to protect their users more and more, but still, it’s important for a developer to be clear with some basic concepts.

Basics

Hash

Hashing algorithms are basically one way functions, where (typically) the hash(x) call is quick and easy, but its inverse is very slow and expensive - even impossible. In most cases they map arbitrary strings to fixed length, ones with very low probability of collision.

REpresentational State Transfer is a software architectural style for creating stateless web APIs. These APIs are typically based on HTTP methods to access resources specified by URIs that are transmitted in JSON or XML encoded form. They are called RESTful APIs.

Now that we are aware of the basic networking concepts, let’s take a deeper look at the main protocol of the web - HTTP.

So, what happens if you enter a URL into the browser’s location bar and press ENTER? A very many things, and eventually a website is loaded and rendered.

Let’s check the networking part!

I’m planning to create a custom web component which lets you easily embed your fragment shaders into any website for a long time. You can find some (mostly abandoned ones) on github, so this is my take on the topic (to abandon it eventually 😉).

It tries to be compatible with https://twigl.app/, supporting geekest mode and MRT as well (but only 300 es).

See details on github.

Sometimes I have the itch to create something that’s not (just) useful, but pleases the eyes.

I’ve started experimenting with webgl a few years ago, mostly in shadertoy - but most of my experiments aren’t public.

This (fullscreen) is one of my favourites. But of course I’m still not entirely satisfied with it.

A quine is a computer program which takes no input and produces a copy of its own source code as its only output.

This one is not really a quine, but something similar, 1020 bytes of HTML/JS that animates it’s own code. Inspired by the great work of @aemkei.

Click here, to see it in action!

CSS Paint Worklet (Houdini) experiment to generate cellular noise based mesh.

Details on github.