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Since June 2024 I’ve been operating a mirror for Zig releases at http://mirrors.nektro.net/zig/. https://github.com/mlugg/setup-zig was testflighting what would eventually become the https://ziglang.org/download/community-mirrors/ system and I wanted a browsable directory of all past versions. At time of writing it has 0.11, 0.12, 0.13, all of 0.14-dev, 0.14, 0.14.1, all of 0.15-dev so far. This isn’t a tutorial per se since this setup isn’t actually eligible for the Community Mirrors listing (as it queries for new versions on a cron job instead of on request), but it works for me and sharing is caring so here it is in the hopes it may be helpful to someone else or any potential future version of myself....

Lately I’ve been building some side projects using USWDS, or US Web Design System and it has been going great. They have a pretty good selection of components and mix together very well. Most recently I wanted to use the Accordion component but was faced to see it was using <div> elements and required using the provided JS bundle in order to perform its collapse and expand functionality. As a developer in the future I had a feeling we could build it natively with <details> so that’s exactly what I set out to do....

There have been quite a few number of times where the default layout algorithm of the <table> element has surprised me. Most particularly how there isn’t much control on the width of columns. There seems to be some CSS workarounds for this but in 2025 we have display: grid. Is there any way we can use that with tables? As it turns out, there sure is! Thanks to subgrid we can keep the HTML markup of our table but have fine-grained control over layout with this below class and a single grid-template-columns definition....

As an avid contriubtor to open source, I accrue a lot of branches in my local Git repos. However once the PR has been merged upstream I wanted an easy way to clean up. This new command (usually ran from master/main) will enumerate over all other branches and delete them. git-deleteallotherbranches() { git branch | grep -v $(git branch --show-current) | xargs -L1 git branch -D } Happy coding!...

As an avid contriubtor to open source, both in my own repositories and others', I interact with Git a lot and need to submit changes to those projects. If one such project happens to be on GitHub, then those changes need to go in a standalone branch before submission. Following up from my previous articles, I’m finally at a command I’ve been very excited to share about. It took a few tries to nail this down but ever since I did, it’s been indispensable....

As an avid contriubtor to open source, both in my own repositories and others', I interact with Git a lot and need to submit changes to those projects. If one such project happens to be on GitHub, then those changes need to go in a standalone branch before submission. This is a very light addition on top of yesterday’s post where we defined git-newbranchname but this one has just as much joined its spot in my toolbox so I wanted to give it its own moment (URL) to shine....

As an avid contriubtor to open source, both in my own repositories and others', I interact with Git a lot and need to submit changes to those projects. If one such project happens to be on GitHub, then those changes need to go in a standalone branch before submission. For single file changes the GitHub on-site editor is often sufficient however the branch name will be something like patch-1, patch-2, etc and incrementing up as you make more....

Hey y’all, in our last installment I showed off the first “real application” coming out of Magnolia Desktop and today I wanted to show some screenshots for a new app aptly named ImageViewer. Just like many other operating systems I feel that a user should not have to open a web browser in order to view the pictures on their computer. To this end we now have the ImageViewer program. There is still much work to do but as of today it contains fully custom working implementations for BMP, QOI, TGA, PNG, and JPG....

https://mastodon.social/@nektro/110857823907433264 I’ve been working on a nice catalog of demos for Magnolia Desktop, but it now has reached a point where I made real app: Calculator This has been a long time coming since my first introductory post to Magnolia Desktop over a year ago both because a lot of life happened and other projects took precendence for a while. A myriad of other demos have been added in that time and if you check mastodon I posted that about a month ago....

As the developer of a source package manager (for the reference point of this article) rather than one of a system package manager (eg apt, apk, pacman, nix) it is very easy for me to prioritize the users who only build their apps from source by running zigmod fetch and zig build, either locally or in CI. Zig already makes a lot of headway in ensuring this is a just-works experience and Zigmod fits in snuggly....