A little while back I heard about the White House launching their version of a Drudge Report style website called White House Wire. According to Axios, a White House official said the site’s purpose was to serve as “a place for supporters of the president’s agenda to get the...
I’ve long wanted the ability to create custom collections of icons from my icon gallery.
Today I can browse collections of icons that share pre-defined metadata (e.g. “Show me all icons tagged as blue”) but I can’t create your own arbitrary collections of icons.
That is, unt...
Here’s a screenshot of my inbox from when I was on the last leg of my flight home from family summer vacation:
That’s pretty representative of the flurry of emails I get when I fly, e.g.:
Check in now
Track your bags
Your flight will soon depart
Your flight will soon boa...
I recently got my copy of the Internet Phone Book. Look who’s hiding on the bottom inside spread of page 32:
The book is divided into a number of categories — such as “Small”, “Text”, and “Ecology” — and I am beyond flattered to be listed under the category “HTML”! You ca...
This post is a secret to everyone! Read more about RSS Club.
I’ve been reading Apple in China by Patrick McGee.
There’s this part in there where he’s talking about a guy who worked for Apple and was known for being ruthless, stopping at nothing to negotiate the...
Dan Abramov in “Static as a Server”:
Static is a server that runs ahead of time.
“Static” and “dynamic” don’t have to be binaries that describe an entire application architecture. As Dan describes in his post, “static” or “dynamic” it’s all just computers doing stuff.
Comp...
Dan Abramov on his blog (emphasis mine):
The division between the frontend and the backend is physical. We can’t escape from the fact that we’re writing client/server applications. Some logic is naturally more suited to either side. But one side should not dominate the othe...
Radek Sienkiewicz in a funny-because-its-true piece titled “Why do AI company logos look like buttholes?“:
We made a circular shape [logo] with some angles because it looked nice, then wrote flowery language to justify why our…design is actually profound.
As someone who ha...
I quite enjoyed this talk. Some of the technical details went over my head (I don’t know what “split 16-bit mask into two 8-bit LTUs” means) but I could still follow the underlying point.
First off, Andreas has a great story at the beginning about how he has a friend with a ...
OH: It’s just JavaScript, right? I know JavaScript.
My coworker who will inevitably spend the rest of the day debugging an electron issue
— @jonkuperman.com on BlueSky
“It’s Just JavaScript!” is probably a phrase you’ve heard before. I’ve used it myself a number of times....
I came across this post from the tech collective crftd. about how software is in a process of “continuous disintegration”:
One of the uncomfortable truths we sometimes have to break to people is that software isn't just never “done”. Worse even, it rots…
The practices of co...
A clip from “Buy Now! The Shopping Conspiracy” features a former executive of an online retailer explaining how motivated they were to make buying easy. Like, incredibly easy. So easy, in fact, that their goal was to “reduce your time to think a little bit more critically ab...
I’ve written about how I don’t love the idea of overriding basic computing controls. Instead, I generally favor opting to respect user choice and provide the controls their platform does.
Of course, this means platforms need to surface better primitives rather than supplying...
In his post about “Vibe Drive Development”, Robin Rendle warns against what I’ll call the pseudoscientific approach to product building prevalent across the software industry:
when folks at tech companies talk about data they’re not talking about a well-researched study fro...
I’ve spent so much time, had so many headaches, and encountered so much complexity from what, in my estimation, boils down to this: trying to get something to work on multiple computers.
It might be time to just go back to having one computer — a personal laptop — do everyth...
I loved this talk from Alexander Petros titled “Building the Hundred-Year Web Service”. What follows is summation of my note-taking from watching the talk on YouTube.
Is what you’re building for future generations:
Useful for them?
Maintainable by them?
Adaptable by them?
...
Following up on a previous article I wrote about backwards compatibility, I came across this document from Rick Byers of the Chrome team titled “Blink principles of web compatibility” which outlines how they navigate introducing breaking changes.
“Hold up,” you might say. “B...
In his book “The Order of Time” Carlo Rovelli notes how we often asks ourselves questions about the fundamental nature of reality such as “What is real?” and “What exists?”
But those are bad questions he says. Why?
the adjective “real” is ambiguous; it has a thousand meanin...
Via Jeremy Keith’s link blog I found this article: Elizabeth Goodspeed on why graphic designers can’t stop joking about hating their jobs. It’s about the disillusionment of designers since the ~2010s. Having ridden that wave myself, there’s a lot of very relatable stuff in ...
After reading an article, I ended up on HackerNews and stumbled on this comment:
The most frustrating thing about dipping in to the FE is that it seems like literally everything is deprecated.
Lol, so true. From the same comment, here’s a description of a day in the life o...
Here’s Sean Voisen writing about how programming is a feeling:
For those of us who enjoy programming, there is a deep satisfaction that comes from solving problems through well-written code, a kind of ineffable joy found in the elegant expression of a system through our fav...
I like the job title “Design Engineer”. When required to label myself, I feel partial to that term (I should, I’ve written about it enough).
Lately I’ve felt like the term is becoming more mainstream which, don’t get me wrong, is a good thing. I appreciate the diversificatio...
Excuse my rant.
Nobel-prize winning CEO of DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, was on 60 Minutes and floored me when he predicted:
We can cure all diseases with the help of AI. [The end of disease] is within reach, maybe within the next decade or so. I don't see why not.
“I don’t se...
In April 1945, as US soldiers overtook Merkers, Germany, stories began to surface to Army officials of stolen Nazi riches stored in the local salt mine.
Eventually, the Americans found the mine and began exploring it, ending up at a vaulted door. Here’s the story, as told by...
Carson Gross has a post about vendoring which brought back memories of how I used to build websites in ye olden days, back in the dark times before npm.
“Vendoring” is where you copy dependency source files directly into your project (usually in a folder called /vendor) and ...
I like to try different apps.
What makes trying different apps incredible is a layer of interoperability — standardized protocols, data formats, etc.
When I can bring my data from one app to another, that’s cool. Cool apps are interoperable. They work with my data, rather th...
I learned a new word: ductile. Do you know it?
I’m particularly interested in its usage in a physics/engineering setting when talking about materials.
Here’s an answer on Quora to: “What is ductile?”
Ductility is the ability of a material to be permanently deformed without ...
The other day I was working on something where I needed to use CSS to apply multiple background images to an element, e.g.
<div>
My content with background images.
</div>
<style>
div {
background-image:
url(image-one.jpg),
url(image-two...
I saw these going around, but didn’t think I’d ever see myself get tagged — then Eric assuaged my FOMO.
As I’ve done elsewhere talking about how I blog, I’m gonna try and impose a character limit to my answers (~240). I’m not sure if that makes my job as the writer easier or...
Jack Johnson is on Rick Rubin’s podcast Tetragrammaton talking about music, film making, creativity, and surfing.
At one point (~24:30) Johnson talks about his love for surfing and the beautiful flow state it puts him in:
Sometimes I’ll see a friend riding a wave while I’m ...
