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The online home of Jeremy Keith, an author and web developer living and working in Brighton, England.
IndieWeb
Sunday session
Reading Gideon The Ninth by Tamsyn Muir.
Thursday session
Wednesday session
A thoughtful piece by Matthias that’s a must-read for both designers and developers.
A stack is also technical debt, non-transferable knowledge, accelerated obsolescence, and vendor lock-in. That means fragility and overall unnecessary complication. Popular stacks inevitably turn into cargo cults that build in spite of the web, not for it.
The web platform does not require build toolchains. Always default to, and regress to, the fundamentals of CSS, HTML, and JavaScript. Those core standards are the web stack.
A collection of small, low stakes and low effort tools.
No logins, no registration, no data collection.
Just heard the sad news about Moya Brennan passing. Some of the first records I ever bought were by Clannad—Macalla, Magical Ring, Legend.
Ar dheis Dé go raibh a hanam.
Monday session
The bots are swarming hard today, laying waste to the meadows of the open web. This is what powers vibe-coding.
The slop must flow.
I know a young student in Germany who needs to learn about relevance of the Entscheidungsproblem and Alan Turing to today’s work in computation—who should I put them in touch with?
leehanchung.github.io/blogs/2026/04/05/the-ai-great-leap-forward/
In 1958, Mao ordered every village in China to produce steel. Farmers melted down their cooking pots in backyard furnaces and reported spectacular numbers. The steel was useless. The crops rotted. Thirty million people starved.
In 2026, every other company is having top down mandate on AI transformation.
Same energy.
The conference circuit is in a slump these days. That won’t change as long as people don’t buy tickets. And a good conference circuit is typically something that you start to miss only when it’s too late.
Tuesday session
techdirt.com/2026/03/25/ai-might-be-our-best-shot-at-taking-back-the-open-web/
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.
Sound checking Salter Cane
Thursday session
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.
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.
brucelawson.co.uk/2026/apple-at-50-my-top-five-apple-moments/
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
