Hidden Features

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JavaScript Advanced

for await...of: Paginated APIs as a Simple Loop

Async generators hide the pagination bookkeeping - cursors, hasMore flags, page counters - behind a clean loop that fetches pages only as you consume them.

Jan 22, 2025 2 min 1,692 Read →

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JavaScript Beginner

toSorted() and Friends: Arrays That Stop Mutating Under You

sort() silently rearranges the original array - a bug factory in shared state. ES2023 shipped non-mutating twins for the worst offenders, plus with() for single-item replacement.

Jan 3, 2025 2 min 1,156 Read →

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JavaScript Beginner

??=, ||= and &&=: The Assignment Operators Nobody Told You About

ES2021 added three assignment operators that collapse the most common if-statements in JavaScript. Knowing when ??= beats ||= is the part that matters.

Dec 17, 2024 2 min 2,356 Read →

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jQuery Advanced

Write Your Own jQuery Selectors like :external

jQuery lets you define custom pseudo-selectors - :external, :blank, :offscreen - that work in every $() call, filter() and delegation rule in your codebase.

Nov 25, 2024 2 min 726 Read →

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PHP Beginner

"First Day of Next Month": PHP Date Phrases You Should Steal

strtotime and DateTime parse a small English grammar - "last day of next month", "second friday of january" - that replaces whole functions of calendar math.

Oct 30, 2024 2 min 3,185 Read →

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PHP Intermediate

PHP's match(true) Pattern Replaces if/elseif Chains

match() is not just a stricter switch. Feed it true as the subject and every arm becomes an arbitrary condition - an elegant, exhaustive replacement for elseif ladders.

Sep 24, 2024 2 min 2,014 Read →

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PHP Intermediate

The PDO Fetch Modes That Delete Half Your Data-Mapping Code

FETCH_KEY_PAIR, FETCH_UNIQUE, FETCH_GROUP and FETCH_COLUMN reshape query results at fetch time - the id-indexed maps and grouped arrays you keep building with foreach loops.

Sep 11, 2024 2 min 2,113 Read →

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CSS Beginner

The Pseudo-Elements Everyone Forgets: ::marker and ::selection

List bullets and text-highlight colors are both fully styleable with dedicated pseudo-elements - no list-style: none rebuilds, no browser defaults clashing with your brand.

Aug 15, 2024 2 min 4,256 Read →

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CSS Advanced

Animating CSS Gradients (Yes, Really) with @property

Gradients famously cannot be transitioned - until you teach the browser that your custom property is a color or angle. @property makes CSS variables animatable with types.

Jul 27, 2024 2 min 2,236 Read →

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CSS Advanced

content-visibility: The Rendering Shortcut Nobody Uses

One CSS property tells the browser to skip layout and paint for off-screen sections entirely. On long pages it can cut initial rendering work dramatically - no virtualization library needed.

Jul 20, 2024 2 min 3,697 Read →

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CSS Intermediate

CSS Counters: Auto-Number Anything Without Touching HTML

Numbered steps, section headings like "2.3", even line numbers - CSS counts elements natively, updates automatically when content is reordered, and needs zero markup changes.

Jul 1, 2024 2 min 3,736 Read →

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CSS Intermediate

:has() Is the Parent Selector We Waited Twenty Years For

Style a form field wrapper based on the input inside it, a card based on whether it has an image, a layout based on its content - all in pure CSS with :has().

May 28, 2024 2 min 4,708 Read →