Matt Houghey wrote a blueprint for his “Dream CMS” and we had him on ShopTalk to talk about it. That got me thinking about what features I’d want in my dream CMS. It’s fun to think of what a modern CMS might have like inline editing, asset serving, monetization/membership functio … | Continue reading
At the end of each MSNBC YouTube video right now they have a 30 second post-roll of Ali Velshi explaining the 5-step process on how to install the new MSNBC app. Tap on the App Store on your phone Hit “Search” on the bottom right corner Type in “MSNBC” Click on the MSNBC app Clic … | Continue reading
I bought a 40 pound weighted vest for $40 dollars on Amazon. The workout term for this is “rucking” and has connotations with being outdoorsy and/or in the military. Load up a backpack full of weights (or in my case, a vest full of sand bags) and head outdoors. The marketing bene … | Continue reading
“You know those body builders with the big arms and skinny little legs? Your jaw is like that.” My dentist is explaining this to me while both her hands are inside my mouth clenching the left and right sides of my jaw. She explains that my right jaw muscle is three times larger t … | Continue reading
Hank Green posted a video about four lies he believed. It’s a great video because it’s embarrassing to be wrong on the internet and here is smart person™️ Hank Green admitting he believed some bullshit. As you travel through the internet you’re constantly working against a lot of … | Continue reading
A couple weeks ago I joined a conversation about John Romero and prototypes. Tyler posted some thoughts about Romero’s autobiography, Matthias shared a quote from a Tim Ferris podcast where Romero chided prototypes, and Matthias looped me in because I love prototypes. No prototyp … | Continue reading
Howdy. It’s March already. Let’s catch up. In January, Austin had a freeze but thankfully uneventful. Brings up a lot of “my dumb hyper-capitalist ultra-Libertarian government has created failed state” trauma though. In February, my family and I have been battling sickness on and … | Continue reading
I’ve been co-hosting a weekly podcast for nearly 12 years with over hundreds of guests and I want to tell you the secret to getting invited on a podcast. Are you ready? Here it goes. Already be talking about something. If you want to go on a podcast and talk, the best thing you c … | Continue reading
Duolingo does a great job capturing the novel delight of learning a new language. You hop on, take a short quiz, and a little green owl waves at you and hops towards a trophy. You can add friends, join group challenges, and there’s a weekly ranking system to compete with users al … | Continue reading
It’s been a couple years of working full-time on Luro and we’ve travelled through at least three (or four?) different distinct architectures. If that sounds like a lot, I’d agree. It’s been educational to say the least. I think it’s interesting to think about how apps grow and ad … | Continue reading
I’ve read the entire internet so you don’t have to and here’s some links I found. Is this the start of a newsletter? 🤷♂️ I tried this two years ago. Anyways. Here’s some links. Web platform news CSS Working Group resolved to add Mixins - Styles, now even more reusable Cu … | Continue reading
“UI is a function of state” is a pretty popular saying in the front-end world. In context (pun intended), that’s typically referring to application or component state. I thought I’d pull that thread a little further and explore all the states that can effect the UI layer… First-p … | Continue reading
AI. It’s the talk of the town (or at least this year, that is). I’ve been in dozens of conversations about AI in recent days. The likelihood that the next big feature or product I build involves AI seems to be going up. No idea where it’s all headed – and reserve the right to cha … | Continue reading
Two years of working on Luro full time has taught me a lot about #startuplife. While I could probably fill a book with what I’ve learned so far, the biggest takeaway is you’re always busy if you’re on a small team. Here’s a list of jobs that you always need to be doing when creat … | Continue reading
CoraQuest is a “family cooperative dungeon crawler” created by adorable dad-daughter duo Dan and Cora Hughes from Huddersfield, UK. Feeling the boredom of pandemic lockdown, Dan and Cora (8yo) decided to design a board game and put it on Kickstarter. I’ve wanted an easy “Dungeons … | Continue reading
You and I are partaking in something magical. The electric meat inside my cranium told my fingers to punch mechanical keys to send signals through an electric rock and encode these thoughts on a magnetic rock. Then through radio waves, beacons, and wires I create a copy of this m … | Continue reading
Often when I talk with folks who know me from my podcast they will say something along the lines of, “I used to listen to your podcast!” Then they blush because their statement implies they don’t listen anymore (Exhibit A). And I just wanted to say… I get it. It’s fine. I take no … | Continue reading
The EU Digital Markets Act is making waves in the Apple ecosystem. For the first time ever you’ll be able to install a browser other than Safari/Webkit on iOS (as long as you live in the EU). While there are other browsers on the iOS App Store, they’re all Safari/Webkit under the … | Continue reading
Hi Dave Rupert LLC, I liked your latest blog post Quick toughts on chips and see you are a business leader in accessibility, Doritos®, and Jekyll blogging software. I thought we should connect. I would like to inform you of an exciting opportunity. I scraped or stole your email a … | Continue reading
One thing I love about the new’ish :focus-visible pseudo-state is that it allows me to create bigger, bolder, and more obvious focus states for my keyboard users than I normally would with a :focus pseudo-state that might flash or linger on a click. For example, my default :focus … | Continue reading
The heart of Luro has always been a tool to enable deeper collaboration in a broader team context, so we architected it that way (a few times). It’s important that teams working on the same app are able to look at the product with the same lens of understanding, not just through … | Continue reading
Last year, an investor we were talking to sent us a tweet that expressed her hesitancy about investing in products in the design systems space that went… #DesignSystems are a zero-interest rate phenomenon I dismissed this criticism as meme-of-the-day fodder. The idea behind the “ … | Continue reading
Sarah Hendren’s What Can a Body Do? is a beautiful meditation on disability and the different ways bodies meet the physical world. In a word, there’s often a “mismatch” between how the world is designed and how people interact with it. There’s a chapter in the book where Hendren … | Continue reading
It’s so easy nowadays to get up and going on a project. I can burp some npm commands into my terminal, burp some more to setup a deployment pipeline and blam! Website. The time to product demo is so low. You can get far on your own… very quickly… but then… you’re on your own. And … | Continue reading
I often feel overwhelmed deciding what to do with my spare time. It’s a problem with volume moreso than ambition. When the feeling hit the other weekend I scribbled down seven ideas rattling around in my head and stared at the list blankly. I’ve used different prioritization syst … | Continue reading
More than making money… more than that feeling of launching a new product, feature, website, or app… the idea I am coming to value most in my professional life is the feeling of “play”. Sometimes play is being on my own with high autonomy and low consequences, sometimes it’s gett … | Continue reading
A post from Jason Velazquez called “Where have all the websites gone?” crossed my socials. It’s a good lament about the dearth of interesting content on the internet and how we’re stuck in the same boring content silos. The question reminded me of a song by Pete Seeger called “Wh … | Continue reading
For years the latest articles list on my homepage had a neat little CSS trick where each post had wobbly “rough boxes” around them. To create the effect I used a script from css-houdini.rocks aptly named Rough Boxes. One minor problem, CSS Houdini paintlets aren’t – and probably … | Continue reading
You might look at my office and the 32 plastic robot models on my shelf and think “This guy is a collector!” Or you might look a the bass guitar, electric guitar, long neck open back banjo, closed back resonator banjo, tuba, saxaphone, ukelele, and shamisen in my office and think … | Continue reading
From time to time I need to stitch together two or three images into a horizontal or vertical image. It seems so wasteful to spin up a whole design document for that task. What I really wanted was a CLI that does that for me and I found one that does the job: Stitchy. How to use … | Continue reading
It’s a secret to everyone! This post is for RSS subscribers only. Read more about RSS Club. I think about this tweet a lot. Being a billionaire must be insane. You can buy new teeth, new skin. All your chairs cost 20,000 dollars and weigh 2,000 pounds. Your life is just a series … | Continue reading
Have you heard about Dropout? Spun off from College Humor, Dropout is a paid streaming service with hours and hours of high quality improv content. For $6/month (less than half a Netflix) you get access to a large swath of independently produced shows that are a guaranteed laugh. … | Continue reading
In a recent post I covered how to get MDX-style posts with web components and people come to me every day, tears in their eyes, and ask me to go into more detail. Seriously, tho it’s just regular markdown… blah blah blah blah blah blah And it’ll pretty much work. | Continue reading
Last year I switched my default search engine twice. First from Bing to Duck Duck Go. It felt different but during my Bing de-listing fiasco I learned that Duck Duck Go and lots of other smaller search engines use the Bing Index. One of the more interesting engines I learned abou … | Continue reading
I’m coming to the realization when you’re a family with a small fridge you cannot be all these platonic ideals at the same time: The buy in bulk Costco family The big weekly shopping trip family The cook/order extra and eat leftovers family The cook extra and freeze it family The … | Continue reading
I stumbled across this TED talk by Holly Cohen about building accessible fart machines with Arduino. As someone who loves to tell jokes – and particularly loves a good fart joke – the phrase “they were the ones telling the jokes” makes me impossibly happy. When I was a teacher in … | Continue reading
I’ve moved house over sixteen times in my lifetime (more if you count step-homes). Apartment to house, city to city, state to state, country to country; I’ve done it all. I’ve even lived in a couple pseudo-communes with over 6+ roommates. Thinking back, I realized I have little p … | Continue reading
2023 has been a memorable year and –at times– downright existential. Looking at the scorecard, it’s pretty clear there’s been more downs than ups. Despite everything, I maintain a positive outlook and am forward-looking. I’m happy to report that I failed at all my SMART goals fro … | Continue reading
Went on a little video game bender thanks to Donkey Kong: A Record of Struggle on Shmuplations, which translates an interview from “bit” magazine with Hirohisa Komanome, a programmer at Ikegami who Nintendo contracted to build their first arcade games. The handful of minor happen … | Continue reading
The year is almost over. The weather is delightful in Austin and walking the neighborhood is a joy. Happiness arrives in holiday cards. The tree is up and the ambient stress of moonlighting as an assistant to a jolly, fat norseman takes its toll. The power grid still hums but –th … | Continue reading
Inspired by my home for stories, I decided to build a home for all the projects, side projects, and weird ideas I’ve chased over the years in a new Jekyll collection. It ended up being a project in itself. I searched my past and summoned 19 projects over 15 years. Some are work-r … | Continue reading
I spent the last week refactoring a single file on a single service of Luro to fix a production-only bug, which caused our server to fall over and took over 5+ hours to finish the weekly cronjob. Taking the bitter pill, we buckled down and did the work. 🧹 Redid the entire … | Continue reading
The weather is changing. The cool rains of Fall have arrived after a brutal “hottest on record” summer. My wife is back working at the school, family adjusted to the new routine, kids plodding through Fall with school and sports. Baseball is already wrapping up while my daughter … | Continue reading
Dave’s short’n’sweet sci-fi stories, collected in one place. adactio.com/links/20596 | Continue reading
For years I’ve been tinkering on and off with writing short speculative fiction on my blog; which I affectionately call my “shitty sci-fi” (to keep the self-expectations low). Inspired by Robin Rendle’s Essays, I decided give more prominence to my stories on the ol’ website. Ther … | Continue reading
There were two times in my career where I’ve been publicly shamed over accessibility. The first was at one of the first conferences I ever attended and the keynote speaker shit-talked my open source project on the main stage. Oof. The second was when I worked on a high profile we … | Continue reading
As part of my weight loss journey, I’ve overhauled the fluids I consume. I’ve ditched alcohol (mostly), diet sodas (completely) and sparkling water (completely) and have settled into a mix of coffee (morning), tea (afternoon), and (in the evenings) something we around the house c … | Continue reading
As part of my weight loss journey, I’ve nearly eliminated dairy from my diet. I still eat some cheese but I don’t have a plate of nachos and three big dawgs of milk right before bed anymore. A cold glass of milk is tastier than a beer to me which created a struggle to give it up. … | Continue reading