Felix

@fb55

Climbing student, rock programmer

London, UKfeedic.comJoined March 2009

139 Following

244 Followers

Felix’s Tweets

In our first five minute maintainer video, we get to chat with

@fb55

! Watch to learn more about Felix’s journey in open source: bit.ly/3J5ra5k

Felix

@fb55

May 2, 2022

I am in love with the app icon of

parse5@7.0.0 is out, which has been a big focus of mine since taking over as a maintainer five months ago. All the deets at

github.com

Release v7.0.0 · inikulin/parse5

Welcome to parse5@7.0.0!

This is a huge release with many changes, features and fixes. From an organisational perspective, the most important change is that parse5 is now maintained by a team, co...

Felix

@fb55

Apr 10, 2022

TIL that source maps can point to URLs for source files, using the `sourceRoot` property. This allows you to publish NPM packages with source maps, *without* including the original source. For TypeScript, this does the trick:

Felix

@fb55

Mar 19, 2022

We’ve had an Amazon Fresh store for a few months now right next to our home. My favorite part of the cashier-less experience is that I don’t feel awkward bringing in groceries from a different store. Amazing for combining trips.

Felix

@fb55

Jan 20, 2022

I am curious how Telegram emoji codes for calls are generated. This one from last night perfectly summarized the call, before it even happened. And that wasn’t the first time.

Felix

@fb55

Jan 20, 2022

I have considered writing my own app to deal with bank cards on the web. 1Password is already a big step up over iCloud Keychain, as that doesn’t support storing verification numbers. But it still feels like an afterthought of a feature.

Bank card handling in

@1Password

really has so much low-hanging fruit. (1) Please flag that cards are about to expire. (2) Why aren’t card networks inferred from the number? (3) Why aren’t card numbers validated? (4) And why can’t I just scan my card with my camera?

Seeing this Gmail auto-complete: My heart goes out to all of the knowledge workers stuck in the same meeting for weeks.

Felix

@fb55

Nov 25, 2021

I am genuinely hyped about what's to come with WebAssembly and AssemblyScript. For now, the complexity of calling the module, and the need to use Node >= 14.8, ultimately made me put a pin in this.

I was able to call the WASM-ified module and extract enough information that I do think things work. And yes, the speed-up is dramatic (~80% faster or so, although result extraction is going to reduce that number).

Also, this is when I learned that I really want top-level `await` support when using WASM in a module. Otherwise, all of the module's exports would have to be `async`, to wait for WASM to initialise. This is only available in current Node 14 releases.

Once things compiled, calling the WASM module turned out to be much more complicated than expected. This really is the equivalent of writing a foreign-function interface, with afaict no tooling actually advanced enough to help.

AssemblyScript is a little bit weird in the subset of TS it supports, but mostly works as advertised. Porting the code mostly involved fixing up types, with very little logic that had to be changed.

Enter WebAssembly: With the `br_table` instruction, all of these branches should become constant time operations. My module is written in TypeScript, so I decided to port the core logic to AssemblyScript.

The initial idea came when profiling the module, and seeing that it spends most of its time on selecting branches for enum values. This would be trivial to optimise with a jump table, but alas JS doesn't have them.

I tried to introduce WebAssembly into one of my NodeJS modules today. Tl;dr it isn't ready for prime time yet.

In other news, I finished The Outer Worlds yesterday. Such a treat, it really felt like a reimagining of the Firefly TV show.

Felix

@fb55

Nov 18, 2021

After spending quite some time living & working in Silicon Valley, me and my wife decided to relocate to London earlier this year. We are now slowly building up our own company. Nothing to announce yet, but I do believe we have some promising ideas.

Felix

@fb55

Nov 18, 2021

Also reactions for releases are amazing to see. Actual people reacting really takes away the feeling of shouting into a void.

One new thing that is adding a lot of joy is that people are willing to sponsor these packages. GitHub Sponsors does a fantastic job of making you feel valued. It is great that there is more than just an abstract download number, and more people yelling at you when you f up.

Take github.com/fb55/entities. I adapted an approach of decoding entities from the parse5 module, which lead to ~2.5x speed-ups by using a more intelligent lookup map 🤯

github.com

GitHub - fb55/entities: Encode & decode HTML & XML entities with ease & speed

Encode & decode HTML & XML entities with ease & speed - GitHub - fb55/entities: Encode & decode HTML & XML entities with ease & speed

I have rediscovered my joy of working on open source software recently. For some reason, the node modules I wrote in high school are still incredibly popular, and after years of half-hearted updates, I have started taking them seriously again.

I've been thinking about tweeting again for a bit now, but never knew how to get started. Decided to skip doing a catchup thread, and just say: I'm back!