Reading Our Wives Under The Sea by Julia Armfield.

Under the guise of technological inevitability, companies are using the AI boom to rewrite the social contract — laying off employees, rehiring them at lower wages, intensifying workloads, and normalizing precarity. In short, these are political choices masquerading as technical necessities, AI is not the cause of the layoffs but their justification.

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Saturday morning tunes and tea

Every engineer eventually overbuilds something. You think you’re being smart. You’re thinking ahead, building for growth and before you know it, you’ve created a system ten times heavier than your actual problem. That’s the trap. We keep designing for imaginary futures for scale that may never come and call it engineering. But it’s not engineering. It’s over-engineering.

The industry rewards it too. Nobody gets promoted for keeping things small and sane. You get promoted for complexity.

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Here’s a handy little tool for generating CSS with :has() selectors in order to do quantity queries.

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I’m very happy to announce that the one and only Jake Jaffa-The-Cake Archibald will be speaking at Web Day Out! Given the agenda for this event, I think you’ll agree that Jake is a perfect fit. He’s been at the forefront of championing user-centred web standards, writing sp...

LLMs are useful when you need a compromise between fast and good. You will never get a good outcome fast.

I’m afraid we are settling into a status of good enough when using “AI,” which is especially hurtful for accessibility.

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The transcript of a very thoughtful talk by Frank.

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Having a coffee with Mango.

Confession: I can never remember the actual name of the coffee shop so in my mind it’s Mango’s.

Sunday session in Cork

Technologies like LLMs have utility, but the absurd way they’ve been over-hyped, the fact they’re being forced on everyone, and the insistence on ignoring the many valid critiques about them make it very difficult to focus on legitimate uses where they might add value.

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Reading A Prayer for the Crown-Shy by Becky Chambers.

Going to Cork (for real this time, I hope). brb

There’s quite a crossover between resilence and longevity:

1. Understand the requirements
2. Keep scope small and fixed
3. Reduce dependencies
4. Produce static output
5. Increase Quality Assurance

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Thursday session

This is a wonderfully evocative description of what it was like to go online 30 years ago.

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When I set about writing this article, I intended it to be a strong argument for progressive rendering. But after digging into it, my feelings are less certain.

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Grrr… it turns out that browsers exhibit some very frustrating behaviour when it comes to the video element. Rob has the details…

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Wednesday session

Framework monoculture is a psychology problem as much as a tech problem. When one approach becomes “how things are done,” we unconsciously defend it even when standards would give us a healthier, more interoperable ecosystem. Psychologists call this reflex System Justification.

The explains a lot about React-driven front-end development!

When a single toolset becomes the default, we don’t just prefer it, we build narratives that justify it. And that’s when a tool quietly becomes a gate or even a destructive force.

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If you need to convince someone – your boss, your team, your family, or also yourself – then explain that going to a conference isn’t just another trip away from “real work.” No, this is the real work: investing in your craft, your connections, your growth.

Matthias nails why should go to events …like, say, Web Day Out.

There’s something magical about walking into a conference venue in the morning. The hum of first conversations, the smell of coffee, the anticipation, and the smiling faces. And the unspoken feeling that we all belong here, that we are here for the same reason: because we care about the same things and we all have, in some way or another, built our lives around the Web.

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Tim recently gave a talk at Smashing Conference in New York called One Step Ahead. Based on the slides, it looks like it was an excellent talk. Towards the end, there’s a slide that could be the tagline for Web Day Out: Betting on the browser is our best chance at long-...

Monday session

I don’t get out to gigs as much as I’d like. But for some reason, the past week has been packed with live music. On Tuesday I saw Ye Vagabonds. I’m particularly partial to their nice mandolin playing. It was a nice concert that felt like being in a Greenwich Village folk cl...

I’ve had some incredibly productive moments with AI design tools. But I’ve had at least as many slogs, where I can’t get it to do some basic thing I should’ve done myself 45 minutes ago.

My hunch: vibe coding is a lot like stock-picking – everyone’s always blabbing about their big wins. Ask what their annual rate of return is above the S&P, and it’s a quieter conversation 🤫

This, in my opinion, is how we end up with a firehose of AI hype, and yet zero signs of a software renaissance. As Mike Judge points out, the following graphs are flat: (a) new app store releases, (b) new domain names registered, (c) new Github repositories.

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Suppose somebody is using a blade. Perhaps they’re in the bathroom, shaving. Or maybe they’re in the kitchen, preparing food.

Suppose they cut themselves with that blade. This might have happened because the blade was too sharp. Or perhaps the blade was too dull.

Either way, it’s going to be tricky to figure out the reason just by looking at the wound.

But if you talk to the person, not only will you find out the reason, you’ll also understand their pain.

A URL shortener that’s dodgy by design.

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I’m not the only one who’s amazed by how much you can do with just a little CSS these days.

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This is a nifty initiative:

This site lets you rank the proposals you care about, giving us data we can use when reviewing which proposals should be taken on for 2026.

For the record, here’s my top ten:

1. Cross-document view transitions
2. Speculation Rules API
3. img sizes="auto" loading="lazy"
4. Customizable/stylable select
5. Invoker commands
6. Interoperable rendering of HTML fieldset/legend
7. Web Share API
8. CSS scroll-driven animations
9. CSS accent-color property
10. CSS hanging-punctuation property

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I prefer my tools to help me with repetitive tasks (and there are many of those in programming), understanding codebases, and authoring correct programs. I take offense at products that are designed to think for me. To remove the agency of my own understanding of the software I produce, and to cut connections with my coworkers. Even if LLMs lived up to the hype, we would still stand to lose all of that and our craft.

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