Thanks to everyone who came out to the Salter Cane gig on Saturday night—that was fun!

There’s a fundamental problem with these tools beyond the capacity of any deployment strategy to solve: the tool requires expertise to validate, but its use diminishes expertise and stunts its growth. How does one become an expert? There are no shortcuts; there is only continuous hard work and dedication. I was once told of writing, great writers learn how to break the rules in new and ingenious ways by first learning the rules.

But how is a new developer meant to learn the rules if their day-to-day work is nothing but the babysitting of models? How will they gain the hard-won experience that allows a human in the loop to be a useful safeguard?

These models alter cognition in ways deleterious to human prosperity. In other words, for as much output as they provide, they take something important from us.

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Sound checking Salter Cane

Salter Cane is ready to rock and/or roll!

https://saltercane.com/tickets

Thursday session

This Saturday night in The Hope And Ruin in Brighton…

https://saltercane.com/tickets

This was another fantastic conference from the Clearleft team, and one that I hope is repeated next year. It is absolutely incredible what you can do in the browser these days, and even though I thought I was keeping up with the latest developments, it astounded me how far things have come.

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Four years ago I wrote about something that has long puzzled me in the world of front-end development. Trust: The mindset I’ve noticed is that many developers are suspicious of browser features but trusting of third-party libraries. Developers are more likely to tru...

This looks very handy!

Add any public account from Instagram, Facebook, Threads, X, TikTok or YouTube to quickly get a feed for your favorite reader.

Bonus: Add any website to quickly grab its existing feed as well.

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Never forget:

• The time Apple lied to the UK regulator
• The time when Apple told the EU that Safari is 3 different browsers
• When Apple tried to shut the UK investigation down
• When Apple’s VP of Finance got caught lying under oath
• When Apple tried to wreck all EU Web Apps

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My wish is coming true!

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Wednesday session

People of Brighton, be sure to get your ticket for the Salter Cane gig this Saturday, April 4th featuring Skyscrapers and The Equatorial Group!

https://saltercane.com/tickets

We show you a CSS property name. You tell us if it’s real or if we made it up. That’s it. It starts easy. It does not stay easy.

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Coco’s napping

Monday session

This Saturday, April 4th, come to The Hope And Ruin in Brighton to see Skyscrapers, Equatorial Group, and Salter Cane:

https://saltercane.com/tickets

Tickets are £8 in advance, £10 on the door.

Saturday evening session in Tullamore

Saturday afternoon session in Tullamore

It’s gettin’ wild in Tullamore tonight!

Friday evening session in Tullamore

Going to Tullamore. brb

Web development follows a familiar cycle. First we glue together a solution with whatever we have — JavaScript, image hacks, Flash, anything. Then the platform matures, and CSS or HTML eventually makes that same workaround native. Rounded corners, custom fonts, smooth scrolling, sticky positioning: all of these started as JavaScript-heavy hacks before CSS turned them into a single declaration.

We are in another one of those transition moments. A new wave of long-requested CSS features is finally landing, and many of them are explicitly designed to replace patterns that used to require JavaScript. Not as approximations — as first-class platform primitives that handle the edge cases, run in the right thread, and need zero dependencies.

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I’m slapping my forehead—progressive web components is a perfect name for what I’ve been calling HTML web components. Why didn’t I think of that?

A Progressive Web Component is a native Custom Element designed in two layers: a base layer of HTML and CSS that renders immediately, without JavaScript, and an enhancement layer of JavaScript that adds reactivity, event handling, and more advanced templating.

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I can’t remember the last time a blog post resonated with me this much.

Craig’s criteria on his job search:

• One: fuck offices
• Two: fuck AI
• Three: fuck React

And his conclusion:

Fuck work

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Wednesday session

People of Brighton, mark your calendars: Saturday, April 4th. That’s when Salter Cane will be playing in The Hope And Ruin.

It’s not just Salter Cane though. We’ll be joined by Skyscrapers from Lewes, and The Equatorial Group from Eastbourne. We’ve played with them before, and they’re superb!

Tickets are available now. They’re £8 in advance. It’ll be £10 on the door. So please get your ticket in advance!

Doors are at 7:30pm. Skyscrapers will be on stage at 8pm, The Equatorial group at 9pm, and Salter Cane at 10pm.

I’m really, really looking forward to rocking out playing songs from our newest album and I would love it if you could make it.

See you there!

It’s a real missed opportunity in Project Hail Mary that at no point does anyone look to the camera with a steely gaze and declare, “It’s daylight saving time.”

I was in the library the weekend before last when I spotted something on the shelf of recently-returned books. Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir. I knew the film adaptation was coming out later that week. Ideally, I’d like to read the book before seeing the film. It would be a...

This is a guide to how to be a web developer.

Really good advice from Laurie.

What this site is not is a tutorial. Tutorials are very specific to a time and a technology. This is intended to be a guide to tell you all the things you can learn, so you can then go off and learn them.

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