Axel Rauschmayer

Topics: #JavaScript #TypeScript #fedi22

Other interests:
• Sustainability, degrowth, permaculture, urbanism
• Languages: German, English, French, Spanish, Dutch, Mandarin
• Calisthenics (body weight exercises)
• Tiny houses
• Education
• Psychology, getting out of one’s head, heart-centered living
• Minimalist spirituality: Advaita, Daoism, Buddhism, Christian mysticism, J. Krishnamurti, …

I live in Munich. http://pronoun.is/he

Public Key

npub17at4s5zn2gryfckwn6xpmwuaejhdksd93nk8rtzwjsjhcm8pu54s8875qq

NIP-05 Address

[email protected]

Profile Code

nprofile1qqs0w46c2pf4ypjyut8farqahwwuetkmgxjcemr3438fgftudns722cpz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerfw36x7tnsw43q59y5mw

Publishing to

relay.ditto.pub

Author Public Key

npub17at4s5zn2gryfckwn6xpmwuaejhdksd93nk8rtzwjsjhcm8pu54s8875qq

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Last Notes

2026-04-10 16:00:10 GMT

I’ve grown to deeply dislike AI texts and their excessive use of the pattern “not A, but B”.

2026-04-09 13:09:22 GMT

What’s the least bad way of reading mainstream ebooks (which usually have DRM)? AFAICT, it’s ebooks.com(?)
Example: https://www.ebooks.com/en-de/book/346399824/chain-reaction/ijeoma-uchegbu/

2026-03-21 12:33:26 GMT

Google Search is now using AI to replace headlines
https://www.theverge.com/tech/896490/google-replace-news-headlines-in-search-canary-coal-mine-experiment

2026-02-28 18:01:09 GMT

#MacOS clipboard history is nice:
• Bring up Spotlight (e.g. Command-Space)
• Press Command-4 (you can also switch between Spotlight categories via tab or arrow keys)

2026-02-24 23:13:14 GMT

“How ‘Liquid Design’ Broke the iPhone and Forced Apple’s Great Reset”
https://webdesignerdepot.com/how-liquid-design-broke-the-iphone-and-forced-apples-great-reset/
“[…] the Battery Tax has been devastating. Data suggests a 10–15% reduction in real-world screen-on time because the phone is effectively running a physics engine just to show you your calendar.”

2025-11-17 18:45:18 GMT

Interesting detail: “[…] Steam Machine is optimized for gaming, but it's still your PC. Install your own apps, or even another operating system. Who are we to tell you how to use your computer?”
https://store.steampowered.com/sale/steammachine

2025-11-06 23:55:23 GMT

Three website features that could be built into browsers:
• Mode toggles (dark mode, light mode, print mode, …)
• Self-links for headings
• Cookie dialogs (with a default choice that can be triggered automatically)

2025-10-28 01:05:14 GMT

Using Cloudflare for static file hosting:
• Cloudflare Pages is easy to use but forwards requests from /home.html to /home (which I don’t want because it changes existing URLs)
• Solution: Switch to Workers where forwarding can be switched off.
• New problem: / isn’t forwarded to /index.html anymore. Not sure how to fix that yet.
• A % in a filename caused an error with an obscure message and prevented deployment.
I may not be their target audience. I just want simple static file hosting.

2025-10-10 02:05:14 GMT

What are your thoughts on adding #ActivityPub support to a blog? I feel like blogs are different and should be separate from social media(?)
A simple solution for letting people comment on a blog post could be embedding a post including all of its replies. However, for blogs, you want comments to survive as long as possible and Fediverse servers generally don’t guarantee that.

2025-09-05 13:11:20 GMT

Actively fetching replies in Mastodon 4.4 is a game changer for small instances, as @nprofile…7r6l reports: https://mastodon.exitmusic.world/@james/115147206129637513
It fixes an important weakness (basically a bug) of Mastodon that matters even for large servers: https://2ality.com/2024/11/mastodon-weaknesses.html#all-replies
I still really like Mastodon’s “local view of social network” approach:
• Much more decentralized than a global view.
• Scales really well.
• Setting up a new server is *relatively* cheap and simple.
#Mastodon

2025-08-23 18:27:52 GMT

Learning web development: Loops in JavaScript
https://2ality.com/2025/08/javascript-loops.html
#2ality #WebDev #JavaScript

2025-08-20 18:02:00 GMT

Learning web development: Booleans, comparisons and `if` statements
https://2ality.com/2025/08/javascript-booleans-comparisons-if.html
#2ality #WebDev #JavaScript

2025-08-03 21:53:04 GMT

“Fil-C is a fanatically compatible memory-safe implementation of C and C++. Lots of software compiles and runs with Fil-C with zero or minimal changes.”
https://github.com/pizlonator/llvm-project-deluge

2025-08-02 16:53:46 GMT

Cookie banner buttons. You *can* click on “Decline”! 🙈
https://cdn.fosstodon.org/media_attachments/files/114/960/202/954/463/069/original/cf6d64fe73c0ec3b.jpg

2025-07-21 13:58:59 GMT

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@nprofile…4tpe In case others are as curious as I was: https://calendar.online/calendar-weeks/2025/1

2025-07-18 16:31:39 GMT

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@nprofile…4tpe My suspicion: Most programmers like creating new things but not maintaining them (cleaning up small bugs, etc.).

2025-07-17 14:40:27 GMT

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@nprofile…4tpe I personally need simplicity. My impressions (as someone who doesn’t do much frontend development):
• Most extreme performance problems seem to come from overly complex tech stacks.
• But *some* performance tips I’m seeing involve complicated micro-optimizations that I would indeed not worry about. (On the other hand, even those can pay off for big sites with lots of traffic.)

2025-07-16 13:59:55 GMT

My books on #JavaScript and #TypeScript are free to read online:
– Exploring JavaScript (ES2025 edition)
– Deep JavaScript
– Exploring TypeScript (TS 5.8 edition)
– Shell scripting with Node.js
:mastodon: Boosts appreciated!
https://exploringjs.com
https://cdn.fosstodon.org/media_attachments/files/114/863/261/895/351/062/original/4e76696ffb62c0ce.jpg
https://cdn.fosstodon.org/media_attachments/files/114/863/262/461/589/599/original/87465616b00c03f2.jpg
https://cdn.fosstodon.org/media_attachments/files/114/863/262/873/951/221/original/56fa8cc4f4679536.jpg
https://cdn.fosstodon.org/media_attachments/files/114/863/263/070/038/647/original/1aee5616666bf02e.jpg

2025-06-30 16:15:13 GMT

#JavaScript: Which web platform objects must be closed explicitly? I’m looking for good, commonly used examples.
Example—a Reader for a ReadableStream:
reader.releaseLock()

2025-06-13 13:10:55 GMT

Out now: “Exploring JavaScript (ES2025 edition)”
• Free to read online
• Lots of new content
• New: flashcards for learning the content and the standard library API
https://exploringjs.com/js/
#JavaScript
https://cdn.fosstodon.org/media_attachments/files/114/676/208/198/859/189/original/1ebcd4bf357867bd.jpg

2025-06-06 14:55:10 GMT

#Markdown tip: A backslash at the end of a line inserts a <br>. Should be well supported everywhere now. (Hopefully, you won’t have to use the silly two trailing spaces that were needed in the original Markdown.)
https://spec.commonmark.org/0.31.2/#hard-line-breaks

2025-05-26 13:04:37 GMT

Fediverse servers (Mastodon etc.) don’t have global views of the network:
• Pro: Much easier to set up independent servers because data is retrieved as needed.
• Con: Discovery (search etc.) is limited, especially on small servers (which don’t see much of the network).
Solution: Fediverse search engines. https://www.fediscovery.org
Part of my list of current weaknesses of Mastodon: https://2ality.com/2024/11/mastodon-weaknesses.html
#Fediverse #Mastodon

2025-05-19 19:38:08 GMT

Node.js—I just learned that there is:
npm init --init-type=module --yes
But it doesn’t help much. I’ll probably continue to use `npm init` without that flag and change "commonjs" to "module" manually.
It feels like npm could switch to "module" as the default now.

2025-05-13 23:12:42 GMT

I don’t understand why exceptions are so widely disliked:
• Rust’s Option<> is nice for handling errors we want to take care of immediately.
• However, there are also many cases where going up the call stack is a feature, not a bug—e.g.: https://exploringjs.com/js/book/ch_exception-handling.html#motivation-throwing-and-catching-exceptions
Has anyone written about this?

2025-05-09 21:34:50 GMT

Great feature of Markdown: Pasting is always without formatting.

2025-04-29 23:28:56 GMT

@nprofile…hjan asks a good question: “Why can’t HTML alone do includes?”
https://frontendmasters.com/blog/seeking-an-answer-why-cant-html-alone-do-includes/
Pure-HTML includes would help with a static site generation issue:
• Whenever you change the (cross-page) user interface, you have to regenerate the whole blog.
• If the shared bits were stored in separate files, only those would have to be regenerated.

2025-04-25 13:20:27 GMT

@nprofile…kgua I know this would take a long time to implement (probably years) but is portable identity (*) a long-term goal for Mastodon?
It has many interesting benefits:
• Choosing a server doesn’t lock you in at all.
• You can keep a backup account on another server and switch to it if your main server goes down.
• Etc.
(*) https://shadowfacts.net/2023/activitypub-portable-identity/

2025-04-14 13:05:09 GMT

@nprofile…e858 Should you ever want to go big with merchandise: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hq8_7iaLGGM

2025-04-07 16:19:04 GMT

Nice to see progress in my #Mastodon wish list (*):
1. “https://neuromatch.social/@jonny has been working for several months to add a way to fetch replies from other servers, to solve the common issue of only seeing a part of conversations.”
2. “We merged the first Fediscovery-related PR into Mastodon”
3. “We also started work on the next discovery capability: ‘Account Recommendations’.”
Source: https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/04/trunk-tidbits-march-2025/
(*) https://2ality.com/2024/11/mastodon-weaknesses.html

2025-03-29 17:13:13 GMT

Interesting #Mastodon bot that turns RSS or Atom feeds into Mastodon accounts: https://rss-parrot.net/
(Following feeds would also be useful as built-in Mastodon functionality.)

2025-03-23 17:40:27 GMT

It’s a shame that GitHub still displays tabs in code blocks as 8 spaces: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/8067
And AFAICT, it’s not possible to inject CSS into, say, Gists.
In contrast, the tab size for source can be configured: https://github.com/settings/appearance

2025-03-14 18:30:13 GMT

#Mastodon tip—you can make your public posts full-text searchable:
Edit profile > Public profile > Privacy and reach > Include public posts in search results

2025-03-14 14:00:11 GMT

Idea for EJS (templating library): make custom delimiters more flexible.
https://github.com/mde/ejs/issues/781

2025-03-11 22:13:43 GMT

2025 has already been a good year for #TypeScript:
• Type stripping increases conceptual clarity of TS, has made emitting .js faster, works well without source maps (via blank spaces) and doesn’t require a tsconfig.json. https://2ality.com/2025/01/nodejs-strip-type.html
• All server-side runtimes can now run TS directly: Deno, Bun, Node.js.
• Isolated declarations have made emitting .d.ts faster. https://2ality.com/2025/01/tsconfig-json.html#isolatedDeclarations
• The upcoming Go code base will make type checking 10× faster. https://2ality.com/2025/03/typescript-in-go.html

2025-03-10 15:23:07 GMT

Firefox 136 supports vertical tabs. You can switch them on via a the context menu for the tab bar or the toolbar.
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/136.0/releasenotes/
https://cdn.fosstodon.org/media_attachments/files/114/138/814/539/511/172/original/eef5f630b24f9c8c.png

2025-03-04 20:39:37 GMT

It’s really difficult to pick an operating system right now:
• macOS is continually degrading in quality: Apple are over-promoting their services and there are more and more small bugs and glitches: https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/03/04/premium-hardware-subpar-software/
• Same for Windows: ads, AI, etc.
Linux still has many issues but is slowly catching up.

2025-03-04 13:19:18 GMT

If a Mastodon thread is longer than, say, three posts, I prefer a blog post. I find those easier to read. Interestingly, there are also people who find threads easier to read.

2025-02-27 13:30:28 GMT

What is TypeScript? An overview for JavaScript programmers
https://2ality.com/2025/02/what-is-typescript.html
#TypeScript #2ality

2025-02-26 16:25:12 GMT

Pagefind by @nprofile…fjhd gives you full-text search for a static website—hosted statically by yourself.
I’m experimenting with it right now and I’m amazed by how easy it is to get started:
1. Generate indices.
2. Insert an HTML fragment somewhere on a page.
• Website: https://pagefind.app
• Demo: https://mdn.pagefind.app

2025-02-16 12:01:02 GMT

One consequence of web dev social media now being fragmented across Mastodon, Bluesky, etc.: If you want to share updates of your project as widely as possible, you should consider a blog with a feed (RSS, Atom, JSON Feed).
• Feed readers provide the best user experience for keeping up with news.
• Many email newsletters use feeds to find content.
• Many people seem to avoid social media because it’s too anxiety-inducing at the moment. Those can still be reached via feeds and email newsletters.

2025-01-24 11:02:37 GMT

Feature in next week’s #TypeScript 5.8 Beta: --erasableSyntaxOnly
• Pull request: https://github.com/microsoft/TypeScript/pull/61011
• Description (with an old name): https://github.com/microsoft/TypeScript/issues/59601#issuecomment-2294010520
Forbids non-type syntax that isn’t JavaScript—e.g. enums and namespaces.
Use case: TypeScript support in Node.js. https://2ality.com/2025/01/nodejs-strip-type.html
/via @nprofile…5u7e

2024-12-10 17:02:40 GMT

Draft: “Mastodon for people who are new to social media”
https://gist.github.com/rauschma/15bf55cd2015ab29d7c3bbfb0805c18d
I tried to write as compact an introduction as possible. Much material I’ve seen:
• Explains irrelevant things and/or assumes knowledge only social media users have,
• Yet leaves out other information that I *think* would be useful to newcomers.
But that’s just my impression—which is why I’m interested in feedback.
#Mastodon

2024-12-08 19:01:55 GMT

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@nprofile…9g5v From what I know about Bluesky’s team, I believe that their intentions are good.
But, eventually, they’ll have to make money.
Upside: People have moved once (from Twitter to Bluesky). Moving again is going to be much easier and the Fediverse isn’t going anywhere.
Only potential downside of ActivityPub that isn’t relatively easy to fix: It *may* not scale as well—no one knows at the moment. I’m curious: Could AP handle (e.g.) Taylor Swift joining the Fediverse?

2024-12-08 17:43:14 GMT

Bluesky says that: “Never lose access to your followers or data.”
However, I don’t think that’s true. Can someone confirm?
Even in a scenario where there are multiple Relay/AppView/Labeler services, if you move to a different service:
• You can only follow a user if their PDS is crawled by your service.
• A user can only follow you if your PDS is crawled by their service.

2024-11-25 17:17:58 GMT

1/ Great in-depth article by @nprofile…zwgs:
“Bluesky and ATProto are not meaningfully decentralized, and are not federated either. However, this is not to say that Bluesky is not achieving something useful; while Bluesky is not building what is presently a decentralized Twitter, it is building an excellent replacement for Twitter, and Bluesky’s main deliverable goal is something else instead: a Twitter replacement, with the possibility of ‘credible exit’.”
https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/

2024-10-07 08:52:56 GMT

One thing worries me about the web platform:
– Are we always going to add more features to JavaScript and CSS?
– The constantly increasing complexity makes it more and more difficult to learn the web and nearly impossible to implement new browsers.
So what is the long term strategy for the web? Will we eventually start over and extract a subset of the web that has stood the test of time? Or will we split it into more specialized platforms (one for apps, one for documents, etc.)? Or sth. else?

2024-06-06 21:31:11 GMT

Has anyone tried out Pop Shell on Ubuntu #Linux?
https://github.com/pop-os/shell
I’m mostly interested in its ability to “stack” windows (turn them into tabs while their panes occupy the same space. Is that useful in practice?

2024-05-29 14:22:39 GMT

#Linux: Does anyone use #Bluefin? Is it worth switching to from Ubuntu? (Hardware: Framework Laptop where it is “community-supported”)

2024-03-26 13:19:07 GMT

#JavaScript:
// Iterating over an object
for (const [key, value] of Object.entries(obj)) {
// ···
}
Details: https://exploringjs.com/impatient-js/ch_objects.html#Object.entries
// Iterating over an Array
for (const [index, value] of arr.entries()) {
// ···
}
Details: https://exploringjs.com/impatient-js/ch_arrays.html#for-of-iterating-over-index-element-pairs

2024-03-16 10:31:32 GMT

Shouldn't it be possible to port #VisualStudioCode to iPad (since it runs well on Safari)? I’d love to be able to run it offline and would pay money for an app. I wonder why no one has done a port yet.

2024-02-01 09:54:23 GMT

Is there a Node.js library for creating ZIP files that you like? I’d like to use it in a Node.js-based shell script.
This one looks good: https://www.npmjs.com/package/adm-zip

2023-12-15 03:51:50 GMT

With computing devices, there is a lot of lock-in with Apple & Google when it comes to syncing data. Proton looks like an interesting alternative. They offer: Mail, Calendar, Drive, VPN, Pass (a password manager).
https://proton.me
Any opinions about them?

2023-12-09 23:33:13 GMT

Firefox/Mac tip: By default, full screen behavior is non-standard—you can’t reveal the menu bar by moving the cursor to the top of the screen.
Fix:
– Go to about:config
– Set full-screen-api.macos-native-full-screen = true
https://support.mozilla.org/mk/questions/1383595
#Firefox

2023-12-04 15:38:33 GMT

28 years ago today (1995-12-04): “Netscape and Sun announce JavaScript, the open, cross-platform object scripting language for enterprise networks and the internet”
https://web.archive.org/web/20070916144913/http://wp.netscape.com/newsref/pr/newsrelease67.html
#JavaScript

2023-09-04 18:37:01 GMT

Yesterday, a 30-year-old sci-fi TV series (#Babylon5) gave me an idea for a better Siri voice command: I had used “lights on” and “lights off” until I noticed that in that show, they only said “lights” to toggle between on and off. Lo and behold, that also worked with Siri. 😀

2023-08-26 13:50:15 GMT

Idea for reducing the number of open browser tabs—three ways of closing a tab:
– Close and forget
– Close, remember, and add tag “read later”
– Close, remember, and add arbitrary tags
Additional functionality:
– Searching tagged items
– Removing items older than a given date (optional: only if they have a given tag)
Key insight: Must be quicker than bookmarking. Finding a proper location for a bookmark takes time.

2023-08-25 18:05:24 GMT

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@npub1xed…yg9w But then why buy the framework’s company if money is tight?

2023-08-18 16:41:25 GMT

I hope we’ll eventually get new sci-fi TV shows that are located in space and not part of the following franchises: Star Wars, Star Trek, Stargate, Babylon 5, Expanse, Marvel, DC
I like all of them, but I’m also looking forward to seeing something that’s completely new. The last shows that fit this criterion, that I’m aware of, were: “Dark matter”, “Killjoys”, “Foundation”. I can recommend all of them (I only watched S1 of DM).
#ScienceFiction

2023-08-04 11:37:12 GMT

“Apple announces alliance with Adobe, NVIDIA, and others to develop Pixar’s 3D standard”
“Open Universal Scene Description (OpenUSD) was created by Pixar Animation Studios as a 3D scene depiction technology that promises significant interoperability among tools, data, and workflows.”
Apple’s interested in using it for Augmented Reality.
https://www.macrumors.com/2023/08/01/apple-alliance-to-develop-pixar-3d-standard/

2023-06-28 17:09:01 GMT

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@npub1094…2wum “Toot” seems to be on its way out though(?) At least in the Mastodon UI. Personally, I welcome that, I have always called them “posts”.