26 Things from “101 Things I Learned in Architecture School”

Last year I read the book 101 Things I learned in Architecture School. It’s a good book. Good enough, I thought I’d share 26 Things I learned from “101 Things I Learned in Architecture School”. Meta. A lot of this will, of course, be applied to web design. 6. We move through nega … | Continue reading


@daverupert.com | 2 years ago

Shigeru Miyamoto on the Secret to Success

One of my favorite #oldgold resources is Shmuplations; they scour old video game magazines and translate them to English. I love it so much I support the work on Patreon. Cruising through the archives, I found a translation of a 1989 issue of BEEP magazine which features one of m … | Continue reading


@daverupert.com | 2 years ago

Prototyping to learn

I came across a Circuit Breaker Podcast episode called Understanding Prototyping to Learn. This episode is a MUST LISTEN! Bob Moesta and Greg Engle come from a hardware/manufacturing product development background but it all applies to prototyping on the web. Bob and Greg give so … | Continue reading


@daverupert.com | 2 years ago

30 Minute Study Model

The algorithm surfaced me a video of an architect explaining why they make scale models and BAM just like that I’m back on my prototyping bullshit. This time we’re learning about the how and why an architect might make a scale model of a project. The idea of model making for me i … | Continue reading


@daverupert.com | 2 years ago

Solara

A healthy but aging bearded man in a light vest walks the streets of the capitol city, weaving in and out of streets and light traffic, making his way to the local farmer’s market. It’s a typical sunny morning but the desert air is still cool from the previous night. The desert g … | Continue reading


@daverupert.com | 2 years ago

Vibe Check №20

August brought about some pretty sweeping changes. Kids are going back to school and I’ve found myself stepping back from some commitments. Running out of spoons This month I ran out of spoons. Neck-deep into starting a company and feeling that ambient stress, I realized I’m runn … | Continue reading


@daverupert.com | 2 years ago

Modern alternatives to BEM

When I first heard Nicole Sullivan talk about OOCSS, I thought “Oooh, smart.” When I read Jonathan Snook’s riff on that idea in SMACSS I thought “Oooh, smart.” When I heard Harry Roberts say “never use IDs in your CSS files” I said “Oooh, smart.” But when BEM and roboclasses came … | Continue reading


@daverupert.com | 2 years ago

The web is a harsh manager

The responsibilities of the front-end web are ever increasing. The person responsible for knowing the 3,000 programmable property-value pairs to make the site look like the design comp… is the same person in charge of understanding the language and ecosystem required to query the … | Continue reading


@daverupert.com | 2 years ago

The RSS Club

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@daverupert.com | 2 years ago

Thoughts on Copilot

I’ve been using GitHub Copilot full time over the summer and have collected my thoughts on this new industry redefining tool. It’s a product that has the potential to impact my life greatly and a product that’s a mix of helpful, clumsy, and potentially dangerous. Let’s dive into … | Continue reading


@daverupert.com | 2 years ago

Vibe Check №19

July 2022 was a bit of a country music song. A friend’s brother passed away while she was visiting, nearly everyone we know got COVID, took my broken guitar to get fixed by the guy that fixes Willie’s guitar, got a flat tire on the family car, the oil change on my pickup truck tu … | Continue reading


@daverupert.com | 2 years ago

Before I go: What I know about putting on a rock show

I’m not dying, but before I do I want to share with you — future generations of rockers — what I know about putting on a live music rock show. The audience’s energy will match your energy. If you stand like a turd on the stage, they audience will stand like a bunch of turds. If y … | Continue reading


@daverupert.com | 2 years ago

Cloud-work vs. Land-work

At the beginning of the pandemic, Joe McCann wrote a speculative future piece called The New, New World Order (use a private tab if Medium paywalls you). Predicting the future or forecasting trends is never exact work, but Joe made some thought-provoking claims even if everything … | Continue reading


@daverupert.com | 2 years ago

The kids are online

This summer marks the summer my kids got online. I gave them “the talk” and set down some ground rules. Never send a photo of yourself to a stranger. What you say online is the same as saying it in person. If you’re a mean person online, it’s the same as being mean in person. No … | Continue reading


@daverupert.com | 2 years ago

Creating a Netlify-to-Notion form

This month we launched a waitlist for Luro. For simplicity’s sake on our Eleventy-powered site, we felt like Netlify Forms was a slam dunk for getting the waitlist up and running in a couple minutes by adding a netlify attribute to our waitlist form. ... form goes here ... Netl … | Continue reading


@daverupert.com | 2 years ago

Solving “The Dangler” Conundrum with Container Queries and :has()

Y’know that situation where you tell the client, “Here’s your website and you can edit those four (4) little homepage features in the CMS” and the client says “Okay okay okay” and you check the site a week later and it looks bad because the client —despite your incredible documen … | Continue reading


@daverupert.com | 2 years ago

Where I'm at on climate change

This summer has been hot. Not the hottest summer I’ve had in Texas but hot enough. More worryingly, it’s another summer in what looks like a trend of increasingly hot summers due to unstoppable climate change. It’s hot enough that the grass is dying in places that don’t have shad … | Continue reading


@daverupert.com | 2 years ago

Vibe Check №18

As Q2 FY22 wraps up, it’s a good time to reflect on all that’s happened. The Dude Ranch and a horse named Tank June kicked off with a rare family trip. My brother and his family came down from South Dakota and we all drove out to meet my mom and her husband in Bandera, TX for two … | Continue reading


@daverupert.com | 2 years ago

The energy to suggest change

E = ( p 2 c 2 ) + ( m 0 c 2 … | Continue reading


@daverupert.com | 2 years ago

The Demo → Demo Loop

I’m 100% convinced that working demo-to-demo is the secret formula to making successful creative products. Video games have a strong history of ritualizing prototypes, play testing, and following the fun. There’s even some data that suggests prototypes increase your chances of su … | Continue reading


@daverupert.com | 2 years ago

Goodbye, IE

In 1995, I got my first PC with Windows 95 and my first web browser, unbeknownst to me at the time, was Internet Explorer 1.0. I dialed my computer into AOL checked my mail, checked my favorite chat rooms, but I soon learned the Internet I wanted existed outside the in-app silo o … | Continue reading


@daverupert.com | 2 years ago

Vibe Check №17

May is over already which means the kids are now out of school, summer has begun, and work is ramping up at Luro. Here is the retelling of vibes… The little league championship In my last vibe check I mentioned my son’s little league experience and how he and his teammates talke … | Continue reading


@daverupert.com | 2 years ago

The recycling backlog

In Austin we have three types of trash: trash, recycling, and compost. And then if I’m honest there’s a fourth and fifth variety: e-waste and a bag of old clothes and toys to donate. The big three live outside in the side yard and those last two live in piles in my garage until I … | Continue reading


@daverupert.com | 2 years ago

Doge'd a bullet

It’s a secret to everyone! This post is for RSS subscribers only. Read more about RSS Club. Two years ago, Easter of 2020, I was chatting with some friends about crypto and one friend was starting to set aside some money and invest. Seemed harmless to do with “fun money”. We were … | Continue reading


@daverupert.com | 2 years ago

Thoughts on spectrums

One principle I’ve come to embrace is that the answer is rarely ever a spectrum. At first glance, a single-axis spectrum might make perfect sense, a reduction of the problem, a right and a left, a binary dichotomy but with a grey area in the middle. But as I grow older a spectrum … | Continue reading


@daverupert.com | 2 years ago

Notes from a gopher:// site

Long time readers of the blog will know I’m a fan of esoteric content delivery protocols. While compulsively checking for updates on my Playdate (a small, yellow, Gameboy-like device with a crank) and I came across this tweet: When Playdate shipped, Panic co-founder Steven wrote … | Continue reading


@daverupert.com | 2 years ago

Vibe Check №16

April was a busy month of new happenings and finishing projects. I did a new workshop, we got a new lawn, my kids are learning new skills, my wife got a new (short term) job, new developments at my new company, a new blog design, and to cap it all off I turned a new age number wh … | Continue reading


@daverupert.com | 2 years ago

Server-side vs Client-side Analytics

.gradient-start stop { stop-color: var(--accent, #2451f5);} .gradient-start stop[offset="0"] { stop-opacity: 0.35; } .gradient-start stop[offset="1"] { stop-opacity: 0; } For the last 3 years, I’ve been running both client-side analytics and server-side analytics on my sit … | Continue reading


@daverupert.com | 2 years ago

Inspiration in the Tall Grass

I got some landscaping done this month and as a reward the YouTube algorithm brought me a new genre of video called “Tall Grass”. These are the lawns with shoulder high grass, filled with mice and snakes, endlessly consuming buildings, fences, and concrete. It’s complete and utte … | Continue reading


@daverupert.com | 2 years ago

An unplanned open redesign

Howdy! If you frequent this website often, you’ll notice some changes. This weekend I started on my planned redesign, but as I started nudging my About section, I found myself in a fight with my typography. After some hemming and hawing, I made the drastic decision to nuke my sty … | Continue reading


@daverupert.com | 2 years ago

Productivity-sniped by PARA

In February, I got nerd-sniped by a mention on Twitter about a productivity system called PARA. PARA is a way to organize your digital life in to separate buckets: Projects, Areas, Resources, and Archives. After watching some videos, I started applying PARA to my second brain in … | Continue reading


@daverupert.com | 2 years ago

My Weekly Engineering Report

Providing visibility into your work is one of the most underrated developer soft skills. Coworkers are often too busy to keep track of what’s going on with engineering work, even if it’s their job to know what’s going on with engineering work. It’s generally not out of malice or … | Continue reading


@daverupert.com | 2 years ago

7 Web Component Tricks

This week I finished my Frontend Masters Web Components Course. To market it celebrate that accomplishment, I wanted to share ~7 tips and tricks I’ve learned preparing my course or I feel aren’t super obvious about Web Components. 1. You can manipulate props right on a Lit elemen … | Continue reading


@daverupert.com | 2 years ago

What if... one day everything got better?

One day I came across this video about Muharrem, a deaf man, and how his whole neighborhood conspired against him for a surprise. Here I am, crying at my desk, moved to tears by an advertisement for a Samsung product in Turkey. You watch as Muharrem’s expression moves from confus … | Continue reading


@daverupert.com | 2 years ago

Vibe Check №15

March came and gone. I chased fitness. We went on Spring Break. Growing a business. Baseball games. Failed on blogging. Here is a retelling of the vibes. Closing my rings This month I decided I would undergo a challenge to close my rings on my Apple Watch every single day for the … | Continue reading


@daverupert.com | 2 years ago

Different people, different ways

There’s a bit of a setup to this song: Big Bird is pouting in his nest, jealous of the new baby Cody which gets a lot of attention. The whole street is concerned about Big Bird. If you ask me, Big Bird is being a bit of a bitch about it all but clearly he’s going through some str … | Continue reading


@daverupert.com | 2 years ago

Goodbye, Big Freeda

A proper memorial for our popup camper | Continue reading


@daverupert.com | 2 years ago

Vibe Check №14

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@daverupert.com | 2 years ago

The 15 minute fix vs the 30 day fix

The choice between velocity and scalability | Continue reading


@daverupert.com | 2 years ago

原爆を許すまじ

Forgive us the atom bomb | Continue reading


@daverupert.com | 2 years ago

Τ’ακορντεόν

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@daverupert.com | 2 years ago

Been in this war for too long

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@daverupert.com | 2 years ago

Six end of week links

Gundam timelines, web3 concerns, and some cool free projects | Continue reading


@daverupert.com | 2 years ago

Before I go: When it comes to complaining about web browsers

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@daverupert.com | 2 years ago

Five links for a Friday afternoon

A pretty font, an old Austin music doc, a 30 day video game challenge, the problem with NFTs, and a food source that eats CO₂. | Continue reading


@daverupert.com | 2 years ago

Vibe Check №13

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@daverupert.com | 2 years ago

Five Hundred ShopTalks

10 years of weekly episodes and then some | Continue reading


@daverupert.com | 2 years ago

The Vacation

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@daverupert.com | 2 years ago