What is a good admin panel design and is it worth your time? — They live in the deepest and darkest corners of the internet. Always in the background. Never seen by the majority of normal users. No, I’m not talking about porn or the dark web. I’m talking about admin panels and dashboards. These days, almost every website has some type of configuration…

A 1,500-year-old game is now conquering the internet — Inspired by the recent Netflix hit The Queen’s Gambit, millions of people are getting into chess. Chess websites, content creation, and esport events are booming. It may not have 100 champions, 50 weapons, or crazy explosions, but it has an unrivaled tactical depth, which makes it not only a…

How to use the Twitter API to track your follows and unfollows — Are you posting regularly on Twitter? Do you get the occasional follower here and there? Are they unfollowing a few days later because you didn’t follow them back? Enough with that! Let’s find out who is unfollowing so we can burn voodoo dolls with their names… oh, sorry, I’m getting…

The Netflix drama series shows the struggles of an orphan on her way to become the best chess player in the world — As I was scrolling through Netflix, a new thumbnail caught my eye: A beautiful woman sitting behind a chessboard. This had me intrigued. I love chess and as it so happens beautiful women. I started watching and got immediately hooked. The Queen’s Gambit follows the life and career of Beth…

Sparrow WebGL Devlog 15: Outlines — Think about any website, application, or game: Almost every interactable element has some effect when you hover over it with your mouse. This is a very important hint for the user that the element does something when you click on it. Adding a hover effect in normal web development is…

How should he be punished? — I’ve been following the Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) criminal trial for the last few weeks. After the spectacular collapse of the second largest cryptocurrency exchange FTX last year, he was indicted with several crimes including wire fraud, securities fraud, commodities fraud, and money laundering. His coconspirators Caroline Ellison, Gary Wang, and…

Sparrow WebGL Devlog 14: Billboards — WebGL tutorial style — Imagine an NPC in a video game. You can see their name above their head. Now move a few steps and look at the NPC again. You can still see and read their name. Just like Mona Lisa’s eyes, the text always faces you no matter where you go. This…

A simple material system and real-time object transforms — Sparrow WebGL Devlog 13 — Materials are an essential concept in computer graphics. They are used to describe how the surface of an object looks and interacts with light. From 3D modeling programs like Blender to game engines like Unreal, they all use materials. Last week, I finally started to work on a new 3D…

Sparrow WebGL Devlog 12: Sky, lighting, fog, and water options with new UI features — Real-time feedback is extremely valuable when tweaking options. When you edit an image and change the brightness you expect to see the result immediately. The same applies to graphics programming. You can set the options in the source code, but this requires refreshing your browser to see the effects in…