I’m a pretty avid podcast listener, and one of my recent favorites are bringing Vaidehi Joshi’s blog series base.csto life, with another fave of mine, CodeNewbie’s Saron Yitbarek. It’s called the base.cs podcast, and on Episode 3, Saron and Vaidehi talked about Hexes.

These hexes aren’t what you may be thinking about…

miss celie puts a hex on em

In this case, we’re talking about a Hexadecimal number, or a Base16 number.

What I learned from this podcast specifically was about the magical numbers 8, 16, and 256, which makes conversion between bits, bytes, and hex codes perfect, 🍰 scrumptious even! 🍰

Additionally, as developers began using hex codes in their work, they created a set of codes that could universally mean something, and these codes are called HexSpeak.

I found a list of HexSpeak terms and here are a few of my favorite:

0x8BADF00D - BADFOOD
0xC00010FF - COOLOFF
0xDEADC0DE - DEADCODE

SPOILER ALERT: This is a CSS code.. based in HexSpeak
#BADA55 - BADASS!

(I actually got that last one from @wesbos)

In base.cs Episode 4, they talked over how Hexadecimals are used to define colors, and how to translate them out, so the above hexcode #BADA55 is actually rgb(186,218,85). Here’s how that’s calculated:

# NOTE this is pseudocode!

r=0xBA, g=0xDA, b=0x55

A.to_denary = 10 # Perfect A!
B.to_denary = 11

# B is in what we'd think of as the "tens" place,
# so we multiply that number by 16
11 * 16 = 176

# We then add "A" to the value from B,
# and get r's value, 186! WOO WOO
176 + 10 = 186

-----
# RGB's B value may seem like it should just be 55,
# but we're actually looking at 0x55, a hexadecimal number,
# so let's see how we translate that into denary:

5.to_denary = 5
5.to_denary = 5

# Again, we have the first five in the "tens" place:
5 * 16 = 80

# Then we add the second five:
80 + 5 = 85

Here’s a cool site to check out hexspeak/leetspeak color codes at BADA55.io so you can color with #C0FFEE, and other cool words…

And if you want to read more in-depth about hexcodes, check out Vaidehi’s Basecs post on the subject:

Amazing work, Vaidehi & Saron! you are both indeed #BADA55, Perfect 0xA’s!!