February 2021 Recap

This month was considerably slower than the previous one. Both in projects/demos and also in activities outside of development. It was also a heck of a month: the worst cold front in Texas in decades, no electricity or water, plus a heavier workload at my job... a lot of fun.

But life moved on. We got electricity and water back, the cold weather passed,... and well, work will be work. 😋

Here are some of the things I did this past February.

Tech Things

Project Menu

I created a small menu button with subsections based on a design from @adircode. It is animated, mobile- and keyboard-friendly and supports live changes to reduced motion settings.

The initial prototype used vanilla JS, but then I developed a version in React. I want to do a version in Svelte to learn that library.

CSS Dino Game

This month I also built a new CSS game: a version of the Chrome no-connection dinosaur game using only HTML and CSS (if you like that type of stuff, I have a collection that you will like).

Unfortunately, I used CSS variables inside an animation, and the only browser that supports them is Chrome. Not Firefox or Safari, which is a bummer.

CSS Peasant

A cartoon drawing of a peasant done in HTML and CSS. Responsive and slightly animated (it blinks and tries to add a "breathing" sensation).

Snowfall effect with HTML and CSS

I developed this animation of snow falling with HTML and CSS in less than 10 minutes... and then wrote a post sharing how the animation worked.

Later, with some feedback from users from DEV, I modified the animation to make it smaller (at least the CSS) and more efficient.

Almond.CSS (update)

Almond.CSS is a collection of class-less CSS styles. Like a framework but without the framework part: no need to learn classes or anything (there's none), just element styles. In the end, it's basically an opinionated CSS reset file with some customization.

I developed it a few months back and needed some tweaking after browsers change the default styles for some elements, so I went ahead and made some needed updates. You can see a demo here.

Non-Tech Things

This month I only finished 4 books:

Ready Player Two was entertaining in general, but the action moves too slow at some points to go super fast at some others suddenly... House of M was a re-read; everyone is talking about Wandavision (I haven't watched the show), so I went back to read the graphic novel.