My ol buddy Allan Branch, a decade or more ago, used to run a conference called LessConf which was about anything from “design to marketing to business”. There was a decent amount of web people that went. Allan ran some startups himself, as well as this conference, with Steve Bristol (RIP). Now he’s the dang […]

🎧 The Telepathy Tapes — A friend recommended I listen to this and I tore through it a few weeks ago. It’s about autistic people and how apparently literally all of them are telepathic. It’s a bit of a rollercoaster that goes: Anyway, “The Hill”, a thing in the show where autistic people go in […]

“How’s your folk fest?” people ask each other on the street. Nobody doesn’t know what you mean. Community is a word that gets thrown around a lot. It doesn’t bother me. Community means lots of things. They can be small or big, tight or loose, in person or digital, and live on a million other […]

Frontend Masters now has a Tutorials section of their site. Just makes your subscription all the more valuable, I suppose. I’ve got a couple videos on there now, based on a little component I was obsessed with for a minute. I re-created it my own way using an HTML Web Component and modern CSS fancy […]

I think I preferred talking about it to writing about it as really I just wanted to spout off thoughts and ideas, and hear other people’s. My writing wasn’t real journalism, it was more if it goes this way my guess is it ends badly. There are some real extremes here. At worst: Google is […]

We’ve long had a YouTube channel for ShopTalk, but now we’re posting regular ol’ episodes to it, which we’ve never done before. Like this: And “shorts” here and there that we’ll clip out of the shows when it’s fun.

When you open Visual Studio Code without doing something like opening a .workspace file or dragging a folder onto it, you get a fairly blank screen like this: Speaking for myself, there is about a 95% chance what I want to do is open a recent project. I’ve got good muscle memory for Command-Shift-P to […]

My kid likes listening to podcasts sometimes and it’s cool with me! Story Pirates, for example, rules. She must have typed in “Bluey” at some point into the podcast app we use and found the Bluey Storytime Podcast. It looks kind of official. That’s real Bluey art, it uses the word “Bluey” in the title, […]

You’ve got a monopoly on lemonade because you pay all the grocery stores to be the default lemonade. So we’re going to force you sell your car. What’s with the weird redirect? If the monopoly is directly caused by paying the grocery stores for placement, then stop that part. We can see this exact redirect […]

The ShopTalk Discord #games channel has been pretty heavy on Balatro for like… a year? I was turned off by the game at first as I think I downloaded some unofficial port or something and it was unplayably janky. But now Balatro+ is on Apple Arcade, which I have anyway, and I’ve got a perfectly […]

Imagine announcing to the world you’re going to do the difficult job of making big changes and cuts in the government in order to make it more efficient. Then taking an organization that is demonstrably doing that job well already and destroying the whole thing. What if I told you there was a group of […]

My sister is a big fan of Justin Timberlake. She & her friends went to go see him in Milwaukee this past weekend, with some swank front-row tickets her husband Aaron scored. She made a little sign to hold up that said “Moms / Teachers Night Out” and JT called them out early in the […]

I like the John Warner thing where the problem with outsourcing writing to AI is that the computers aren’t doing a process that is aligned with how humans would do it. On an episode of Search Engine, he said that using a calculator for long division, a tool that some compare to AI generated writing, […]

Seventeen bits of advice from Ariel Salminen on Leading Successful Product Teams. I really like all of them. Allow me to pluck off a few about meetings: People gotta work yo. Including yourself. You gotta give lots of time to let that happen. Context switching has a cost for some people, and I’ve found a […]

There is an idea in my bubble that running your own website is A Very Good Idea. I subscribe to the idea that running your own website is A Very Good Idea and will continue to help that along in my career. But there is a heaping helping of It Depends involved here. Perhaps the […]

It was August 5th, 2024 when a federal judge in the US decided that “Google acted illegally to maintain a monopoly in online search”. Then November 20th, 2024 when “The Justice Department and a group of states asked a federal court late Wednesday to force Google to sell Chrome“. It hasn’t been forced yet and […]

🎥 The War of Rohirrim — I was on a bit of a Lord of the Rings kick, reading the books then watching the Extended editions. So of course I had to see this. I tried to see in theaters but I just missed it, so streamed it. I thought it was good! A perfectly […]

There’s a classic old time tune “How Many Biscuits Can You Eat?”. I know it from The Freight Hoppers but it’s certainly much older than that. The answer? How many biscuits can you eat? 49 and a ham of meat. Obviously. Wait, did they say “a ham of meat”? Some renditions of the song just […]

The kid and I randomly started watching World’s Toughest Race: Eco-Challenge Fiji on Amazon Prime from 2020. 66 teams descend upon Fiji to compete in the most epic global adventure race ever attempted. Bear Grylls hosts this 11-day expedition that pushes competitors to their physical and emotional limits.  We were both like whaaaaat when “Team […]

Robin Rendle quoting Chris Armstrong: I have these two opposing thoughts: The difference, I suppose, is that a personal blog and a site designed to get people technical information, have different content strategy goals. There are tweener answers as well. Robb Knight has a thought: I like the idea of redirecting /now to the latest post tagged […]

First, we had the Nest thermostat. Gotta have that, right? The first thermostat in the history of time that feels well-designed. Works great. Pleasure to use and look at. Then we got the smoke alarm. Why not — seems nice. Then we got a free Nest Mini as a promotion when Miranda went Android for […]

Rogue has a 1000LB Club. Find your cumulative total of a 1 Rep Max Bench/Squat/Deadlift in one hour I’m not particularly interested in actually doing it. You have to record a video with a bunch of rules and crap. But I heard about it years ago and the general challenge idea stuck in my head. […]

Steward Brand has talked about Pace Layering for a long time: Pace layers provide many-leveled corrective, stabilizing feedback throughout the system. It is in the contradictions between these layers that civilization finds its surest health. I propose six significant levels of pace and size in a robust and adaptable civilization With this example: The inner […]

My fiddle player friend Darin sent me this documentary about GB Grayson, which I enjoyed: The documentary talks about how very few people even recognize the name despite all of recorded tunes essentially becoming standards in today’s folk/bluegrass/old-time world and having been covered by extraordinarily huge artists. That’s true for me! I absolutely had never […]

Over the holiday’s our family did the Exploring Hogwarts puzzle. It was just 500 pieces but took us like… a month? Of course at the end there was a missing piece that we absolutely could not find, confirming our conspiracy theories the entire time. It don’t know if that looks hard to you, but my […]

I just got a big ol’ stack of USPS Priority Mail®️ marked as RETURN TO SENDER. It’s… malicious spam. Physical spam, I suppose. I didn’t send these, of course. But the return address is CodePen Headquarters, so it seems it was just a free way to get spam into our door. The evil schmucks drop […]

I don’t actually have Starlink. I was just considering it for a hot second and figured I’d write down the thoughts. I was getting annoyed at our home internet service the other week and started looking into other options. In the end, I called our service provider (TDS) and they were like (1) your modem […]

When the M1 MacBooks dropped, they looked amazing and I picked one up in 2021. It’s 2025 now, so it’s fairly typical of me to be upgrading. It felt a little unnecessary since my M1 was: extremely perfectly fine. It’s an excellent machine really and it will continue to be for it’s next owner for […]

When haters deny HTML’s status as a programming language, they’re showing they don’t understand what a language really is. Language is not instructing an interlocutor what to do in a way that leaves no room for other interpretations; it is better and richer than that. Tim Carmody, HTML Is Actually a Programming Language. Fight Me […]

I was on Learn with Jason the other day! Jason and I go way back and it was a dang pleasure getting to hang out with him to chat and build a thing together. We made a light-DOM-y LitElement photo shuffle machine thingy. Mega high five to Toni Lijic where I swiped the whole idea […]