A quote from Luke Harris I’m sniping from Rach: I’m on Mastodon, but I’m bored of what I call “the timeline era”. Scanning an unending stream of disconnected posts for topics of interest is no longer fun, I prefer deciding what to read based on titles, or topic-based discussion. … | Continue reading
Just a couple of ideas! They came to me while I was poking around thinking of something to say for Alex Trost’s Holiday Mega-Stream (my segment starts here). Styleable Resizers Ya know how a is resizeable by default? That’s a nice default. If users are typing, they should have s … | Continue reading
I just went to the liquor store and bought a bottle of gin, rum, and tequila 100% based on the design of the bottle. I’ve only tried the gin so far and it’s great. Maybe it’s just because I expect a nicely designed bottle to taste good like we all expect an expensive bottle of [… … | Continue reading
This article The Stormtrooper Problem: Why Thought Diversity Makes Us Better on Farnam Street lays out the advantages, nay, necessity, of diversity: Diversity is how we survive as a species. This is a quantifiable fact easily observed in the biological world. From niches to natur … | Continue reading
Had to bust out Photoshop for my dream hat: DALL*E couldn’t hack it. | Continue reading
These are a thing these days. Maggie Appleton put a point on it in a recent article: Command K Bars. She makes the point that they date back quite a way, to “Spotlight” in macOS Tiger. Twenty-two years later, we still have Spotlight: Tools like Raycast and Alfred arguably take th … | Continue reading
There are some URLs that make a ton of sense to force-open in specific browsers: You probably have your own examples, but I can’t imagine the above logic is controversial. Personally, I care more about sending links to specific apps than I do opening certain links in, say, Firefo … | Continue reading
I was watching this video about some dudes on a 5-day Alaskan ferry. One of the dudes had this shirt that said “Press Publish” on it and I thought that was cool. Turns out, it’s a little shop which comes right up web searching for that phrase. I like the sweatshirt a lot. The ful … | Continue reading
It’s called: Syntax-highlighting Code Block (with Server-side Rendering) Weston Ruter really got it right: I once built a custom code block plugin that was largely based around this idea, and it worked pretty well, but it still relied on client-side JavaScript and it was a custom … | Continue reading
Elon isn’t the only person who has recently purchased a large-scale social network. Matt Mullenweg snapped up Tumblr back in August for the “de minimis” sum of 3 million (it takes far more than an order of magnitude more than that just to run Tumblr for a year). Nilay Patel has a … | Continue reading
I recently did the BMW Performance Driving School. I took the M1 School, two full days of instructor-driven learning, with 3 other friends down in the Palm Springs, California area. It’s kinda like training to be a race car driver. They do not coddle you. If anything, they make f … | Continue reading
Apple made a big deal of their support of Passkeys at their latest developer conference. And rightfully so. I hope they keep making a big deal of it. It really seems like the future of authentication and we should get moving on it, as an industry. Fascinatingly to me, Apple didn’ … | Continue reading
Marc Brooker lists five ways in which Writing is Magic. They are all true. The first is my favorite. First, clarity. I’m sure you know the quote “Writing is nature’s way of letting you know how sloppy your thinking is”, and knowing how sloppy your thinking is allows you to sharpe … | Continue reading
I’ve long been on the “spaces” side of the tabs vs. spaces preference debate. I think there is just something that feels sturdy and reliable about spaces. I’m wrong though. Despite not having swapped over most of my projects, I think that, objectively, tabs are the better choice. … | Continue reading
I was a little nervous about the drive to the airport Sunday morning. It was supposed to snow pretty good the night before. It did snow a bit, so I shoveled the driveway before I left at 4:30am for my 6:00am flight. The snow got worse on the drive, but I made it to the […] | Continue reading
You can’t! Terence Eden knows this too, but it didn’t stop him from a very clever experiment. First, split the image into two in some fashion (he made every-other-line interlaced versions). Then… Using JavaScript the first frame can be rendered onto a element for a millisecond, … | Continue reading
Before a dissertation on Designing Go Libraries, Abhinav Gupta essentially tries to talk you out of it: Do you need to write it? Owning and maintaining a library can be a significant undertaking. The work does not end once the code is written — there is often a never-ending strea … | Continue reading
I was a little skeptical of Arc, a new web browser from The Browser Company of New York. Ooo la la. Yeah, well, I run the Fart Factory of Bend. A small irony is that the pandemic means they aren’t really even in New York anymore. Joke. Ruined. I was actually skeptical because I’v … | Continue reading
I’m stoked about this time around. I haven’t been as excited in the past mostly because I was turned off by how much quieter it was than Twitter (read: it didn’t fuel the addition well enough). This time around, it’s still quieter, but I’m more ready for the quiet. And it’s not t … | Continue reading
Pleased that FART has become: … officially a term of art in computer science. Because it’s a part of Chrome Platform Status as a feature of Client Hints. Indeed, prefers-color-scheme is a perfect thing for Client Hints. … it is a best practice to not load CSS for the particular n … | Continue reading
I was at a charity dinner with an auction tonight. Clearly they couldn’t figure out how to put instructions into the system anywhere anybody could find. So they made “items” in the CMS and made them $1. I’m pleased to have won the “how to register” item for $3. | Continue reading
The movie goes: Some man who has had some success running other things has a twinkle in his eye to run another thing. He takes it over on a whim with some seriously questionable tactics. Smart people that he should really listen to tell him it’s a bad idea but he completely ignor … | Continue reading
Say you have some JSON data like this (I’ll be using Go on purpose here): The challenge here is to build a machine that does four things: Validate that the JSON is valid syntax. Validate that the JSON is valid against a schema. If there is a problem with one part of the data, fir … | Continue reading
I don’t think there is any doubt that this is a unit test: You have a function, and you’re testing that the function returns what you think it should return. A code base probably has lots of this as they are easy to write, useful, and not flakey. I also don’t think there is any [ … | Continue reading
Says my physical therapist. I hurt my back most recently doing back squats. 135lbs on the bar. That’s nothing for my big elephant legs. It was my third rep of what was going to be 60 reps over 15 minutes as part of an EMOM (Every Minute on the Minute) workout involving box step-u … | Continue reading
One. You don’t have to json.Unmarshal into an empty struct. I learned with examples like this: There, post is totally defaults, meaning because favorite_count was missing in the JSON data, post.FavoriteCount defaults to 0, the Go default value for an int. But it doesn’t have to s … | Continue reading
I got a copy of Dan’s latest book! So many endearing, funny, and relatable bits. From Chapter 4: As soon as I typed the HTML for my first hyperlink, the power of it hit me. This is the DNA of the web, the fabric that connects all of the bits and pieces all over the […] | Continue reading
I think Daniel Bruce’s Entypo was the first icon set designed for the web that I fawned over. Maybe it was how it had a cool name, almost like it was a startup product. And the website design around it was awesome. The 2012 design was pretty fresh, especially for that time: Then … | Continue reading
2006: Sass was invented. Has nesting. All subsequent CSS processors have nesting (Less: 2009; Stylus: 2010). 2011: Tab says Chrome engineers already dabbling with CSS nesting. 2011: (Lost to time?) First Editor’s Draft appears actually called “CSS hierarchies”. Lennart Schoors ha … | Continue reading
Local By Flywheel makes running a local WordPress site trivially easy. I just got a marketing email from them saying that there is a plugin for Atlas now, which is their parent company WP Engine’s product for running “Headless” WordPress. Headless, meaning the front-end of the si … | Continue reading
Same with any no-JavaScript-by-default framework like Eleventy, Jekyll, Hugo, and whatnot. Check out what Maxi Ferreira did with Astro: Cool. Although he had to slap in SPA navigation to make it work, because the current API only supports that, not normal “multi page” transitions … | Continue reading
Nicky Case made a thing called Nutshell: Nutshell is a tool to make “expandable, embeddable explanations” … This lets your readers learn what they need, just-in-time, always-in-context. I really like the look and feel of it, especially the little animated colons. I do feel like i … | Continue reading
I wanted to find my most favorited tweets of all time. I figured I should know what those are so I can re-home them (or some version of their spirit) elsewhere in case the ol’ bird kicks the can. Turbulent times over there. Twitter has some built-in analytics tooling that I could … | Continue reading
Jon Yongfook: Just paid $75 (per month) to remove the “Upgrade Now” button from Slack. Never underestimate how much a B2B customer armed with a corporate card will pay to solve a minor inconvenience. It me. And I dislike it about myself but it’s true. Just a dumb little upgrade b … | Continue reading
Folk creations fill a gap. They solve problems for individuals and small communities in a way that that centralised, top-down, industrial creations never can. They are informal, distributed practices that emerge from real world contexts. Folk Interfaces, Maggie Appleton So my mom … | Continue reading
For the first time since buying the damn thing, it started on my first try at the beginning of the season. Just so I don’t forget why: I ran it completely out of gas at the end of last season. No more gas getting gummed up in the system while it’s in storage in the […] | Continue reading
I like Cloudflare technology. I think they do a great job of building things that are very useful, very innovative, and very reliable. That’s no easy task, especially while shipping pretty regularly as they do. I’ve been known to do pretty glowing podcasts about them, unsponsored … | Continue reading
Every Old-Time music jam I’ve ever been a part of does one thing the same: they don’t change keys very often. If you’re playing in D, you stay in D for a while. Maybe for an hour, maybe two, maybe the whole dang day if you’re at a festival. Then you move. Probably to G […] | Continue reading
I recently wrote about one of the ironies of a Jamstack approach recently. Yes, rendering static content from the edge is fantastic, but only when the content is actually there. If you need to hit an API with client-side JavaScript to actually get the content, you aren’t benefiti … | Continue reading
There is a line of thinking that goes: WordPress is fairly complicated. I only need to do something fairly simple. Thus, there should be a simpler version of WordPress to do that simple thing. A WordPress Lite, if you will. The trouble is, which simple thing do you focus around? … | Continue reading
jQuery is 32 Kb compressed and minified. Pretty small, really. I’d say heck, a hero image might be 10× that size alone!, but as we know, all bytes are not equal in web performance. JavaScript needs to be parsed and executed, and might even be a blocking resource depending on wher … | Continue reading
You should wear your seatbelt. I should wear my seatbelt. No argument there, but my new Tundra has the most annoying seatbelt alarm I’ve ever experienced. It’s loud and it literally never stops. There are, sometimes, legit reasons to silence an alarm like that, like putting groce … | Continue reading
I had a three-year lease on a Toyota Tundra and had the 2020 model. It came due and I had to make a decision on what to do next. Maybe Rivian? I only like the R1S and it’s not shipping until late 2023. Also worry about repairs and such in our fairly remote town. Probably […] | Continue reading
Papa bear’s porridge: The self-fulfilling prophecy of React. React isn’t great at anything except being popular. Mama bear’s porridge: Get in Zoomer, We’re Saving React Most next-gen React spin-offs strike me as universally regressive, not progressive. Baby bear? It’s a trick: bo … | Continue reading
Almost anything in life, you could always have a little better. Your car could be fancier, your sheets could be softer, your boat could be longer, your TV could be brighter, and your whiskey could be older. But there are some things where an upgrade just isn’t possible. If you’re … | Continue reading
It was at WWDC22 that Apple talked about adding support for passkeys. They seem like a Very Big Deal because they literally replace passwords for login and are better in every way. And crucially, it’s not some Apple-only thing, but an open standard (FIDO). I only bring up Apple f … | Continue reading
Ethan was digging around trying to find the origin of the term breakpoint as it relates to media queries in web design. It’s such a classic term now, it’s weird the term never appeared in Ethan’s first article or talk on the subject of Responsive Web Design. I showed the article … | Continue reading
Austin Kleon: Comfort work is work that I do when I don’t know what else to do. I know I need to work, but I don’t know what I should be working on, or I can’t work on the thing I should be working on because I’m too tired or depressed or otherwise unmotivated. Comfort […] | Continue reading