There’s a lot of “same-ness” across design systems. Yesenia Perez-Cruz said it well: Sameness over cohesion. This is probably the biggest issue I’ve seen with design systems. They can lead to a feeling of visually generic sameness instead of a feeling of cohesion across an experi … | Continue reading
The shorthand for embedding an in Markdown is the following:  This works for rendering an image in the same way a skateboard is a minimum viable replacement for car; it rolls, but not fast. To render an image responsibly in modern times y … | Continue reading
I didn’t know I had a brand of humor, but apparently that brand is Jif. Incredible. | Continue reading
Spurred by last week’s ShopTalk I rolled out View Transitions here on my static Jekyll site. I hadn’t realized View Transitions for multi-page apps (MPAs) and static sites are ready for testing behind a flag in Chrome 113+. View Transitions for MPAs are a feature that’s high on m … | Continue reading
Robb Owen writes on the state of front-end development… I’ve personally never really seen frontend as an assembly job. Lego is admittedly awesome, but for me the mental model of assembling Lego bricks in the required order until a Jira ticket can be marked as “done” feels too lin … | Continue reading
I have a love-hate relationship with the hurdy-gurdy. While the haunting drone sound it produces is enchanting, it strikes me as something a medieval software engineer would conjure up so they could play the viola without actually knowing how to play the viola. Drawing a bow is t … | Continue reading
One of my favorite ideas for Twitter was by Oliver Reichenstein in a post called “Make Bots Identifiable”. Oliver makes the case that apps should notify users if the author of the post is a feed, a bot, or an actual human and the UI of the application should reflect that accordin … | Continue reading
It’s been two months since my last vibe check. I needed a break. My last Jan/Feb vibe check was so bad I forgot to include the part where my wife had COVID for a week. Anyways, she’s fine now and went to the hospital for an entirely different reason. In the last two weeks… Let’s … | Continue reading
Kottke found a video of how they make those beautiful Japanese manhole covers. I don’t have much to add other than I found the number of manual, mechanical, and robot processes involved in fabricating a manhole cover interesting. Machine used to grab scrap metal Machine melts scr … | Continue reading
Your kennel name was Lyla. Your previous owner called you Kate. We called you Rudy, Rudo, Rudo Prosciutto, Dodo, Dody, Rude dog, Rudiosis, Rudiosis Montosis, Rudy girl, Girly, and Sweet girl. Didn’t matter what we called you, you came. You were the sweetest dog we could have ever … | Continue reading
I’ve been thinking a lot about limitations. Nearly all the rabbit holes I travel down end up with the same theme: “Limitations exist and we need to understand them and work within them”. This of course that got me thinking about the limitations we do and don’t put around building … | Continue reading
My son Otis wants me to help him make a video game. When he says “we should make a game”, he means “me” because despite a lot encouragement from his parents he hasn’t shown interest in coding classes. I also have a lot going on with the whole “starting a company” deal, so I was h … | Continue reading
My wife and I did a poor job sharing Christmas wishlists with each other this year. It dawned on us how our hobbies (hers tennis, mine gunpla) are so specialized we either A) have the stuff we need or B) our needs are so specific or subjective that even gifting a ballpark guess o … | Continue reading
It’s a secret to everyone! This post is for RSS subscribers only. Read more about RSS Club. I don’t talk about this much, but since February 24th, 2022 I’ve spent ~2hrs a day following the war in Ukraine. My heart breaks and sensitivities to injustice rise over this David vs. Gol … | Continue reading
I had a free night on the calendar, so I tumbled out of my office with a stack of necessary supplies: a laptop in case I wanted to blog (or work more), my iPad in case I wanted to watch YouTubes, a gunpla set and all my tools in case I wanted to hobby, and a book or two in case I … | Continue reading
I frequently find myself in a cycle where I’m switching between phases of “Feature Work” and “Maintenance Work”. Sometimes the cycle is morning-to-afternoon, sometimes weekstart-to-weekend, sometimes week-to-week, sometimes month-to-month. I don’t think this is unique so much as … | Continue reading
One day my friend Bryan told me to come look at something on his computer. I respected Bryan, he was a bit older, and his opinions always weighed heavily on me. This seemed urgent, so I shuffled in his office as quick as I could. On the screen was a grey’ish looking website. Brya … | Continue reading
Earlier this month, I got the chance to join Kevin Powell on his livestream to talk Web Components. Kevin is one of my favorite web development content creators. His style is approachable and beginner friendly. If you’re getting started with web development or want to improve you … | Continue reading
An unusually warm Texas January; 70ºF days, cool nights, my son had baseball try-outs, then… On the last day of January, a horrific ice storm hit Central Texas. My house lost power and internet on Wednesday morning as thick tree limbs snapped under the weight of ice, taking out p … | Continue reading
This post is part of a series: Part I: I’m Shadow Banned by DuckDuckGo (and Bing) Part II: Updates on my Bing ban Part III: My Bing Webmaster Guidelines Compliance Report Today I bring good news: We solved the mystery! Bing now indexes my site and it shows up on DuckDuckGo… and i … | Continue reading
Last year I got into Gunpla, a hobby where you build little plastic model anime robots. What I like most about the hobby is that the models are “press-fit”, meaning you can build the entire model by pressing the parts together with your fingers. No gluing, no painting, just finge … | Continue reading
We are creating some How-To Videos for Luro. Exciting to be at that point in product development, but it would be nice if our videos had captions from day one to set a precedent. We could pay to have them all transcribed, or pay for some automated caption service, or even upload … | Continue reading
Friday evening at 5pm on my way out of work I was about to push a feature fix up to add some encryption and decryption using crypto-js. The API looks like this: import CryptoJS from 'crypto-js' const encryptedThing = CryptoJS.AES.encrypt("message", SECRET_KEY).toString() const de … | Continue reading
2022 was a massive year for CSS. We got CSS Layers, more subgrid support, the impossible :has() selector, and WE GOT CONTAINER QUERIES! Thank you to everyone who worked on those. A lot of the success for CSS this past year was due to an incredible cross-browser effort called In … | Continue reading
I sometimes think about what it would take to start a successful JS framework project in the year 2023… You need a library that is different from React, but similar enough that people might actually use it You need say it’s “fast” You need 10 influencers to get hyped about it bec … | Continue reading
In my last post I dug around and found a crawl error in Bing Webmaster Tools… The inspected URL is known to Bing but has some issues which are preventing indexation. We recommend you to follow Bing Webmaster Guidelines to increase your chances of indexation. Awww yeah, you know w … | Continue reading
I wrote about my DuckDuckGo (and Bing) shadow ban in a previous post. It made the rounds, so in the interest of transparency (and so I remember for next time this happens), here’s steps I’ve taken to fix this, what I know so far, and what I know… Edit: …and stay for some good new … | Continue reading
It came to my attention that my site does not appear on DuckDuckGo search results. Even when searching for “daverupert.com” directly. After some digging, DuckDuckGo used to get their site index from Yandex, but now gets their site index from Bing and sure enough… I didn’t appear … | Continue reading
It’s a secret to everyone! This post is for RSS subscribers only. Read more about RSS Club. After a good long hem n’ haw about Texas politics my friend Daniel filled a conversational pause by jokingly asking… “So what’s good?” A question made in jest, but it has stuck in me like … | Continue reading
Psst… I’ve been keeping a secret. As part of my Web Components course on Frontend Masters, I built an entire guidebook on how to get started with Web Components. A Web Components 101. I spent hundreds of hours preparing the materials for the course and I’m excited to announce tha … | Continue reading
I’ve written and rewritten this five times and decided to go with a brief, brutal, bulleted list of a December I don’t want to experience again. Stacking viruses ran through our kids over the course of three weeks. My immune system was shaky but held on. It culminated in ear infe … | Continue reading
Another year has come and gone. I can’t believe it. I think I’ll look back on 2022 as a year of milestones. It’s been a year of new jobs, new challenges, new products, and new hobbies. This is my second year piecing my year together from my monthly vibechecks. I think I’ve boiled … | Continue reading
I watched the documentary General Magic (mentioned in Tony Fadell’s book Build) about the 1990s Apple spin-off company General Magic that built the iPhone before the iPhone. Ultimately the product was a commercial failure, but the documentary is a wonderful look at product design … | Continue reading
It was always “Oh, you’re only at risk of automation if your job has a high degree of repetition, creative jobs are less at risk” but it feels like over the course of the past year Copilot, Dall-e, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and ChatGPT have decided upend that assumption. Writ … | Continue reading
This, the 23rd retelling… We went to my Mom’s in Houston for Thanksgiving this year. The weather was rainy and the kids went a bit stir crazy but we had a good time. We also had a small Friendsgiving the Sunday before; it’s a great feeling to have a house full of kids and friends … | Continue reading
I was reading about Akira the other day and stumbled across an interesting casual fact: Painstakingly animated by hand, the care that went into Akira can be seen in every frame; there’s 327 different colour shades in the film, 50 of which were invented for it. Fifty colors! Inven … | Continue reading
Dragon’s Heaven is an eccentric anime directed by Makoto Hashimoto that —after hearing about it— I instantly dropped everything to watch it. It’s a giant robot mech anime with a Mœbius-”inspired” aesthetic. Actually, it’s a 100% rip-off of Mœbius, but it’s so well executed it sta … | Continue reading
You ever want to grab a still frame from a video you’re watching online? Here’s a trick I use from time to time to get video stills from HTML and avoid all the fussy hover-activated UI bits. Pause the video at the timestamp you want Open the DevTools > Console Target the right c … | Continue reading
One of our family pandemic purchases was an electronic piano, a Yamaha P-121. My son was showing interest in music and we thought we’d be good parents and nurture that. His interest waned fast (read: in minutes), but I still play it! I grew up with a piano in the house so I’ve al … | Continue reading
Here’s a video of a guy knocking down a grain silo with a sledge hammer. I love this video because it reminds me of simpler times where we watched idle videos on the internet all day instead of the staring in abject horror at the endless timeline. A single man knocking down a sil … | Continue reading
In recent weeks, a handful of people asked me what’s been happening in Web Components Land. Well, as President of Web Components, I have good news and the state of Web Components is pretty strong right now. I did my Frontend Masters course on Web Components in April and since the … | Continue reading
Spooky season has come and gone. We’ve put away our trademark giant inflatable Beetlejuice sandworm. Halloween in our neighborhood is a great time. Almost everyone pitches in to make it special for the hundreds of kids that take to our streets. A genuine piece of Americana. There … | Continue reading
I’ve spent the last week or so cleaning, purging, and reorganizing my office. I had encapsulated myself in a micro-hoarder situation in the shed which made it difficult to get focused. Clutter, as I’m learning, is adversarial to my distractible brain. One task that’s been looming … | Continue reading
It’s been some years since Tab Atkins first proposed Cascading Attribute Sheets. I had a situation come up which made me think about them again and I thought I’d share. On my site I have a handful of blog posts which have a title and/or text content in different languages. As som … | Continue reading
The YouTube gods surfaced me a video of classical guitarist Brandon Acker comparing a $200 guitar, a $2,000 guitar, a $20,000 guitar, and a $200,000 guitar. As you step up in orders of magnitude in cost, you start to see what creates value: the materials, the resonance, the susta … | Continue reading
A break in the Texas heat, Fall is in the air, and baseball is back on the menu. Neighbors having small conversations on the walks to-and-from the elementary school and kids putting on lemonade stand fundraisers for their friends. Humming birds saunter by my window each day. Texa … | Continue reading
I was using the Crunchyroll app on my iPad this weekend and noticed my level of frustration rising because the most annoying feature of the Crunchyroll iPad app is that while using it, I can do nothing else. The developers of the application didn’t add Picture in Picture or backg … | Continue reading
This month I finished Michael E. Mann’s The New Climate War, a treatise on where we’re at with climate change. After my post on climate change a handful of people mentioned it and the book does a fantastic job at opening your eyes to the deflection tactics and information warfare … | Continue reading