It’s just over one month until UX London. You should grab a ticket if you haven’t already!
The format of UX London is quite special. While the focus of each day is different—discovery, design, and delivery—each day unfolds like this…
There are four talks in the morning. Yo...
I’ve been thinking about the kind of CSS I write by default when I start a new project.
Some of it is habitual. I now use logical properties automatically. It took me a while to rewire my brain, but now seeing left or top in a style sheet looks wrong to me.
When I mentione...
I have little understanding for people using large language models to generate slop; words and images that nobody asked for.
I have more understanding for people using large language models to generate code. Code isn’t the thing in the same way that words or images are; cod...
In exactly six weeks time, UX London is happening!
I am ridiculously excited about this year’s line-up—I can’t wait to see the talks and get hands-on in the workshops.
If you haven’t yet got your ticket, now is the time. There’s a flash sale this week: use the discount code FLASH20 to get a whopping 20% of any ticket. Do it before the end of Friday!
Whether you’re coming for all three days or choosing one focused day, you’re in for a treat.
I was at the State Of The Browser event recently, which was great as always.
Manu gave a great talk about colour in CSS. A lot of it focused on OKLCH. I was already convinced of the benefits of this colour space after seeing a terrific talk by Anton Lovchikov a while back.
...
For the past couple of years, myself and Jessica have been going to the Belfast Tradfest in the Summer. It’s an excellent event with great workshops, sessions, and concerts. And it helps that Belfast is such a lovely city to spend a week in.
What struck me the first time we...
This Saturday, April 12th, is Record Store Day. To mark the occasion, Salter Cane will be playing a stripped-down set at Union Music Store in Lewes. That’s the place that Jamie used to run, so it has a special place in our hearts.
If you’re in the neighbourbood, please swing by! We’re really looking forward to playing a mix of some old songs and some brand new songs from our brand new album.
<a href="https://saltercane.bandcamp.com/album/deep-black-water" target="_blank" rel="external noopener">Deep Black Water by Salter Cane</a>
The Wikimedia Foundation, stewards of the finest projects on the web, have written about the hammering their servers are taking from the scraping bots that feed large language models.
Our infrastructure is built to sustain sudden traffic spikes from humans during high-in...
My favourite bit of the archive on this site is the link that says “on this day”. It’s of no interest to anyone except me, but I love going through this little time tunnel.
Using that link this month gives me a flashback to March five years ago when The Situation was unfold...
I’ve been banging on for a while now about how much I’d like a declarative option for the Web Share API. I was thinking that the type attribute on the button element would be a good candidate for this (there’s prior art in the way we extended the type attribute on the input ...
There’s a new proposal for giving developers more control over styling form controls. I like it.
It’s clearly based on the fantastic work being done by the Open UI group on the select element. The proposal suggests that authors can opt-in to the new styling possibilities by...
Dan wrote an interesting post with a somewhat clickbaity title; This Competition Exposed How AI is Reshaping Design:
I watched two designers go head-to-head in a high-speed battle to create the best landing page in 45 minutes. One was a seasoned pro. The other was a non-...
I’ve had my head down for the past six months putting the line-up for UX London together. Following the classic design cliché, the process was first divergent, then convergent.
I spent months casting the net wide, gathering as many possible candidates as I could, as well as...
I left Twitter in 2022. With every day that has passed since then, that decision has proven to be correct.
(I’m honestly shocked that some people I know still have active Twitter accounts. At this point there is no justification for giving your support to a place that’s lit...
Brighton is blessed with plenty of traditional Irish music sessions. You need some kind of almanac to keep track of when they’re on. Some are on once a month. Some are twice a month. Some are every two weeks (which isn’t the same as twice a month, depending on the month).
Sometimes when the stars align just right, you get a whole week of sessions in a row. That’s what happened last week with sessions on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. I enjoyed playing my mandolin in each of them. There was even a private party on Saturday night where a bunch of us played tunes for an hour and a half.
There’s nothing quite like playing music with other people. It’s good for the soul.
I really like Brad’s new project, Cold Album Drumming:
Brad Frost plays drums to the albums he knows intimately, but has never drummed to before. Cover to cover. No warm-up. No prep. Totally cold. What could possibly go wrong?
I got a kick out of watching him play alon...
Research By The Sea was last Thursday. I’m still digesting it all.
In short, it was excellent. The venue, how smoothly every thing was organised, the talks …oh boy, the talks!
Benjamin did a truly superb job curating this line-up. Everyone really brought their A-game.
As ...
Here’s a post outlining all the great things you can do in mobile web browsers today: Your App Should Have Been A Website (And Probably Your Game Too):
Today’s browsers are powerhouses. Notifications? Check. Offline mode? Check. Secure payments? Yep, they’ve got that too...
From 2005 to 2015 Clearleft ran the dConstruct event here in Brighton (with one final anniversary event in 2022).
I had the great pleasure of curating dConstruct for a while. I’m really proud of the line-ups I put together.
It wasn’t your typical tech event, to put it mild...
A couple of days ago I linked to a post by Robin Sloan called Is it okay?, saying:
Robin takes a fair and balanced look at the ethics of using large language models.
That’s how it came across to me: fair and balanced.
Robin’s central question is whether the current cr...
With the release of a new Salter Cane album I figured it was high time to update the design of the band’s website.
Here’s the old version for reference. As you can see, there’s a connection there in some of the design language. Even so, I decided to start completely from sc...
Back in July 2023 I went into the studio along with the rest of Salter Cane.
We had been practicing a whole lot of new songs for over a year beforehand. Now we were ready to record them.
We went in with a shared approach. We were going to record everything live. We were go...
I’ve been tagged in a good ol’-fashioned memetic chain letter, first by Jon and then by Luke. Only by answering these questions can my soul find peace…
Why did you start blogging in the first place?
All the cool kids were doing it. I distinctly remember thinking it was far...
I’m going to be hosting Research By The Sea on Thursday, February 27th right here in Brighton. I’m getting very excited and nervous about it.
The nervousness is understandable. I want to do a good job. Hosting a conference is like officiating a wedding. You want to put peop...
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, ...
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 ...
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...
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...
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 ...
Subscribe
