Every once in a while, I’ll have a post gain traction over on ye ole’ orange site (Hacker News).
I find out about it because my analytics digest will get a yuge uptick in page views.
What’s interesting is all the referral sources that show up in my analytics. The Hacker New...
Here’s Ben Nadal quoting Dave Farley:
I've come to the belief that the only definition of quality in code that makes any sense is our ability to change the code. If it's easy to change, it's high quality; if it's hard to change, it's not.
Then Ben comments:
I'm sure that ...
Bryan Braun has an interesting post about his experience with what he calls a “haunted domain”:
He buys a domain that seems fine on the surface.
When he begins using it, he notices some things aren’t right (organic search traffic, for example, is dead).
After some investiga...
Nicholas Carr, one of my favorite technology writers, has been blogging over on Rough Type since [checks archives] 2005. As of late his writing has gone quiet, but he’s got a new book due out early next year and I think he’s starting up blogging again to help drum up interes...
Native apps are all about control. Don’t like thing X? You can dive in and, with enough elbow grease and persistence, finally get what you want. Write your own C library. Do some assembly code. Even make your own hardware if you have to.
But on the web you give up that contr...
I joked on Mastodon:
If anyone endeavors to write a book about what went wrong with tech, I have a great suggestion for the title:
“Enabled by Default”
It seems there really are two hard problems in tech:
Naming things
Setting good defaults
Keeping to scope
Anyhow, a lit...
So there I am, working on a bug exclusive to Safari (we’ve all been there). I can’t figure it out so I ask AI, “Hey, this piece of code is not working in Safari, what’s wrong?”
The issue might be related to how Safari handles keyboard events, especially for certain keys…
I...
In Penn & Teller’s Masterclass (no. 12 “Principles of Performing”) they explain how one of their favorite ways to design a magic trick is to come up with an idea and then act it out as if they already know how to do it. Here’s Penn:
We still start with an idea for a tri...
So there I am, having an issue where my UI state isn’t updating correctly. What do I do? What every developer does: turn to console.log() and troubleshoot by logging values.
I have a named color (e.g. blue) and a corresponding HSL color string for that named color (e.g. 100 ...
Ryan Dahl was on The Changelog to talk about Deno 2 specifically and his work on JavaScript more broadly. What follows are a few things that stood out to me.
His Regrets From Node Are Now in Deno
I think it’s interesting that Ryan’s famous talk 10 Things I Regret About Node....
The other day in our morning rush before school my wife asked for help figuring out how to put lunch money on our kids’ school accounts.
For some time she’s been doing it “the hard way”: talk to the people in the front office of the school every few months and swipe a credi...
The other day I saw a meme that went something like this:
Isn’t it crappy how basic human activities like singing, dancing, and making art have been turned into skills instead of being recognized as behaviors? The point of doing these things has become to get good at them. B...
Sean Voisen has a great post about 1) how we as humans think of randomness, 2) how computers simulate randomness, and the difference between the two.
He puts forth an intriguing thought: in a world increasingly driven by computation, how does that affect randomness in our l...
When you read a great blog post, the feeling you often get is: “I already knew this, I just hadn’t been able to express it!”
In this sense, writing a great blog post is about listening.
If you’re listening — to others, your coworkers, the people you follow, your own experien...
Beware ye who enter, here be personal opinions.
I’ve never understood reading time estimation widgets. Why did these get so popular? Is it because they’re easy? I mean, you can grab one off npm no problem.
Baldur suggests a theory in his piece about estimated reading time...
Rick Rubin gives this advice about working in the studio with artists when making an album:
[Let’s say] We’ve recorded twenty-five songs. We think the album is going to have ten. Instead of picking our favorite ten, we limit it to: “What are the five or six we can’t live wi...
Stanford psychologist Emily Pronin and her colleagues came up with an interesting study in human behavior.
Subjects were given incomplete words and asked to complete them with the first word that came to mind.
For example, you’re given the fragments B__T and CHE__ and you wr...
I look at some people’s personal websites and think, “Stupendous! If I ever reach that zenith of personal web design, I will call it quits.”
Then I read a post by them later and they say something like, “Gah! I just really don’t like where I’m at with my personal website.”
A...
One of the ways I like to do development is to build something, click around a ton, make tweaks, click around more, more tweaks, more clicks, etc., until I finally consider it done.
The clicking around a ton is the important part. If it’s a page transition, that means going ...
I was joking on Mastodon about how the zeitgeist has changed over the years, but its pattern is revealing itself: an acronym which merely drops letters. The Next Big Thing™ is clearly going to be “A”.
2010: Everyone needs an "API"
2020: Everyone needs "AI"
2030: Everyone ne...
I quite enjoyed Pen & Teller’s Masterclass (paywall, sorry!). I learned some practical card tricks that came in handy while we sitting in the airport waiting for a connecting fight with restless kids.
I also really enjoyed Pen & Teller’s reflections on the art of the...
I recently changed my workflow around authoring and publishing my site notes.jim-nielsen.com. Here’s the rundown.
Before
Pretty standard JAMstack type stuff. All my notes are markdown files in a git repository that live alongside the code generating the website, e.g.
package...
On ShopTalkShow no. 628, Chris and Dave got to talking about s3/r2 and hosted media solutions. Dave graciously gave a shoutout to my Netlify “public folder” workflow, which reminded me of something I’ve been meaning to write about.
Chris mentions how he prefers being able to...
From Emil Kowalski’s newsletter (my Feedbin cache for your convenience):
I started writing more blog posts recently. I like it because it's different than X. You get a spike of views when you share something on X, but that dies off quickly. If you provide great value with y...
Imagine you’re driving a dirt road and you come to a fork. Which way do you go, left or right?
This decision is much easier to make if you’ve been traveling that road for the last hour and you’re sitting there in your truck facing the reality of the decision. You can see the...
I love this articulation: AI enables action without thought. It comes from an iA article about AI and the future of design (emphasis mine):
Now, what actually is AI? The Italian philosopher and technology ethicist Luciano Floridi sums it up nicely. He posits that AI doesn’t...
Me a few weeks ago:
tfw when you have an idea for a personal website redesign, and then you build it, and then you hate it, and then you have to decide whether to ship it anyway or keep what you have
As you can probably guess from the title[1], I decided to keep what I hav...
I’ve been a long-time fan of Deno and their ethos of following the web platform. But I’m not sure how I feel about their latest admission which makes their dependency story more like npm and less like the web.
Designing Deno’s module system around HTTP imports was ambitious...
Here’s something you might not know about me: I like to play golf. As such, I follow a couple of golf-related brands on social media as a guilty pleasure.
The other day an image surfaced on Taylormade’s account which showcases Tommy Fleetwood playing some of their newest iro...
Just a quick note on a personal workflow thing.
I’ve written before about the many different ways I host my personal websites on Netlify.
I’ve got a few websites that aren’t the traditional model of: commit to git, push, build triggers on Netlify, website goes live.
Sometime...
