Hi there. My name is Matei Stanca and I make websites and stuff.

Featured project

Neurocracy

Project media
A screenshot of the Omnipedia main page on October 1st, 2049: a message from the founder, an excerpt of an article, and a few news items of the day.
A screenshot of the Omnipedia main page on October 1st, 2049: a message from the founder, an excerpt of an article, and a few news items of the day.

Neurocracy is a project conceived by Joannes Truyens, Younès Rabii, and myself, featuring visual direction and illustrations by Alice Duke and Ollie Tarbuck in addition to a range of futurist stories from contributing writers Leigh Alexander, Io Black, Holly Nielsen, Malka Older, Edward Smith, Axel Hassen Taiari, and Yudhanjaya Wijeratne. It aims to be equal parts interactive fiction and cautionary tale about the intersection of surveillance capitalism, big data, and authoritarianism.

Latest snippets

How I experience the web today

A mock up of a website with a lot of ads, a chat bot pop-up open, and various marketing widgets crowding the page.

Truly a living nightmare.

A great interactive demo showcasing just about all the major obnoxious dark patterns a lot of larger websites use to make our lives miserable. Not the dystopian future we were promised.

Don't attach tooltips to document.body

Instead of attaching tooltips directly to document.body, attach them to a predefined div in document.body.

BAD

Code language: HTML

<body>
    <!-- temporary div, vanishes when tooltips vanishes -->
    <div>my tooltip</div>
<body>

GOOD

Code language: HTML

<body>
    <!-- this div stays forever, just for attaching tooltips -->
    <div id="tooltips-container">
        <!-- temporary div, vanishes when tooltips vanishes -->
        <div>my tooltip</div>
    </div>
<body>

Introduction

Tooltips in our app were taking >80ms. And during this time, the main thread was blocked, you couldn’t interact with anything.

Other components like modal, popover, dropdown had similar performance issues. In some cases, a modal took more than 1 second to appear while making the UI unresponsive.

Read on in the source link for details.

js;dr

js;dr is JavaScript required; Didn’t Read.

Pages that are empty without JS: dead to history (archive-org), unreliable for search results (despite any search engine claims of JS support, check it yourself), and thus ignorable. No need to waste time reading or responding.

Also known as, if it’s not curlable, it’s not on the web.