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Feeds from people participating at the IndieWebCamp Düsseldorf, May 2025.

A public list by dan.

Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott

Go Deep

Do you know the feeling when you know an album so well that you always anticipate the next bar of a song and when the song ends, you can already hear the first beats of the next song playing in your head? The best albums are the ones, where it might take quite a while to get...

Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott

What Would This Look Like If It Were Easy?

Tim Ferriss just released the audiobook of his book “Tribe of Mentors”. The book contains the answers to 11 questions he sent out to hundreds of the world’s “top performers” from across all possible fields of expertise. In the introduction, which you can also listen to in Ti...

Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott

Debugging HTML With Advanced CSS Selectors

Writing HTML is hard. At least writing semantically sound, valid HTML is. This might come as a surprise to those who only scratch the surface of what HTML really can do. What can be so hard about a few elements, right? At least it isn’t an object-oriented, multi-paradigm pro...

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So, no German Corona Warn App for me: my iPhone 6 Plus is stuck on iOS 12. And you need to be able to run iOS 13 (which came out last year) and above to run it. A shame.

I’m probably in the minority of iPhone users on such an old device, though. Still, I wonder how many people have a similar problem (at least Android devices only require Android 6, which is five years old). And how many people won’t even bother installing it.

Furthermore, the seemingly extraordinary high development costs of €20 million - plus an additional €48 million running costs until the end of 2021 - makes me wonder whether the money could have been used more wisely. Time will tell I guess.

Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott

Becoming a Tyrant

It is one of the most emotional and finest moments in “The Last Dance”, Netflix’s documentary series about Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls of the Nineties: The interviewer asks Michael Jordan if he thinks that the intensity at which he played the game has come at the ex...

Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott

Release

One of the things I’ve been thinking a lot about is how to know when something is ready. A website, an article, a song, a painting – whatever it is, how do you know that it is ripe for publication? There are many answers to that question and maybe everyone of us has their ow...

Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott

Smooth Operations

How many connections are there in a team of two? One, of course. In a team of three? Three, of course. A team of four? Six. A team of five? Ten, already. What about a team of ten people? A team of ten has 66 connections. Yes, sixty-six. This basic concept of network theory ...

Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott

Feck Perfuction

There are books that you read once and never open again. There are even more books that you start to read and somehow never finish. I have a lot of them. And there are book with a lot of images in them, so there is not so much to read. I have a lot of them, too. But then, th...

Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott

There Is No Secret Code

Back in design school, I spent days – weeks even – trying to crack the secret code of a given topic. Typography? Once I know all the rules and all the typefaces, I’ll be a well-versed typographer. Logo design? Once I have looked at enough logos to understand what the essence of logo design is, I’ll be able to design great logos myself. Flash? Once I've fully understood all the concepts and methods of ActionScript, I’ll have mastered Flash for good.

Except that there is no secret code. There is only cutting your teeth. There is only doing. There is only practice. There is only learning what you have to learn to get the job done. There is no right or wrong. There is only what works and what doesn’t.

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This is the 19th post of my 100 days of writing series. You can find a list of all posts here.

Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott

Resilient Systems vs Humans

There was this strange sound. Clack, clack, clack! Was it coming from the tires? Clack, clack, clack! Just a few minutes after we hit the Autobahn to drive back home all the way across Germany. Clack, clack, clack! Maybe I’ll better have a look. I pulled over and stopped at ...

Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott

The Web of Privilege

My father likes to say: “Man gewöhnt sich an jeden Scheiß,“ which translates to something along the lines of “eventually, any shit grows on you.“ He often uses it jokingly and with a wink, yet there is much truth to it. As human beings, we are extremely good at growing accus...

Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott

CSS Custom Properties Fail Without Fallback

Today I learned! Jeremy Keith wrote about an interesting detail about CSS custom properties, also known as CSS variables, that he learned from Lea Verou: They don’t support the Cascade when a value is invalid. Or, as Lea writes in her article Hybrid positioning with CSS vari...

Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott

Building the Inclusive Web Together

It’s been over a year now that, after reading an article by Ethan Marcotte, I wrote about why we all need to do better to make the Web truly inclusive. Ethan had shared the results of WebAIM’s 2019 study covering the state of accessibility on the Web and the results were dev...

Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott

The Importance of Being Inauthentic

“Just be authentic!” I’m sure you’ve heard that advice before. Maybe you also know some people, who proudly proclaim that they always like to be authentic and always openly tell people what they are thinking. There is only one problem with being authentic: It can be highly d...

Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott

Welcome to the 21st Century

My late grandmother was born in 1913. When she was my age, she had already lived through the Great Depression, the Spanish flu pandemic, hyperinflation, the fall of the Weimar Republic, two world wars, and, with the Nazi regime and the Holocaust, the darkest chapter in Germa...

Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott

Balancing Risk

Life is full of risks. The risk to make a wrong decision. The risk to lose. The risk to fail. The risk to mention too many risks in the first paragraph of a blog post. There are some risks that most of us understandably want to reduce as much as possible. The risk to die, fo...

Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott

Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes

Joschi Kuphal shared an amazing video on Twitter this morning. It is a documentary about an exercise that the school teacher, lecturer, and diversity trainer Jane Elliot devised in response to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968. The exercise is called “Blue...

Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott

Designing and Making

One of the reasons for Apple’s success in the years when they invented breakthrough products like the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad, was the way they created their products. At the heart of the design process was the design studio where lots of models and prototypes of ever...

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Soundtrack for the weekend: Body Count - Cop Killer (Live at Hellfest 2018) YouTube video: Body Count - Cop Killer (Live at Hellfest 2018) Sepultura - Anticop (Live) YouTube video: Sepultura - Anticop (Live)