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
As part of my weight loss journey I’ve been buying a lot of premade meals at Snap Kitchen. My poor eating habits don’t come from emotional eating or binge eating, but rather from not recognizing I’m hungry until it’s too late. After an entire morning of coffee, coding, and meetin … | Continue reading
As part of my weight loss journey I’ve started taking more vitamins and one guilty pleasure is I buy them all as gummies. The gummy vitamins, while possessing myriad mystical benefits, have an add-on effect of being a habitual substitution for buying candy from the gas station. M … | Continue reading
⚠️ Content Warning: Weight Loss. Personal. I don’t need your advice, thanks. Since May I’ve been on a “No fun” diet and I’ve lost about ~30 pounds. This is a significant amount of weight for me after hitting my peak. I’m sleeping better, less back pain, heart rate down, my clothe … | Continue reading
It’s just regular markdown but you use custom elements. | Continue reading
Last week I released a wrapper web component to make your video embeds a little bit more responsive, just like the old jQuery FitVids. It works like this now: It’s an awesome standalone that you can use with a script tag and some HTML. Zero dependencies. It’s smol and al … | Continue reading
My skin is not the best skin. In 2021, I had surgery to remove an invasive skin cancer from my nose. I’m committed now to a life of sunscreen. But there was another problem with my skin… one lurking beneath the socks. A brownish-grey discoloration on my feet that was spreading up … | Continue reading
I 🩵 Feedbin and there’s a lot of features I can’t shut up about. Like reading RSS feeds on a lazy Sunday. Or the feed of likes feature myself and a handful of others use to run a small clandestine social sharing network over RSS. Or how I funnel email newsletters through … | Continue reading
With Luro, I’ve found myself in the accessibility tooling space. I’m bullish on the need for automated accessibility testing to help designers and developers do a minimum viable good job, establish a baseline experience, and diagnose problems before they are giant problems. Even … | Continue reading
I love having web browsers read blog posts to me. Through years of training with podcast, my audio processing skills are much better than my reading skills. I use it like a piece of Assistive Technology to keep my overactive brain from getting distracted mid-post. But I could nev … | Continue reading
Since his time at Mythbusters, Adam Savage has been running Tested, a maker YouTube channel that deals with all forms of nerdery. One recurring segment of Tested is Adam Savage’s series of “One Day Builds”. Savage is the embodiment of the maker persona, so it’s no wonder such a p … | Continue reading
I’m thrilled to say that Luro is out of beta! Anyone can sign up and take it for a test drive. It’s been a year of gathering feedback from private beta customers and design partners, constantly refining to give the app the right mix of instant gratification and long term value. … | Continue reading
As we’re approaching a pretty big milestone for Luro, I’ve been thinking a lot about all the effort that’s gone into the product. Not just the effort from members on the team, but also from the people beta testing our app. A trickle here, a flood there, I squeal with glee when ne … | Continue reading
A lot of people on social media are talking about chips and as a professional who has a dual masters in both potato and corn chips, I thought I’d chime in with some facts about chips. 1. Off-brand chips are rarely worth it. Exceptions exist (e.g. Trader Joe’s fake Takis), but usu … | Continue reading
I flew on a plane from my land locked metropolis to the beach in a different state. After a few taps on my phone, I am transfigured into an expert on local marine life and tide cycles. A work trip to a city I’ve never been to? Tip-tap, I have local knowledge of all the best cuisi … | Continue reading
View Demo on CodePen I got myself into a position: sticky + horizontal scrolling situation with some overflowing tables the other day. The sticking worked fine but I was hoping to add shadows as an affordance that an overflow was occurring on the element. But you know me, I didn’ … | Continue reading
I had the weird pleasure of listening to two books back-to-back that created a serendipitous connection. The first was Mindf*ck by Christopher Wylie, a behind the scenes first-person account of the Cambridge Analytica scandal and its attempts to usurp democracy. The second was Th … | Continue reading
In a recent post I answered a general question about Web Components and their lack of widespread adoption. I’m back with what is probably the most frequently asked question about Web Components: “If I’m already using React/Vue/Svelte, why should I rewrite my app with Web Componen … | Continue reading
I remember that gap in time between when iPhone was announced and when the iPhone was launched. The entire world was pregnant with anticipation about being able to touch this new device. Apple fanboy that I was, I was among them but due to a bout of unemployment I didn’t expect t … | Continue reading
If you watch one video about AI/LLM responsibility, I recommend watching The AI Dilemma by Aza Raskin and Tristan Harris, creators of the Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma. I found it to be a sober, non-doomerist look at the problems AI/LLMs pose when paired with the capital … | Continue reading
Cicadas electrifying the treetops, the hot air hotter, crispy grasses under sandaled feet, asphalt sizzling to the touch. Children ebb and flow from camps, playdates, sleepovers, long days, missed bed times, and the familiar feeling of parental shame over too much screentime. Sch … | Continue reading
All the roads in Austin are awful. It destroys my faith in civil engineering a bit. There’s a couple spots (southbound Burnet near North Loop) where you can catch air on a storm drain if you’re going the speed limit. The extreme Texas heat determines a lot of the road conditions … | Continue reading
Rem recently asked: “I’m also interested to know if anyone has a hot take on why [Web Components has] taken a decade to get traction.” Web Components have a marketing problem. I have a lot of opinions about this, so many that I joined the Web Components Community Group. Too low-l … | Continue reading
I have nearly 2,000 unreads in my RSS reader since the last time I zeroed it out. That’s a lot and sometimes I get overwhelmed. On the positive side, nearly ~1,500 of those posts are from ~30 personal blogs I follow. That makes me happy that friends are posting on their sites and … | Continue reading
After five+ years of negotiation with my wife, I got the gift of a wonderful dad-ass recliner for my 43rd birthday. It’s petite and looks like a regular leather dad chair before it’s glorious transformation into a relaxation station. Per tradition, kids aren’t allowed to use dad’ … | Continue reading
I have a brief window of opportunity where my brain is allowing me to change my default drink of choice. It could be my taste buds evolving, some secret recipe update, or the news that the WHO is saying aspartame as “possibly carcinogenic”… but for whatever reason Diet Coke doesn … | Continue reading
Our family reached the end of what I call “The Luge”. At the beginning of every school semester my family and I hike to the top of the metaphorical mountain, buckle ourselves into a bobsled, and yeet ourselves downhill on a wild and uncontrolled ride. Wake up, make breakfast, fee … | Continue reading
The Soviet Union had an engineering problem. Thousands of miles of remote frozen arctic coastline that needed lighthouses and radio towers which required power. But those places were too cold and too remote for human operators in the winter months, so the Soviets devised a plan t … | Continue reading
I love Behind The Scenes style documentaries of animated films. It’s a niche genre but very fulfilling for me – a dad who watches almost exclusively animated TV and films with my children. Above is a playlist of ~20 short behind-the-scenes documentaries of some of the greatest an … | Continue reading
The other day, Josh “Triple-Threat” Collinsworth challenged me in the ShopTalkShow D-d-d-discord on why I always caveat Svelte with “if you’re comfortable with the compiler” (which I said in Ep537): Assuming you’re using a compiler already, why might Svelte’s [compiler] not be a … | Continue reading
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