Photo by Vinicius "amnx" Amano
The other day I was creating some Gists for a project and stumbled upon the discover page which lists recently published public Gists.
I was always aware that you have the option of creating either a public or private Gist but didn't realise there was a place where you could just browse publicly created ones.
It's quite fascinating to see what gets published and also quite shocking what gets (probably accidentally) shared.
I came across small HTML pages, CSS animations, JavaScript challenges, games, logs, and even sensitive information like SSH keys and AWS credentials.
Here are some of the weird and wonderful things I found.
Dodecahedrons
This Gist contains some JavaScript to create some interesting looking dodecahedron shapes that are animated and are illuminated based on the mouse position.
Here's a demo:
Background CSS Animation
I kept seeing a lot of these background gradient animations Gists popping up.
I converted one into a Codepen as a demo:
It turns out the Gists are created from a Gradient creator found at https://www.gradient-animator.com/ which is pretty cool so check it out if you want to create some animated gradients.
Calculator Project
Creating a Calculator with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript is almost a rite of passage for developers and it's always nice to see examples of people's work.
It's not the most fully-functional JavaScript calculator out there but I would wager that whoever created it was jolly pleased with the results.
Is it snowing in Zugspitze?
This Gist is a simple Python script that makes a call to the OpenWeatherMap API and let's you know whether it's snowing on the German mountain of Zugspitze (the highest peak of the Wetterstein Mountains).
It turns out it snows a lot in Zugspitze.
You could of course adapt this to tell you the weather somewhere else.
Docker Cheat Sheet
This Gist has a really useful Docker cheat sheet you might find useful
JavaScript Physics
Here's an example of how you could model some real-world physics like movement in JavaScript. Plus it's quite cool to push all the obstacles over!
Matrix Rain
I came across this Gist when trying to search for animations. It's quite old (as is the film) but it popped up because it had been recently updated I think.
Here's a demo:
Chocolate Cake Recipe
I haven't had a chance to try this one yet, but it sounds delicious.
If you get a chance to make this, let me know how it tastes 😀
Keyboard Events
I quite like this basic keyboard handler written in TypeScript because it is formatted so beautifully.
There's a couple of things that I believe could make it better (TypeScript-wise) but let's just take a moment to appreciate the presentation of this bit of code.
Tiny Web GL
I found this bit of Web GL code in this Gist.
It took a bit of playing around with the dependencies to get it working but I managed to a version of the code to demo in Codepen:
I've always meant to get round to doing some 3D / WebGL stuff and this gave me a bit of inspiration on how to get started.
Flickgame
This was definitely one of the crazier things I found when looking at lots of public Gists.
Upon opening the Gist, I found some JSON which appeared to relate to a game played at Flickgame.org.
Again, after some research and experimentation, I managed to play the game from the Gist here:
https://www.flickgame.org/play.html?p=b46817105c89e99b354f116b06b5b3b8
I still don't really understand it.
Puzzles
So this Gist is the JavaScript solution to a puzzle but it led me to discover a new site which actually looks like quite an intriguing way to learn some coding skills: http://alexnisnevich.github.io/untrusted/
Command Line Exercises
I came across this Gist which looks like someone has been given some exercises to complete on the command line which is good for practice.
I recreated the Gist without their answers here if you want to have a go at them yourself.
Candy Cornfetti
Want some dancing candy confetti (or cornfetti)?
Of course you do.
Interview Challenge
Ever wonder what developers get asked to do as a coding challenge at interviews?
This Gist seems to suggest it was such a challenge that someone had to complete at interview.
MicroModal
This final Gist introduced me to the MicroModal library which I had not come across before.
It's nothing earth-shattering but a useful library to know about nonetheless.
Here's a demo:
Conclusion
There's definitely some weird and wonderful things that can be found in public Gists.
I found some impressive bits of code which gave me some things to think about and also some useful tools.
Just a gentle reminder not to save anything sensitive into a Gist which is public.
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