So I’ve been thinking, when was the last time I’ve experienced some sort of burnout from a community. And I had forgotten that tech was not my only interest, or the only thing I’ve been deeply enthralled with. While I started making websites when I was 13, I wasn’t always stuck on only thinking about web development as a hobby and career.

It's Tuesday morning. Your VP of Engineering is standing in front of a slide deck, vibrating with the kind of excitement usually reserved for people who just discovered cryptocurrency in 2017. They've just come back from a conference. Or maybe a vendor dinner. Three glasses of pinot noir and a demo, and now they have news.

There is a certain kind of computer review that is really a permission slip. It tells you what you’re allowed to want. It locates you in a taxonomy — student, creative, professional, power user — and assigns you a product. It is helpful. It is responsible. It has very little interest in what you might become.

I read a lot on the web. I almost never look at websites, though. I consume almost everything through an RSS reader. As AI reshapes the way online information is organised and consumed, it increasingly feels like I'm behind the scenes, watching the performance from the wings rather than seeing it from the front as intended. I thought I'd tell you why I do this and what it looks like.

In 2023, Bluesky's CTO Paul Frazee was asked what would happen if Bluesky ever turned against its users.

All industries and disciplines, over time, direct people into greater and greater specialization. Those who have been working on the web since the beginning have been able to see this trend first hand, as the practices and systems grew ever more complicated and it became impossible for one person to hold it all in their head. We sometimes talk of this level of increasing complexity and specialization as inevitable or natural, when it’s neither. Moreover, like many things involving work, speciali

A couple of weeks back, I’m sitting at my desk when a direct message from my frontend friend Kevin Powell pops up. Kevin’s a genuinely kind guy. He makes CSS videos on YouTube and he’s got this way of explaining things that never makes you feel stupid for not knowing them already. He’s one of those folks who still has faith in the Web.

Many ads in Apple News served by Taboola are clearly scams.

I cancelled Disney Plus in September (though my annual sub runs until March). A year ago, I downloaded my entire Kindle library and stopped buying from their store. Netflix was cancelled in December. Audible went bye-bye sometime last summer. None of this was planned, exactly - more like a series of small decisions that eventually accumulated into something larger.

Over the past months, I realised it was about time I moved away from music streaming, to keeping a personal music collection that I control.

Mozilla published a new State of Mozilla. It’s absolute slopaganda. A mess of trippy visuals and corpo-speak that’s been through the slop wringer too many times. I read it so you don’t have to.

Every decade brings new promises: this time, we'll finally make software development simple enough that we won't need so many developers. From COBOL to AI, the pattern repeats. Business leaders grow frustrated with slow delivery and high costs. Developers feel misunderstood and undervalued. Understanding why this cycle persists for fifty years reveals what both sides need to know about the nature of software work.

In the early days of Covid, when nobody knew anything—when we washed our mail, when everything seemed dangerous, when nothing was available—I made masks. Hundreds of them, a sewing machine permanent on the only table in our small house. I'd bag them and take them to friends and neighbors, tossing them onto their porches and stoops. Eventually, when I felt OK going into the post office, I'd mail them to groups that needed them. The Navajo Nation got packs from me, an org in Chicago for homeless L

“The Open Web” means several things to different people, depending on context, but recently discussions have focused on the Web’s Openness in terms of access to information -- how easy it is to publish and obtain information without barriers there.

I recently added a rule to my reset style sheet UA+ that I wanted to share with you. When you add a popover to a page and open it, it looks similar to a dialog in terms of its styling. It's positioned at the center of the viewport.

Over the past year, I’ve made a change to how I consume content. Everything is at 1x now: podcasts, YouTube videos, audiobooks. All of it.

Dear JS ecosystem, I love you, but you have a dependency management problem when it comes to the Web, and the time has come for an intervention.

The number one question I get from my friends, acquaintances, and mentees in the technology industry these days is, by far, variations on the basic theme of, “what the hell are we supposed to do now?”

How to win the war for the soul of the internet and build the Web We Want.

Each year, three people die waiting for Cloudflare and Google to verify they are human.

My concern is that Mozilla is too excited about a technology that has inherent downsides and ethical problems, and I would like to see better defaults and clearer risk mitigations.

We used to think that grieving went through five stages: denial, protest, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. We no longer really believe in that theory, but when it comes to dealing with the US, many Europeans are however currently busily negotiating with reality.

“People are less weird than they used to be,” claims psychologist Adam Mastroianni. He describes this as “an epidemic of the mundane.”

Tech talk ahead. Short version: I’ve turned off comments and other minor features to improve site performance here because I think AI bots are hogging things. (Bots are automated programs to scrape data from the internet. Little do they know this is a personal website of no consequence.)

What’s going on, Internet? If a song isn’t available on Spotify or Apple Music, a lot of people these days assume it isn’t an official release. I reckon that idea is wrong.

Yesterday morning, I woke up and checked my news app while still in bed. The headlines from ProPublica, The New York Times, and The Guardian loaded instantly: a curated stream of stories updated overnight. I scrolled through, tapped on a few pieces, then switched over to my podcast app to queue up something for my morning gym session. I queued up three new episodes: one from Search Engine, the first episode of the new ProPublica Narrated podcast, and an episode of Revolution.Social.

Elon Musk’s X platform has blocked the European Commission from making advertisements, presumably in response to the €120 million fine for its misleading verification system and overall lack of transparency. We’re grateful to Elon Musk for proving once again why the world needs to log off corporate-owned, centrally-controlled social media platforms and log on to a better way of being online. The world needs an open social web through the fediverse and Mastodon.

I think I have an idea why we're so extremely divided on AI: it's because we have an intuitive sense of who it stands to benefit, and who stands to pay the costs. I think whether you see reason for optimism has a lot to do with which group you see yourself in.

Hey, dipshit! You know what loads faster than your bloated, overengineered mess? Plain, unadulterated HTML. And you know what doesn't break every motherfucking Tuesday? HTML that just fucking works. Why the fuck are you overcomplicating things, you masochistic fuck? You're out here acting like you're building the next goddamn moon landing when all you need is a button and some text.

Hey, dipshit! You know what loads faster than your bloated, overengineered mess? Plain, unadulterated HTML. And you know what doesn't break every motherfucking Tuesday? HTML that just fucking works. Why the fuck are you overcomplicating things, you masochistic fuck? You're out here acting like you're building the next goddamn moon landing when all you need is a button and some text.