Plurrrr

In Golang, nil is an interesting value. You may be familiar with Go’s philosophy of making the “zero value” meaningful.

Uninitialized variables and fields are set to the zero value. For example, if you have a uninitialized variable of an integer type, its value will always default to 0. An uninitialized string will be the empty string. Likewise, the zero value for a pointer is nil.

Working in a shell usually involves executing the same set of commands again and again; what changes is the order in which the commands are executed, and the parameters that are passed to the command. One way to improve shell workflows is finding patterns in the execution order of commands and extracting those into little scripts; this can often be helpful and is part of what makes working in a shell so powerful. Another way is to understand how the parameters are added and try to simplify this; that’s what I will focus mostly on in this blog post.

I had a neat realization recently: Buttons are the “killer feature” of the web.

Every significant thing we do online, from ordering food to scheduling an appointment to playing a video, involves pressing a button. Buttons (and the forms they submit) make the web dynamic and interactive and powerful.

But so many of those buttons are lackluster. They can trigger enormous changes in the real world, but they don't feel tangible at all. The feel like dull everyday pixels.

In this tutorial, we'll build a whimsical 3D button.