Spoons

Most people I know would know what I meant if I said “I’m all out of spoons” or “I wish I had the spoons for that”. I believe it has come to mean how much energy you have to do certain things. Say you (metaphorically, obviously) have 5 spoons that replenish themselves each day. B … | Continue reading


@chriscoyier.net | 2 years ago

Tern

A couple of weeks back, we sold our Chevy Tahoe. We purchased it just days after Ruby was born. I remember driving home from the hospital in a two-wheel-rear-wheel drive Toyota Tacoma and it was slippery with snow. We needed a way safer vehicle stat, and we popped over to the Che … | Continue reading


@chriscoyier.net | 2 years ago

A Little Family Trip to Valparaiso

Miranda’s brother and family live there, and her parents also just moved there after retiring. It was a nice time for a final summer trip. We swam in the pool, saw a funk band play in the park, hit the farmer’s market, ate Parlor Doughnuts, watched a Pop Warner football game, and … | Continue reading


@chriscoyier.net | 2 years ago

Day of CascadiaJS 2022

Been a long time since I’ve done an in-person talk, but I broke that ice today. It’s my “The web is good now” talk — revamped quite a bit and shrunk to fit into a 25-minute slot. Felt like riding a bike, really. I was able to summon up that old speaker energy and deliver […] | Continue reading


@chriscoyier.net | 2 years ago

Video Horizontal Rules

Is it interesting to use a video as an


? Eh, kinda. | Continue reading


@chriscoyier.net | 2 years ago

I remember seeing Adam Best’s tweet when it went viral: Boulder: AR-15Orlando: AR-15Parkland: AR-15Las Vegas: AR-15Aurora, CO: AR-15Sandy Hook: AR-15Waffle House: AR-15San Bernardino: AR-15Midland/Odessa: AR-15Poway synagogue: AR-15Sutherland Springs: AR-15Tree of Life Synagogue: … | Continue reading


@chriscoyier.net | 2 years ago

42

Just a lovely day here in Bend, Oregon. It’s very warm out. That kind of deep-seeded warmth you can only feel in late summer, when the warmth radiates from every sidewalk square, telephone pole, and deck chair as much as it does from the sun. I’m 42 years old today. I only feel h … | Continue reading


@chriscoyier.net | 2 years ago

New Banjo & Local Event Fun

It’s an 11″ pot Oak and Pistachio Short Scale Five String Banjo from Beansprout / Aaron Keim & family up in Hood River, Oregon. I drove up to Hood River to pick it up and see Aaron, his shop, and his family. It was so cool to see the woodworking shop of a real luthier. […] | Continue reading


@chriscoyier.net | 2 years ago

The Many Faces of Puzzles

Much of my daily brain power is dedicated to logic puzzles. Coding is effectively a logic puzzle and I do an awful lot of that. Many other aspects of a business are solving puzzles. Determining strategy. Trying to be effective at marketing. Measuring and charting progress. Runnin … | Continue reading


@chriscoyier.net | 2 years ago

Dead Wax

Fascinating that the CEO and co-founder of Patreon, Jack Conte, has a YouTube Channel (cheezy clickbait thumbnails and all) where he hangs out with his buddies, invites on super good musicians to talk about their work, and shoots the breeze about good music old and new. Well, I g … | Continue reading


@chriscoyier.net | 2 years ago

Police Radar on Google Maps Driving Directions

I just noticed for this first time while driving along a highway that Google Maps shows “Speed Traps”. Apparently user-reported (where? maybe in Waze?) data where police are using radar speed guns to measure your driving speed, and pull you over and ticket you if you’re speeding. … | Continue reading


@chriscoyier.net | 2 years ago

Sweet Spot for RSS?

Ben Ubois was on The Changlelog the other day. Ben is the creator of Feedbin, my preferred RSS service. I say “service” and not “reader” because while I sometimes use Feedbin itself as a reader (it’s good), I also bounce around to other readers for fun. The API they offer enables … | Continue reading


@chriscoyier.net | 2 years ago

No Route Talk

I think about The Seven Things You’re Not Supposed to Talk About fairly often. This American Life producer Sarah Koenig’s mother, Mrs. Matthiessen, has seven rules. I’ll put them here, as she says them (although she credits a “French friend” for the first five): Never talk about … | Continue reading


@chriscoyier.net | 2 years ago

Tankless

We decided to move to tankless water heating at our house. So rather than a huge drum water heater that I’ve had in every home of my life, we have these small wall-mounted rectangles. Part of our original impetus was that we’d have “instant” hot water. Which… turns out isn’t real … | Continue reading


@chriscoyier.net | 2 years ago

Scaffolding as a Good Way to Get Started

I’ve noticed that a lot of my commit messages the last few months, especially on new branches, simply say scaffolding. I usually mean it in a very general sense. Not necessarily using some kind of framework or CLI scaffolding, like the famous rails generate scaffold or the generi … | Continue reading


@chriscoyier.net | 2 years ago

JavaScript Import Sorting

It’s fascinating how the order of imports doesn’t matter in individual JavaScript files. If you start awaiting them and using their methods for things, then it might matter, but those top-level normal imports at the top of so many JavaScript files… the order is largely irrelevant … | Continue reading


@chriscoyier.net | 2 years ago

“Jim”

At first I noticed a yard crew over at Jim’s house cutting his grass and trimming the bushes. That’s weird. Jim always did his own yard work. I know because he’s our neighbor right across the street and he was out there a lot. He lived alone. I always thought it was impressive be … | Continue reading


@chriscoyier.net | 2 years ago

We’ve run a software company for 10 years — what have we learned?

Alex and I teamed up for a CodePen Radio podcast presenting our collaborative advice based on what we’ve experienced so far. | Continue reading


@chriscoyier.net | 2 years ago

Smoke

It was the first real day of smoke here in Bend yesterday. Mercifully, a bit late in the summer compared to previous years. But it’s still here. Just a fact of life now. The west burns in huge swathes every year and we deal with the carnage and poor air quality. Climate change in … | Continue reading


@chriscoyier.net | 2 years ago

Bullet Train

Miranda and I went to see Bullet Train the other night. We were both in rather uncharacteristically bad moods, especially for a date night without the kid. This movie really turned things around. I watched the preview and thought it would be a rather soulless/boring action-for-ac … | Continue reading


@chriscoyier.net | 2 years ago

They Got Aquired

I talked to Dana Miranda (from my hometown!) about the sale and she covered it for They Got Acquired. Coyier wasn’t seeking a buyer before DigitalOcean reached out with its offer in January 2022. But he believes the sale came at just the right time. “They could run [the blog] wit … | Continue reading


@chriscoyier.net | 2 years ago

Actually, the San Francisco Typeface Does Ship as a Variable Font

I was recently fawning over Apple’s recently Expanded San Francisco Typeface. San Francisco really looks nice in both the compressed and expanded1 versions, across all the weights. So I ended with: Doesn’t this make perfect sense to construct as a variable font and ship the whole … | Continue reading


@chriscoyier.net | 2 years ago

Bosch 800 Series Refrigerator

We came home a little cockeyed one night this past winter. My memory has it about midnight, but that probably means it was like 8:45pm. I was ready for bed, but of course, fate was not in our favor that night. There was a weird sound coming from the kitchen. Like a hissing. It to … | Continue reading


@chriscoyier.net | 2 years ago

Touch ID for Desktops?

Apple sells desktop machines, like the Mac Studio and Mac Pro, meaning bring-your-own keyboard. If you want to use Touch ID, which is awfully nice UX, you’ve got one choice: Magic Keyboard. Annoying, to me, as I’ll get an RSI flareup in half a day of not using an ergonomic keyboa … | Continue reading


@chriscoyier.net | 2 years ago

KEF LSX II

KEF LEX II are a pair of bookshelf-sized speakers that I recently bought. Spendy! But nice. I’ll get to them, but I’m long winded so I gotta do a bunch of blogwords first to set the scene. I moved to the Mac Studio not long ago. I love it. It’s a great machine. Feels very […] | Continue reading


@chriscoyier.net | 2 years ago

Can’t click on tmux panes in iTerm?

We use tmux at CodePen. It’s essentially so we can all run a single terminal command and it’ll run all the scripts and whathaveyou to fire up our dev environment. Then we have a UI for all the different services and whatnot we run. We can and do update it regularly to help us do … | Continue reading


@chriscoyier.net | 2 years ago

How to Build a Grayscale Color Palette

If you wanted to be 100% mathematical and consistently even about crafting a grayscale color palette, you could create the colors in a math-friendly color function like HSL, like so: Here’s an example of using those colors as backgrounds: If you wanted to DRY that up in SCSS, you … | Continue reading


@chriscoyier.net | 2 years ago

Moving on with Font Management

I recently saw Editorial New by Pangram Pangram. It’s got some freebie downloads, which I’m a sucker for. If I end up using it for something, I’ll be back for the rest. The system works. Normally I’d download what I can and file them away in my FontExplorer X software. But alas, … | Continue reading


@chriscoyier.net | 2 years ago

CascadiaJS 2022

CascadiaJS (August 30th – September 2nd, Sunriver, Oregon) is open to everyone from anywhere, and I’ll be speaking at it this year. Come one come all. I figured I’d blog it (in addition to it being on my speaking page) in particular because I’d hate it if any of my fellow Bendite … | Continue reading


@chriscoyier.net | 2 years ago

CampanaCeramics on Etsy

CampanaCeramics on Etsy Jeff took a 6-year hiatus on Etsy, and now is back with a new line of work: All work here is designed by me on the computer, 3d printed, then I make a mold of that, and cast from my own recipe porcelain and glaze. I remember telling him when I first saw [… … | Continue reading


@chriscoyier.net | 2 years ago

Pizza Pit

Pizza Pit was the pizza of my youth. Fresh, Fast, and Hot Delivery, yo. They were pulling up to my childhood home on the weekly. My folks got pepperoni and onion, which always annoyed me because the onions were weird soggy squiggles and I hated them. I even like onions now as an … | Continue reading


@chriscoyier.net | 2 years ago

10 Years of Simutronics (2009)

It’s 19951, and my friend Jeff was showing me a cool game he found while logged in (via our telephone modems) to AOL. It was called Gemstone III, a text-based adventure/roleplaying game by a company called Simutronics. It was what came to be called today as a MMORPG (Massively Mu … | Continue reading


@chriscoyier.net | 2 years ago

5th

The ol’ anniversary today. Technically we went to the courthouse a few days before July 22nd to be legally married, but July 22nd is when we had the big wedding party so it feels more like our real anniversary. It’s the “wood” anniversary, traditionally. We both got each other co … | Continue reading


@chriscoyier.net | 2 years ago

Easy Asset Cache Busting with Buddy

I’m quite chuffed with this! I’ve been solving this in different ways for a heck of a lot of years, in situations where asset cache busting isn’t part of what it provides so I need to do it myself. But it always requires a little more technology than I would like, like setting up … | Continue reading


@chriscoyier.net | 2 years ago

The World’s Most Satisfying Checkbox

As a proprietor of CodePen, I’ve seen, definitely, thousands of customized checkboxes, some classy and modern, some classy from trends gone by, some fun, some (whimsically) frustrating, and some clever twists. So I was a bit skeptical of Andy Allen’s headline. But I’ve heard noth … | Continue reading


@chriscoyier.net | 2 years ago

Hierarchical Custom Post Types in WordPress

You need to set both of these things to make it work correctly: Now when you are on the Create/Edit screen for the new Post Type, you’ll see the Page Attributes area that allows you to select the Parent you’d like. | Continue reading


@chriscoyier.net | 2 years ago

AAA

Lovely weather this weekend. Took Miranda’s Chevy Tahoe over to the car wash for cleaning. Ruby and I toweled off the wet bits after the wash. After we were done, I went to start the car, click-click-click-click. Light internet research suggested the battery was dead. Miranda was … | Continue reading


@chriscoyier.net | 2 years ago

Stranger Things 4

I was so hyped on season 1. I enjoyed seasons 2 & 3, but I wasn’t quite as into them. I dunno, maybe they felt slightly more convoluted or repetitive. But damn if they didn’t set up a banger season 4. They made the stakes feel so high. They made us care about everyone. They […] | Continue reading


@chriscoyier.net | 2 years ago

Yoga

Yoga has entered my life in several small ways this year. My wife has enjoyed it and has done it for as long as I’ve known her, via practicing alone, online, or in in-person classes. Now that we have Peleton thingies, we have the Peloton app on our devices, and there are Yoga cla … | Continue reading


@chriscoyier.net | 2 years ago

LCH FTW

Using hsl() in CSS is fairly popular because of how sensical it is. Hue, saturation, and lightness. 260 is bluey-purple territory. 85% means pretty thickly saturated. 50% is right in the middle of lightness, not toward a blackening or whitening. And with sensible numbers like tha … | Continue reading


@chriscoyier.net | 2 years ago

AV Receiver

If you’ve got a car for sale, and it’s a halfway desirable car in halfway decent shape, you probably won’t have any trouble at all finding a buyer. You might have multiple buyers competing. If you list it at a really low price, you’ll get tons of potential buyers. But there are s … | Continue reading


@chriscoyier.net | 2 years ago

Performative Design

Sahadeva Hammari: I call this performative design. Performative design ultimately reduces the practice of design from a wide range of creative, psychological, communication, and problem-solving skills to a narrow practice focused on the reproduction of popular styles and interfac … | Continue reading


@chriscoyier.net | 2 years ago

Web Taxonomies

The web is a big place I’ve said that a lot of times in my professional life. The point I’m usually attempting to make is that it’s shortsighted to make sweeping judgment calls about technologies and approaches on the web. Websites are too different from one another. Difference i … | Continue reading


@chriscoyier.net | 2 years ago

Squaring Up

I can empathize with someone who thinks that aborting a baby, at any time under any circumstances, is murder. I don’t agree with it, but I get it. It must be a really deep-rooted emotionally-fueled opinion that they can’t just shake. Even if they have some conflicting intellectua … | Continue reading


@chriscoyier.net | 2 years ago

Family USB C Inventory

Device Main Connector(s) My iPad USB C Miranda’s iPad USB C Ruby’s Kindle USB C My Laptop (also has MagSafe) USB C Mac Studio USB C Miranda’s Laptop USB C External Monitor USB C AirPods Max Lightning Microsoft Ergonomic Keyboard USB A Logitech MX Master 3 Mouse (just for charging … | Continue reading


@chriscoyier.net | 2 years ago

Marketplace

I just recently bitched about Facebook Marketplace, but then found myself lightly pleased at Facebook for allowing me to remove it from the mobile app navigation entirely. At the time, I’ve never used it aside from clicking that navigation item once in a while to be shown a rando … | Continue reading


@chriscoyier.net | 2 years ago

UX Designer Reacts to Having to Debug Something at the Terminal

You could make the same image for “Back-end developer tries to align a wrapping row of boxes along their bottom edge” | Continue reading


@chriscoyier.net | 2 years ago

Street Sweepers

They are so funny. The trucks are always so buff. Super ripped for a truck. But all you see is a little circle brush sweeper thing. Like it needs a fricking jet engine to turn a brush in a circle. | Continue reading


@chriscoyier.net | 2 years ago