Today was my last working day for 2025. I’m off until January. Christmas starts now!

React is no longer just a library. It’s a full ecosystem that defines how frontend developers are allowed to think. Real talk! Browsers now ship View Transitions, Container Queries, and smarter scheduling primitives. The platform keeps evolving at a fair pace, but m...

I’ve come to realize that statements about the future aren’t predictions: they’re more like spells. When someone describes something to you as the future, they’re sharing a heartfelt belief that this something will be part of whatever comes next. “Artificial intelligence isn’t going anywhere” quite literally involves casting a technology forward into time. How could that be anything else but a kind of magic?

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Here’s the schedule for Web Day Out—what a fantastic collection of talks! Web Day Out 10:00 – 10:30 I can’t believe it’s not JavaScript Jemima Abu 10:30 – 11:00 A pragmatic guide to browser support Rachel Andrew 11:30 – 12:00 Progressive web apps from the trenches ...

Wednesday session

Ah, the circle of life!

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This isn’t a rhetorical question. I genuinely want to know why developers choose to build websites using React. There are many possible reasons. Alas, none of them relate directly to user experience, other than a trickle-down justification: happy productive developers will ...

Explore the platform. Challenge yourself to discover what the modern web can do natively. Pure HTML, CSS, and a bit of vanilla JS…

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Another clever use of clamp() and calc() for web typography, but this time it’s adjusting letter-spacing.

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Reading The Bloody Chamber And Other Stories by Angela Carter.

As part of their on-stage banter, The Dubliners used to quip that “All the books that are banned in Ireland should be published in Irish, to encourage more people to learn their native tongue.”

There was no shortage of banned books back in the day. I’m reading one of them now. The Country Girls by Edna O’Brien.

About halfway through the book, I read this passage:

The parcels for the Halloween party were coming every day. I couldn’t ask my father for one because a man is not able to do these things, so I wrote to him for money instead and a day girl brought me a barmbrack, apples, and monkey-nuts.

Emphasis mine, because that little list sounded so familiar to me.

Back in 2011, I wrote a candygram for Jason. It was called Monkey nuts, barmbrack and apples.

It’s not exactly Edna O’Brien, but looking back at it fifteen years on, I think it turned out okay.

Thursday session

The line-up for Web Day Out is now complete! The final speaker to be added to the line-up is the one and only Manuel Matuzovič. You may know Manuel from his superb Web Accessibility Cookbook (full disclosure: I had the honour of writing the foreword to that book). Or perhap...

Wednesday session

Machine learning is amazing if … the value of a correct answer is much higher than the cost of an incorrect answer. Related to Laissez-faire Cognitive Debt: And that’s where I start to get really annoyed by a lot of the LLM hype. It’s pushing machine-learning appro...

I think of Cognitive Debt as ‘where we have the answers, but not the thinking that went into producing those answers’.

Lately, I have started noticing examples of not just where the debt is being accrued, but who then has the responsibility to pick it up and repay it.

Too often, an LLM doesn’t replace the need for thinking in a group setting, but simply creates more work for others.

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Never mind Cloudflare; the electricity has gone out in our street.

It’s actually kinda nice, playing mandolin by candlelight.

I find Brian Eno to be a fascinating chap. His music isn’t my cup of tea, but I really enjoy hearing his thoughts on art, creativity, and culture. I’ve always loved this short piece he wrote about singing with other people. I’ve passed that link onto multiple people who hav...

Front page of the BBC right now.

Reading The Country Girls by Edna O’Brien.

Closing out #ffconf with Erika’s chickens.

Kicking off #ffconf!

All I’ve ever wanted from life is a genuinely great SVG vector illustration of a pelican riding a bicycle.

— Simon Willison, What happens if AI labs train for pelicans riding bicycles?

Technology isn’t destiny, no matter how inexorable its evolution may seem; the way its capabilities are used is as much a matter of cultural choice and historical accident as politics is, or fashion.

— M. Mitchell Waldrop

I’m definitely going to be sent on a side quest.

This is a superb way to deprecate a little JavaScript library. Now that you can just use HTML instead, the website for Pikaday has been turned into a guide to choosing the right design pattern for your needs. Bravo!

Pikaday is no longer a JavaScript date picker. Pikaday is now a friendly guide for front-end developers. I want to push developers away from the classic date picker entirely. Especially fat JavaScript libraries.

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I am interested in art—we are interested in art, in any and all of its forms—because humans made it. That’s the very thing that makes it interesting; the who, the how, and especially the why.

The existence of the work itself is only part of the point, and materializing an image out of thin air misses the point of art, in very much the same way that putting a football into a Waymo to drive it up and down the street for a few hours would be entirely missing the point of sports.

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Hanging out with Coco.

I always enjoy reading Jay’s newsletter, but this was a particularly fun trip down memory lane.

There’s a link to an old post by Jeff Atwood who said:

A blog without comments is not a blog.

That was responding to an old post of mine where I declared:

Comments should be disabled 90% of the time.

That blog-to-blog conversation took place almost twenty years ago.

I still enjoy blog-to-blog conversations today.

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The generative AI industry only exists because some people decided that it’s okay for them to take all this work with no permission, let alone compensation for the original creators, and to charge others for the privilege of using the probabilistic plagiarism machines they’ve fed it to.

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