Tag: self

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Announcing Alchemize v3 — faster, smarter, and sleeker than ever

Alchemize is a lightweight tool to minify and pretty-print your code snippets from around the web. It’s perfect for developers to format messy API responses, debug broken or unreadable code, learn new JS tricks from the Terser engine, or share polished snippets with teammates.

The application has a minimal interface and shows some HTML code with buttons to minify & pretty-print

Initially written in jQuery and after a good ten years since the last release, I thought it was time to rewrite my little code playground from scratch.

The new Alchemize is based on Preact and Vite for a more modern developer experience, uses the same editor component as VSCode, and natively supports light and dark mode. It’s been upgraded to mainly use Terser and Prettier under the hood, which brings updated JS & CSS support and should make these a lot easier to maintain going forward.

♻️ Modern tech stack A complete under-the-hood revamp for better performance and future-ready support.
🛠️ Industry-standard tooling Built on trusted technologies like Prettier and Terser for formatting and minification.
✨ Latest JavaScript and CSS support Enjoy the most up-to-date syntax features and improved styling support.
📚 Better language detection Alchemize now does a smarter job at figuring out what kind of code you’re working with.

What people said about v2

Before Google killed off Chrome apps, the app had a loyal following on the Chrome Web Store where it got a bunch of great reviews which really made my day:

“Great for checking, untangling, prettifying, and minifying JSON and other formats.”

Richard H

“Very helpful, small and effective, without the bloat of a full editor — with great error-catching capability.”

Stefan C

“I’m using this more and more now. Perfect way to make my code look nice before sharing it.”

Andrew L

🚀 Try Alchemize v3 today

The new version is live — no installation required unless you want to install it as a desktop app. Just open the app, paste your code, and experience the magic:

👉 Launch Alchemize

And if you spot anything missing or have ideas for improvement, do get in touch or fork the project on GitHub.

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Announcing Deep Time – an epic story more than 65,000 years in the making

On Sunday we launched the project we’ve been working on for the last little while, Deep Time. It’s an immersive story of the knowledge, art and ingenuity of Australia’s First Nations peoples — told like never before.

It brings together knowledge from dozens of knowledge holders in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, incredible art, design, and if I say so myself, some pretty slick dev work. It was very, very much a team effort and I feel privileged to work with some of the most creative and accomplished colleagues across the journo, design, and dev spectrum. Check out the About page for a full list of credits.

For some technical details it’s implemented with Sveltekit and adaptor-static. Aside from the homepage most of the animation is hand-coded, including the scroll-tied transitions. Josh did some amazing work manipulating SVGs on the fly in Tell Me A Story, and I had fun implementing a pseudorandom starfield in Time that fades in and out as you read the story.

I feel like there’s a lot of interesting dev work I could talk about, but for the moment I just wanted to share it with you because it’s been a massive effort and I’m really proud of what we achieved. I hope you check it out:

Deep Time