Wednesday session

Monday session

Ever since Salter Cane recorded the songs on Deep Black Water I’ve been itching to play them live. At our album launch gig last Friday, I finally got my chance.

It felt soooo good! It helped that we had the best on-stage sound ever (note to the bands of Brighton, Leon at the Hope and Ruin is fantastic at doing the sound). The band were tight, the songs sounded great live, and I had an absolute blast.

I made a playlist of songs to be played in between bands. It set the tone nicely. As well as some obvious touchstones like 16 Horsepower and Joy Division, I made sure to include some local bands we’re fond of, like The Equitorial Group, Mudlow, Patients, and The Roebucks.

A UI library for people who love HTML, powered by modern CSS and Web Components.

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I really enjoyed rocking out with Salter Cane on Friday night—thanks to everyone who came along!

Most obviously, aliveness is what generally feels absent from the written and visual outputs of ChatGPT and its ilk, even when they’re otherwise of high quality. I’m not claiming I couldn’t be fooled into thinking AI writing or art was made by a human (I’m sure I already have been); but that when I realise something’s AI, either because it’s blindingly obvious or when I find out, it no longer feels so alive to me. And that this change in my feelings about it isn’t irrelevant: that it means something.

More subtly, it feels like our own aliveness is what’s at stake when we’re urged to get better at prompting LLMs to provide the most useful responses. Maybe that’s a necessary modern skill; but still, the fact is that we’re being asked to think less like ourselves and more like our tools.

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A bunch of the UX London speakers have been saying very nice things about the event over on LinkedIn. I’m going to quote a few of them for my future self to look at when I’m freaking out about curating the next event… Valentina D’Efilippo: Still buzzing … UX London smas...

Grrr…

Chrome, Edge and Firefox updates usually reach 95% of users within three months. But Safari updates are tied to a new release of the underlying operating system, so they take around 19 months to reach the same usage, and some updates may even need a new device.

This is so shameful. And glad as I am to see new features landing in Safari, as long as they hobble updates like this it’s all just pissing in the wind.

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Semantic HTML? Optional. Server-side rendering? Rebuilt from scratch. Accessibility? Maybe, if there’s time. Performance? Who cares, when you can save costs by putting loading burdens onto the user’s device, instead of your server?

So gradually, the web became something you had to compile before you could publish. Not because users needed it. But because developers wanted it to feel modern.

Everything’s optimised for developers – and hostile to everyone else.

This isn’t accidental. It’s cultural. We’ve created an industry where complexity is celebrated. Where cleverness is rewarded. Where engineering sophistication is valued more than clarity, usability, or commercial effectiveness.

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But then I think of the New York skyline, The West Cork of the Yankee eyeline

—CMAT, The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station

Thursday session

Soon…

Wednesday session

Making Greek salad for lunch pretty much every day now.

Reading Bear Head by Adrian Tchaikovsky.

It feels like someone just harvested lumber from a forest I helped grow, and now wants to sell me the furniture they made with it.

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Here’s what the “AI will replace developers” crowd fundamentally misunderstands: code is not an asset—it’s a liability. Every line must be maintained, debugged, secured, and eventually replaced. The real asset is the business capability that code enables. If AI makes...

AI presents design leaders with a quandary, requiring us to tread a fine line between what is acceptable and useful, and what is problematic and harmful.

This document is not a manifesto or an agenda. It is a series of prompts written by design leaders for design leaders, conceived to help us navigate these tricky waters.

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An excellent appraisal of the importance of the rule of least power.

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UX London happened last week. Working on an event is a weird kind of project. You spend all your time and effort on something that is then over in the blink of an eye. I’d been preparing for this all year. 95% of my work happened before the event—curating the line-up, plan...

There are still tickets available for the Salter Cane album launch gig at The Hope And Ruin this Friday, June 20th …and they’re only £8!

https://saltercane.com/tickets

“We’ve stripped React out of our highest-traffic user flows and replaced it with vanilla JavaScript using small, focused libraries for specific needs,” said the CTO of a streaming service. “Our page load times dropped by 60% and our conversion rates improved by 14%.”

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Finalising the set list for Friday’s album launch gig with Salter Cane.

https://saltercane.com/tickets

Wednesday session in Camden

Hosting UX London

Tuesday session in London

I really like the thinking behind this project:

We believe computers should work for people, and dream of a future where computing, like cooking or word processing, is available to everyone. Where you can solve your own small, unique problems with small, unique apps. Where you don’t just rely on mass-market apps made by expert programmers. Where you share home-made little apps with family and friends.

Scrappy is our contribution to this dream.

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The last three trad sessions I played in were in three different countries—Sunday in Cork, Tuesday in Brighton, Wednesday in Amsterdam—lovely tunes each time!

💜

It’s literally three minutes into CSS Day and I’ve already learned about some CSS I didn’t know about.