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 ...
Ever used a website where you toggle from light mode to dark mode and the web site changes but the chrome around the browser doesn’t?
To illustrate, take a look at this capture of my blog on an iPhone. When you toggle the theme from light to dark, note how the website turns ...
Adam Silver has an article titled “Do you trust design advice from ChatGPT?” wherein he prompted the LLM:
How do you add hint text to radio buttons?
It gave various suggestions, each of which Adam breaks down.
Here’s an an example response from ChatGPT:
If you want the h...
I recently finished Carlo Rovelli’s book “The Order of Time” and, of course, had a few web-adjacent thoughts come to mind.
Who says lessons from physics can’t be applied to making software? (I know, nobody is actually dying on that hill.)
A Weakness of Being Data-Driven
Bei...
Web developers have been waiting years for traction in styling HTML form controls. Is it possible the day has come? Here’s Jen Simmons on Mastodon:
My team is working on a solution — you’ll apply appearance: base and switch to a new interoperable, consistent controls with e...
Heydon Pickering has an intriguing video dealing with the question: “Why is everything binary?” The gist of the video, to me, distills to this insight:
The idea that [everything] belongs to one of two archetypes is seductive in its simplicity, so we base everything that we ...
Here’s Gordon Brander in an article titled “Don't fork the ecosystem”:
Most of our software has been shaped by chance decisions made in haste by people who could not have predicted how the system would end up being used today.
And if we could rebuild those systems today, k...
And by LLMS I mean: (L)ots of (L)ittle ht(M)l page(S).
I recently shipped some updates to my blog. Through the design/development process, I had some insights which made me question my knee-jerk reaction to building pieces of a page as JS-powered interactions on top of the e...
Matt Biilman, CEO of Netlify, published an interesting piece called “Introducing AX: Why Agent Experience Matters” where he argues the coming importance of a new “X” (experience) in software: the agent experience, meaning the experience your users’ AI agents will have as aut...
Rick Rubin has an interview with Woody Harrelson on his podcast Tetragrammaton. Right at the beginning Woody talks about his experience acting and how he’s had roles that did’t turn out very well. He says sometimes he comes away from those experiences feeling dirty, like “I ...
Andy Jiang over on the Deno blog writes “If you're not using npm specifiers, you're doing it wrong”:
During the early days of Deno, we recommended importing npm packages via HTTP with transpile services such as esm.sh and unpkg.com. However, there are limitations to importi...
Let’s say you make a UI to gather some user feedback. Nothing complicated. Just a thumbs up/down widget. It starts out neutral, but when the user clicks up or down, you highlight what they clicked an de-emphasize/disable the other (so it requires an explicit toggle to change...
I’ve been working on a transition to using light-dark() function in CSS.
What this boils down to is, rather than CSS that looks like this:
:root {
color-scheme: light;
--text: #000;
}
@media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) {
:root {
color-scheme: dark;
--text: #f...
