Archive

It’s a common sentiment: The harder you work, the luckier you get. It’s a book, but I’m sure the orignial quote is like Mark Twain or something. I’ll admit it resonates with me. When I’m really working hard on the right things, for all the world to see, good things tend to happen. Things that […]

Brian Rinaldi: Does the Serverless Edge Live Up to the Hype? Your edge function – or middleware as some frameworks call it – will be called when the request comes in before it hits the origin server. It can modify that request, redirect it – so no need for slower server-side or client-side redirects or […]

Wonderful story from Robin where an 83-year-old woman who learns to play “the Big Red Synthesizer, enormous, as long as a Fiat” at the public library. Interestingly, commissioned by a design studio. Doubling the coolness, a modern, functional, web-powered synthesizer forms the header of the story. Amazing what web audio can do, ain’t it?

Have you seen the Browserslist concept? You make a .browserslistrc file at the root of a project, or a browserslist key in a package.json file, which indicates what browsers you want to support. Then any other code processing tool on that project and refer to it to make decisions about how to process that code. […]

I’ve used Pocket Casts as my preferred podcast app for… I dunno a long time I don’t really remember using anything else. I like it. It was July 2021 when Automattic bought it. Friggin wildcard acquisition right? Although Matt has said: Automattic is structured a bit like a holding company. I like to think of us […]

When you commit and push code to a Git repository, it can kick off a series of events. A pipeline for your software, as it were. This whole process is often called “continuous integration,” or CI for short. It’s pretty crucial to modern software development and falls under the umbrella of “DevOps” in current developer […]

Zach reflects on 17 years in the game and my essay The Great Divide, four years old this month: The Great Divide really resonated with me. I keep coming back to it and I do think it continues to accurately describe what feels like two very distinct and separate camps of web developer. And despite […]

I don’t know what step through debugging even is ok. When this post came through my RSS reader it looked extra rad:

I have this (extremely loose) idea for an activity in which a laser beam shines onto a gameboard, parallel to the board, and you have to use mirrors to reflect the beam toward an end goal. Maybe you’re solving a logic puzzle of sorts, where you are reaching the goal with limited equipment. Maybe it’s […]

Say someone asks you a question. They walk up to your desk, send you an email, ping you on Slack, whatever. The answer needs to be beefy. You could answer with your mouth, respond to their email, or DM them back. That’s totally fine and probably the most socially acceptable way to answer. But also […]

When I was on Alex Trost’s holiday stream, real quick at the end, I showed a way that CSS can animate to auto dimensions. This is a hell of a trick and it’s pretty great there is a way to get it done in without needing JavaScript to measure things ahead of time. Ideally, CSS […]

Sarah Bahr at NYT notes that Snow Fall is 10 years old now. It was a big smurfing deal in the crossover world of web design and journalism. It was like the concept of “art-directed blog posts,” but for news stories, taken to an 11. Here’s a collapsed version of how it all played out:

I’m hesitant to share this. I think RSS is most valuable when you slowly add people to your feed reader of choice that you have found and you know you like. A firehose of additions might turn you off. Too much noise. But on the flip side, you might find reading RSS too boring when […]

Monique Judge for The Verge: The biggest reason personal blogs need to make a comeback is a simple one: we should all be in control of our own platforms.  If what is happening on Twitter hasn’t demonstrated it, our relationship with these social media platforms is tenuous at best. The thing we are using to […]

It’s just timestamped HTML. As I recently wrote about feeds. An RSS feed (or JSON feed) isn’t “just for blog posts”, as nobody would be blamed for thinking. I just saw this new CMS called microfeed. One thing I like is how it just digs into Cloudflare-specific tech in a super opinionated way: microfeed uses […]

There is always some degree of tension between “native apps” and “the web” as platforms. If you’re going to write a native app for Android devices, well, I’ll quote from the Android Developer documentation: Android apps can be written using Kotlin, Java, and C++ languages. The Android SDK tools compile your code along with any […]

When you hear me endlessly prattle on about how you should have your own site, publish your own feed, and the general power of writing, I mean it. But why? What’s the point of writing on your own site? So many. Not to mention it’s fun! But there can be money in blogging too: You […]

I wrote about The Perfect TV for 2022 recently, but it wasn’t a shout-out to any particular TV. It was just a list of things I think would be ideal in a TV these days. Some of the things I listed are just a pipe dream, like a TV that has literally no user-facing software […]

I friggin missed what turned about to be the very last An Event Apart (AEA). No tears though, just a salute to a legendary run. September 2013 was my first AEA ever, in Austin, Texas. It was a huge moment for me. In my mind, AEA was the top of the top for our industry […]