sntran

I was brought in the other day to discuss building an app to automate audits, and the person pointed at an internal web app that was made by a person in ERP team, and called that amazing. I can see Claude signatures every where, but I just let them go with it.

It's getting real now that everyone can prompt to build things now and call themselves coders. I was even offered help from them.

Yes, but replying can be a pickle.

Looks like the Up button overlapping the X button.

No Konami code :(

For some reason, I feel sad. I was always fascinated when finding an article about newly found discoveries on Earth, and the comments from Hacker News were usually helpful and adding more to the stories.

Now, we talk about whether such discovery was written by LLM.

Does it really matter?

I'm working on a boring e-commerce site from scratch, with the boring stack of Phoenix Live View, PostgreSQL, HTML and CSS. You know, the boring stuffs.

I just don't use AI building it. It actually brings me joy amidst all these AI news and updates.

You will be surprised that there are lots of things you want to do yourself but haven't been able to (not just ability, but time and effort).

I think it will click once you actually sit down with the AI agent, toggle Plan mode, and just tell it what you want to do in couple of sentences. It will immediately start building up the plan, presenting it to you what it thinks is the right approach , with the steps to take, with open questions that you can look at and answers. Then send them back to the AI. Repeat. That process along would give you a progress way further than you try to do it by yourself.

You can tell it to start implementing step 1. And you pick it up from there. Very natural how you would approach an expert for help, but you can always audit.

I came across this repo while trying to find alternative to NimbleCSV, the go-to CSV parser for Elixir. NimbleCSV took 230s to parse a 250MB file with 35000 rows and 2000+ columns. RustyCSV took 1.7s.

It would be nice if there is an extension for VSCode or its forks that let you monitor your agent *running inside* your local machine, or VSCode adds support for it. I want to run agents on the codes I have open, not pushing them to a cloud "box" to run agents on there. But I do like being able to monitor or pick up the next steps from my phone.

Last time I tried to let AI build such extension, it told me that VSCode did not expose extension API to monitor AI chat.

I have just moved from a free environment in which I was able to use any AI harnesses or models to a strict enterprise environment.

I was shocked to realize how difficult it has been to have a GitHub CoPilot license on Azure. I mean, they're both Microsoft products. But no, the IT now has to figure out how to set up a GitHub enterprise, link to Azure subscription, and all that.

It's easy to look at one part of the HTML and see the Tailwind classes no different than inline styles.

But if you have to use `display: flex" in a lot of places, having the `flex` utility is better. And there are tons of such utilities with Tailwind.

When you inherit a front-end project for the Nth time, those `!important` become a nightmare.

Good luck with keeping it online. Somebody built `rar-stream` with Rust, and its GitHub is no longer there.

Between job searches, I'm working on implementing the WHATWG Web APIs on top of Elixir.

https://github.com/sntran/web

I love Elixir but I had been a JS developer by trade. Bridging that interface keeps my brain focusing on building instead of splitting between JS and Elixir.

Still a lot to do, but I love the progress so far. This puts the joy of building something back to me.

I built Signet.js because I wanted a reactive layer for high-performance edge applications that felt more like a browser standard than a "framework."

## The Architectural Context:

I’ve spent years working on high-performance websites and legacy CMS modernizations. I found that existing reactive frameworks often introduce excessive memory overhead or rigid DSLs that don't play well with bespoke, performant, or legacy-injected code. I wanted to see if I could build a "toolbox" instead of a "black box" that stays small.

## Design Philosophy & Trade-offs:

- Why `Proxy`? I initially explored `Object.defineProperty` to minimize bundle size, but I eventually pivoted to `Proxy`. While it adds a tiny bit of runtime trap cost, the engine-level optimizations in modern browsers make the performance impact negligible for UI cycles. More importantly, it allowed for clean, dynamic object handling without the "magic" workarounds required by descriptor-based reactivity. - Standards-First: I’m building Signet to be a thin orchestration layer. It currently leverages `@preact/signals-core` for its robustness, but the architecture is designed as a drop-in reactive layer. My roadmap is to align the internal primitive with the upcoming [TC39 Signals Proposal](https://github.com/tc39/proposal-signals), treating Signet as a bridge to native browser reactivity as it matures.

## Why did I build Signet instead of using [Alpine / petite-vue]?

The `petite-vue` Gap: Petite-vue was the gold standard for "sprinkling" interactivity, but with it no longer being maintained, there's a real need for a modern alternative that bridges the gap between pure HTML and heavy SPA frameworks.

Solving "DOM Pollution": A common friction point I found when moving to Alpine was the "messy DOM"—state-heavy applications often left behind excessive attributes and listeners that made the DOM feel cluttered. Signet is architected to be "DOM-transparent," ensuring that reactive bindings don't leave a trail of debris when components unmount.

Signal-First Architecture: By building Signet directly on a Signal primitive, I’m opting for a "Reactive-first" model. This is fundamentally cleaner than the directive-heavy, "magic-attribute" approach of previous libraries, leading to more predictable data flows and easier debugging.

## Memory Stability:

I ran a 10,000-component mount/unmount stress test using WeakRef to verify garbage collection. The results confirmed stable heap usage, proving that you can achieve leak-free reactivity with Proxy if you manage the dependency graph lifecycle correctly.

## A Note on Implementation:

I approached the development of Signet as a human architect utilizing AI agents for the implementation. My role was defining the constraints (e.g., bundle size limits, dependency lifecycle logic, memory stability) and enforcing the "clean DOM" architecture, while the AI handled the boilerplate and repetitive logic. This allowed me to iterate on the internal signal graph and performance testing at a speed that would have been impossible manually. This project is a deliberate experiment in "AI-assisted architecture"—where the human provides the technical constraints and domain expertise, and the AI acts as a high-speed implementation engine. I also let the AI implementor construct the full document site at https://sntran.github.io/signet.js/.

Just want to say that the idea of your app is so cool!

Very similar to Texas. It's all about the hours. Will take 4 years to get to journeyman while working 40 hours on the field.

I feel similarly. Being laid off and doing job search recently got me thinking about switching to become an electrician. I don't mind starting over and lower wage, but mortgage and family depending on me still hold me off.

I could not even see 1 opening move. Clicking on one from the home page shows me the login.

A web-based 3d modelling app.

I do. I was not into WordPress until recently. Gutenberg has been very easy to get started versus writing a lot PHP. While there are still annoyances, I have managed to work around. Maybe my projects have not been that complicated, but I feel like the Gutenberg team is heading the right way.

How much for a VPS that supports bandwidth to access those 32T data frequently?

The new CSS Overflow Specification 5 has scroll-marker that can replace anchor link. From my short test in Chrome 135, they seem to scroll to the right place.

This is pretty slow compared to libxslt.

When VR was starting to gain attraction, I had this idea of a virtual playing card deck. Everybody joining the game could move the phone around to see the virtual cards either on their hand or on the surface chosen as the "table". The idea came from the need to play cards in the hall of college department without showing that we were playing cards.Unfortunately, my college education did not equip me enough skills to make that happen. I'm glad that somebody else made this. Looks very nice!

We can now transition to height auto: https://css-tricks.com/transitioning-to-auto-height/

Cloudflare has a thing called HTMLRewriter that is both a streaming HTML parser and selector for changing it. It's very efficient and let you change only the places you need.

For your example, you can just match in `[id^="insert"]` and add the actual firstName value in the handler.

I use it alot on the server side, but it's for JavaScript side, or Rust if you use the lower level lol-html.

Chrome on Android does not work either.

I wonder how useful this is to be placed inside a van for that tiny "bathroom" area. We drive most of the day so the clothes can be dry in there, if the energy usage is efficient.

Of course, clothes can be hung outside for the warmth of the sun, but this seems way cooler.

Wait until you add support for encryption.