Tips & Tricks

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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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PHP Beginner

json_encode() Has Flags That Fix Its Worst Defaults

Escaped slashes, mangled unicode, silent failures returning false - json_encode ships with defaults from another era, and five flags fix all of it.

Nov 3, 2024 2 min 728 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

Render Your Email Templates with Output Buffering

ob_start() plus include turns any PHP file into a string-returning template - the exact mechanism template engines are built on, useful raw for emails, PDFs and HTML fragments.

Oct 2, 2024 2 min 727 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 Beginner

array_column() Does Way More Than Grab a Column

The third parameter turns array_column into a re-indexing tool, it reads object properties, and combined with array_map it handles most of your collection reshaping.

Sep 15, 2024 2 min 1,454 Read →

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CSS Beginner

gap Works in Flexbox Too (Kill Your Margin Hacks)

The lobotomized owl, :not(:last-child) margins, negative-margin wrappers - all workarounds for spacing between flex items. gap has worked in flexbox everywhere since 2021.

Aug 24, 2024 2 min 3,468 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 Intermediate

Fluid Typography with One Line of clamp()

Stop writing a font-size media query for every breakpoint. clamp() scales type smoothly with the viewport between a floor and a ceiling you control.

Jul 5, 2024 2 min 4,492 Read →

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CSS Beginner

The Two-Word Fix for Ugly Headline Wrapping

A headline that wraps leaving one lonely word on the second line looks broken. text-wrap: balance makes the browser distribute the words evenly, and text-wrap: pretty fixes paragraphs.

Jun 14, 2024 2 min 851 Read →

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CSS Beginner

Theme Every Checkbox and Radio with One CSS Line

Custom checkbox hacks - hidden inputs, pseudo-element ticks, sprite images - solved a problem that accent-color now handles in a single declaration.

Jun 5, 2024 2 min 3,865 Read →

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JavaScript Beginner

Serialize an Entire Form in One Line with FormData

new FormData(form) reads every field in one call, posts natively with fetch, and Object.fromEntries turns it into JSON. You may never write form.elements loops again.

Apr 25, 2024 2 min 3,310 Read →