FeedCity

Detective stories and tales of bughunting in software and hardware.

Sometimes bugs have symptoms beyond belief. This is a collection of such stories from around the web.

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Better than the real thing. All true too.

Refresh for more.

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Many interactions are not possible without JavaScript, but that doesn’t mean we should look to write more than we have to. The server doing something useful is a requirement for building an interesting business. The client doing something is often a nice-to-have.

There’s also this:

It’s really fast

One of the arguments for a SPA is that it provides a more reactive customer experience. I think that’s mostly debunked at this point, due to the performance creep and complexity that comes in with a more complicated client-server relationship.

adactio.com/links/21666

Anyone who doesn’t understand the old gods has never looked up at the sky.

— Denise Wilton

This is a great idea that I’m going to file away for later:

I like the idea of redirecting /now to the latest post tagged as now so one could see the latest version of what I’m doing now.

adactio.com/links/21664

LLMs are good at transforming text into less text Laurie is really onto something with this: This is the biggest and most fundamental thing about LLMs, and a great rule of thumb for what’s going to be an effective LLM application. Is what you’re doing taking a large...

When you think of the long and gloomy history of man, you will find that far more, and far more hideous, crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than have ever been committed in the name of rebellion.

— C.P. Snow

Monday session

I’ve been reading lots of modern takes on Greek classics. So when I saw that there was going to be a short of run of Sophocles’s Electra at Brighton’s Theatre Royal, I grabbed some tickets for the opening night. With Brie Larson taking on the title role in this production, ...

Reading The Last Song Of Penelope by Claire North.

Explore our hand-picked collection of 10,046 out-of-copyright works, free for all to browse, download, and reuse. This is a living database with new images added every week.

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It’s great to see the evolution of HTML happening in response to real use-cases—the turbo-charging of the select element just gets better and better!

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It always annoys me when a politician is accused of “flip-flopping” when they change their mind on something. Instead of admiring someone for being willing to re-examine previously-held beliefs, we lambast them. We admire conviction, even though that’s a trait that has been ...

Thursday session

When I was looking back at 2024, I mentioned that I didn’t give a single conference talk (though I did host three conferences—Patterns Day, CSS Day, and UX London). I almost spoke at a conference though. I was all set to speak at an event in the Netherlands. But then the li...

The new Salter Cane album is available on Spotify now:

https://open.spotify.com/album/3MeUNUs1EKdleklacQMaQB

I have to agree with John here:

There’s absolutely no reason the mobile web experience shouldn’t be fast, reliable, well-designed, and keep you logged in. If one of the two should suck, it should be the app that sucks and the website that works well. You shouldn’t be expected to carry around a bundle of software from your utility company in your pocket. But it’s the other way around.

There’s absolutely no technical reason why it should be this way around. This is a cultural problem with “modern front-end web development”.

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Wherein Brad says some kind words about The Session. And slippers.

Slippers are cool.

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Interesting—this is exactly the same framing I used to talk about design systems a few years ago.

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Back in 2019 I had the amazing experience of going to CERN and being part of a team building an emulator of the first ever browser. Remy was on the team too. He did the heavy lifting of actually making the thing work—quite an achievement in just five days! Coming into t...

At the thee-ah-tor!

I have a feeling that 2025 is going to be a year of reflection for me. It’s such a nice round number, 25. One quarter of a century. That’s also how long myself and Jessica have been married. Our wedding anniversary was last week. Top tip: if you get married in year ending ...

Here’s a handy free tool from Calibre that’ll give your website a performance assessment.

adactio.com/links/21646

I can’t wait to play this song live!

https://saltercane.bandcamp.com/track/something-underwater

“There’s something in the water Like the holy face of God It’s out there on the borders And rising inside us”

The new Salter Cane album just dropped on Bandcamp!

https://saltercane.bandcamp.com/album/deep-black-water

If you want to watch me and Remy presenting live, join us here at 7:30pm

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XONerj4rE2I

People of Brighton—myself and Remy are giving a talk this evening at AsyncJS; you should come along!

https://asyncjs.com/built-www-in-5-days/

There will be pizza!

Deceptive design meets gamification in this explanatory puzzle game (though I wish it weren’t using the problematic label “dark patterns”).

I created this interactive experience to explore the intersection of design ethics and human psychology, helping us all make more informed choices while browsing the web.

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This is a very smart way to handle feedback about a product.

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His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

— James Joyce, The Dead