Archive

We only just recently lived through the blockchain and crypto hype. We’re currently living through the AI hype. There is some (anonymous?) person who writes at Bite code! in the first person who remembered a hype cycle I’m too young to remember: When I started programming, XML was going to replace everything. HTML with XHTML, validation […]

If you need a good full-throated argument against this practice, read Garrett Dimon’s Live Coding Interviews. They exist because companies need to know if you can actually code, but as Garrett says: At best, they serve as a tolerable de-risking filter for a company that needs an assembly-line hiring process. It’s clearly fine that a company […]

Some A+ journalism from Anne Dingus [sic] in TexasMonthly in… 1994. I think it’s smart for long-standing publications to make sure their old gold is properly published online. The clear winners: There was some fine ones in The Fox and the Hound 2 also.

The Paravel boys just launched Luro publically. 🍾 I suspect it will be an app that means different things to different people and helps teams differently. But brass tacks, it’s a dashboard of meta-information about your website. “Track your components” is just one of many things Luro can do, but it’s a pretty cool one. […]

Chris Brandrick asked me, for Frontend Focus, “to share a few of his favorite tools and services” which of course I’m happy to. Here are my (somewhat random) picks: I’ve seen a couple of these lists recently, like Michelle Barker’s Cool Tools, Christian Heilmann’s The 10 tools I install on every new Mac I get, […]

I saw this new app for note-taking the other day: Capacities. Looks pretty neat to me. In the vein of Notion, a block-based document-making machine kind of thing. But with a twist or two, like it doesn’t lean into databases as much but elevates other content types like links and images more. Plus, “everything is […]

This February, I half-joked: Waiting for headlines about how web searches are now sent through so many AI models the energy consumption is worse than crypto. Mastodon I was hoping that wasn’t true, but the data is starting to come in. Here’s one I saw (via Ethan): In a paper due to be published later […]

I’m speaking at two events coming up:

I woke up a little hungover on Saturday with burgers on the mind. I was inspired after my locally famous breakfast burrito site to do it again, but pick something perhaps even more niche. Smashburgers it is. (Here’s a repo.) I used Astro for this partially because they just went v3, and I wanted to […]

I was at a musical performance the other week. A couple of groups playing as a send-off to Fiddle Tunes. Maybe a few hundred people in an old blimp hangar. The audience area was slightly staggered, so there would be like 8 rows of chairs, then a stair, then 8 more, etc. So if you […]

You don’t need a special app for YouTube playlists. On any given video, there is a decently easy-to-find “Save” option that allows you to add to a playlist. You can have multiple playlists, and they are also decently easy to find and edit. So it’s an uphill battle for an app like Play ($2.99 on […]

I’m always filled with temporary dread when I see a huge semi truck pull up to a busy intersection to turn. How are they going to orchestrate everything to make this turn happen? They must be way to the left in the turning lane, cutting off lanes to their right. They have to swoop into […]

She writes: myth: everyone should blog I sometimes see advice to the effect of “blogging is great! public speaking is great! everyone should do it! build your Personal Brand!“. That’s me, I say that. I don’t know about personal brands anymore, but I like the idea that it helps you think. Blogging isn’t for everyone. […]

That’s what WordPress.com is asking for web hosting, domain ownership, and support for a hundred years. They are essentially saying they’ll be helping your anointed heir with the /wp-admin/ password after you die. Pretty cool. Mostly, I love the strong marketing play: you can trust us to be around for the (very) long haul. Is […]

Baldur wrote up some thoughts about how companies don’t typically reward refactoring code. There isn’t a lot of incentive at many companies for slow work, rewriting old code, refactoring toward better ideas, paying down technical debt, and that kind of thing. I get that impression anyway, I don’t have much first-hand experience as I’ve spent […]

Keith Grant in Scope vs Shadow DOM: But here’s the thing: CSS @scope and shadow DOM are not competing standards. They’re complementary. They meet different needs entirely — but with enough healthy overlap in functionality so there isn’t a gap. I like that phrase “enough healthy overlap” when it comes to web platform features. Grid […]

I love the idea of the Bird Buddy. Somebody was like: what if a Ring doorbell camera except a bird feeder? Then totally did it. But they went the extra mile by making the app that shows you visiting birds actually kinda good. It must use some kind of machine learning model to identify the […]

When I talked about saving links, what was helpful for me is to think about my behavior in terms of when I’m going to need that link, so I broadly bucketed like: I like how Juha-Matti Santala didn’t just think in terms of those categories for themselves but re-bucketed like: If I were to use […]

Miranda and I went to Vegas the other week. A bit of a late 6th-anniversary celebration. Miranda had also never been there, despite being a way more accomplished world traveler than I, and it seemed like a place she would enjoy, what with all the dressing up. We left on a Thursday afternoon and had […]