Archive

From Dave’s So you want to make a new JS framework: You need say it’s “fast” This requirement applies to nearly every tech product. You absolutely gotta tell people it’s fast, but, plot twist, these products often aren’t particularly clear about what that means. Picking on frameworks specifically, some frameworks pick one possible meaning, toss […]

Good idea! It’s a clear need and offers a clear value proposition. Best of luck. You will have a little competition though: And I bet there are several more at this point, I haven’t updated my list of these in a few years. I came up in this industry working at companies solving “I need […]

Hidde de Vries’s Data-informed flex-grow for illustration purposes is a walkthrough of some of the techniques he used to build his bookshelf backgrounds. There didn’t seem to be an isolated demo so I made one for myself: Forgive me the sin of using React. Just seemed like a quick way to make a loop to […]

This seems new? https://podcast.adobe.com/ Looks like it’s a “labs” experiment (Project Shasta) growing up into a more full-blown product, a whole new vision for podcasting tools. I like it. It fits with an overall vision that Adobe supports the creative endeavors of people. I’ve requested access but haven’t gotten it yet, so I haven’t played […]

Dan Q’s demo is pretty fun. You’ll see a white page in anything but Firefox. But in Firefox you’ll see a webpage-looking webpage only if you View Source you’ll see nothing at all. This is a classic CSS trick that relies on the fact that Firefox lets you apply CSS to a page by including […]

After (a lot?) of years using Pocket Casts, and thinking how cool it is that it’s fully open source now, I’ve moved off it. I love podcasts, but the only time I really have to listen to them is in the car (CarPlay), and my trips are usually 10-15 minutes (I’m a 1.5×-er). Pocket Casts […]

A Christian Heilmann project called Dear Console…. There are 18 in there right now and they are all pretty neat. I’ll re-post one (submitted by Pankaj Parashar) I thought was very interesting as I’ve never heard of the main API being used: On this site: :sad-trombone: Aside from my hand-authored theme CSS, all the rest […]

As a hot take, it’s blasphemy that Disney even made a “2” of The Fox and the Hound (in 2006, after the 1981 original). Let alone made it non-canon. (Are we supposed to believe that in the time gap in the original movie between Tod and Copper’s childhood and the ending with the whole bear […]

Dave and I did a little podcast crossover and joined Brian Kardell and Eric Meyer over on the Igalia Chats show. They are nine-parts deep on this series so far talking about Web Ecosystem Health. It’s a fascinating topic so I’m glad they are making it a whole series rather than cramming the idea into […]

Tina Roth Eisenberg the other day: I get way too much email. Reading newsletters in my inbox has never been the right context for me to actually enjoy content I am subscribing to. Looks like I am not the only one who is struggling with a workflow that makes sense for consuming newsletters. (Dennis’ Crowley’s […]

That’s fake exasperation. Yes, they do! I’m just not terribly surprised. If someone were to put me in charge of MDN and finding a business model, I would have used advertising as part of it long ago. I think it can be done tastefully, non-invasively, and possibly even usefully. So far, it looks like they […]

These likely bear no semblance to Official Computer Science categorization, but these are the categories of logs in my head: I suspect a decent amount of computer work is tending to logs of one sort or another. I’m thinking about this because it’s come up at work a decent amount lately in the form of: […]

I was catching up on Matt’s latest State of Word the other day. I’m something of a career-long user and fan. WordPress has changed a heck of a lot over the past few years. One big change was the Block Editor (aka Gutenberg). I wasn’t maybe on the bleeding edge, but I was a pretty […]

So that’s: Just a massive deal. Cute that it landed on Valentine’s Day. This flips a switch in my brain: I can totally use these in production… right now. I won’t even bother polyfilling. I’m quite proud that in Google’s announcement post (thanks Una!) that the demos are using CodePen. To have something I helped […]

Fun little blogging theme emerging this winter here. I like 🧠 galaxy-brain stuff the most. That is, ideas I haven’t seen floated anywhere else but make good sense. There is a bunch of stuff that we kinda just know we’re going to get this year, and while that stuff is aces, let’s push the thinking […]

See this typeface Academy Engraved LET? It’s usually the first typeface in my Font dropdowns in every single app. No shade, it’s just a very stylized typeface that isn’t really my style. I want to remove it from this dropdown. Maybe not even forever, just deactivate it. That’s what FontBook is for, right? Normally, but […]

Is this: It’s essentially a scoped lobotomized owl. Love it. The idea of putting spacing only between elements is great. Having to select and remove spacing from the last element, or intentionally not select the first element, is weird mental overhead that is nice to avoid. Not that this strange-looking selector is without a bit […]

Sometimes when I change software, I end up switching back. I get excited about the fresh vibes, like moving the living room couch, then find enough little annoyances or rough edges that the temptation to move back overwhelms. Email clients are notorious for that. I get tempted by the aesthetics. Or tempted by the features. […]

You can’t have a white favicon, because, in a lot of situations, you won’t be able to see the dang thing at all. Here’s a default Chrome tab while macOS is in Light mode. You can’t have a black favicon, because, in a lot of situations, you won’t be able to see the dang thing […]

I’m just a general fan of Conway’s Game of Life, mostly for nostalgic reasons. It was one of the first things I ever coded (Turbo Pascal) that was super interesting to me. Probably partially because of the visual and interactive components. I remember working on it feverishly in high school, adding features to a custom-built […]