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The online home of Jeremy Keith, an author and web developer living and working in Brighton, England.
IndieWeb
“Fáilte go Knocka, fáilte go Knocka, gaelteacht nua i dtuisceart na cathrach!”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nH772P6YbMQ
(Tá Kneecap ceart go leor, ach is fearr liom Kabin Crew!)
When you think about it, the phrase “earning a living” is really quite vile.
Reading I Am Legend by Richard Matheson.
Bhí RÓIS ar fheabhas anocht! Guth den scoth!
Can you ship AI-generated code without creating a maintenance nightmare six months from now? Can you debug it when it breaks? Can you modify it when requirements change? Can you onboard new engineers to a codebase they didn’t write and the AI barely explained?
Most teams haven’t realized this shift yet. They’re optimizing for code generation speed while comprehension debt silently accumulates in their repos.
One team I talked to spent 3 days fixing what should have been a 2-hour problem. They had “saved” time by having AI generate the initial implementation. But when it broke, they lost 70 hours trying to understand code they had never built themselves.
That’s comprehension debt compounding. The time you save upfront gets charged back with interest later.
Thursday session
An excellent example of an HTML web component from Eric:
Extend HTML to do things automatically!
He layers on the functionality and styling, considering potential gotchas at every stage. This is resilient web design in action.
Almost two months ago, I put out the call for speaker suggestions for Web Day Out. I got some good responses—thank you to everyone who took the time to get in touch.
The response that really piqued my interest was from Aleth Gueguen. She proposed a talk on progressive web apps, backed up with plenty of experience. The more I thought about it, the more I realised how perfect it would be for Web Day Out.
So I’m very pleased to announce that Aleth will be speaking at Web Day Out about progressive web apps from the trenches:
Find out about the most important capabilities in progressive web apps and how to put them to work.
I’m really excited about this line-up! This is going to be a day out that you won’t want to miss. Get your ticket for a mere £225+VAT if you haven’t already!
Matthias responds to my pondering about the point of “likes” and “shares”:
I like to think of Webmentions not as a measure of popularity. To me, they measure connection. Connection to individual people and connection to the community as a whole. Webmentions let you listen into the constant noise out there and, just like a radio telescope, pick up scarcely audible echoes of connection.
56 years ago today:
Talked to SRI Host to Host
— IMP log, 1969-10-29 22:30, Charles S. Kline, Boelter Hall, UCLA
The message:
LO
The ARPANET was born.
Beyond Tellerrand has a new website and it’s beautiful!
And look! Past speakers like me get our own page.
In fact there’s a great big archive of all the past talks—that very much deserves your support as a friend of Beyond Tellerrand.
React exists as a profound perversion of the web platform. React has failed upwards to widespread adoption because it provides a “developer experience” that bypasses the hard parts. Like learning HTML, or CSS, or JavaScript. Even learning React itself is discouraged; that’s for adults, you should use meta-frameworks. React devs are burdened with multi-megabyte monstrosities before they’ve written a single line of code. You cannot fix “too much JavaScript” with more JavaScript and yet React devs are trained to
npm installuntil their problems become their users’ problems.
A very, very deep dive into like-for-like comparison of JavaScript frameworks. The takeaway:
Nuxt demonstrates that established “big three” frameworks can achieve next-gen performance when properly configured. Vue’s architecture allows competitive mobile web performance while maintaining a mature ecosystem. React and Angular show no path to similar results.
And the real takeaway:
Mobile is the web. These measurements matter because mobile web is the primary internet for billions of people. If your app is accessible via URL, people will use it on phones with cellular connections. Optimizing for desktop and hoping mobile is good enough is backwards. The web is mobile. Build for that reality.
I love the web, and this thing is bad for the web.
- Atlas substitutes its own AI-generated content for the web, but it looks like it’s showing you the web
- The user experience makes you guess what commands to type instead of clicking on links
- You’re the agent for the browser, it’s not being an agent for you
It’s very clear that a lot of the new AI era is about dismantling the web’s original design.
A clear explanation of how image dithering works, illustrated along the way.
A different world is possible. Here, for example, is an open-source large language model from Europe, designed to support the 24 official languages of the European Union.
I have no idea why their top level domain is for the British Indian Ocean Territory, soon to be no more. That doesn’t instil confidence.
It’s creepy to tell people they’ll lose their jobs if they don’t use AI. It’s weird to assume AI critics hate progress and are resisting some inevitable future.
blog.jim-nielsen.com/2025/more-control-equals-less-performance/
So instead of asking yourself, “How can I write code that does what I want?” Consider asking yourself, “Can I write code that ties together things the browser already does to accomplish what I want (or close enough to it)?”
It’s wild what you can do with CSS these days!
Coco in the sun.
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.
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.
Here’s a handy little tool for generating CSS with :has() selectors in order to do quantity queries.