Punderline 34: Cooking issues

Recently, I was trying to figure out a way to create my own arbitrary precision floating point arithmetic library. For those of you unaware, floating point simply means numbers are represented in scientific notation and that allows computers to express really large or really small numbers and everything in between. However, one problem of floating point numbers is that they are normally represented with a limited amount of precision.

With the rise in utility-first CSS libraries, I wanted to dive deeper into why that’s the case, and why we I think it’s valuable to re-invent the wheel.

Note that while I’ve done my best to make sure the content here is correct, there may be slight inaccuracies. At time of publishing, there isn’t much documentation on the inner workings of modules in Firefox, but I’m planning on sending in a patch to the official Firefox docs.

I’m often surprised by the grand expectations that younger coders believe is necessary for success at Hackathon events. Here, in no particular order, are some of the most common misconceptions and tips I’ve learned.