Adactio: Journal

At The Web You Want event in Amsterdam last month, Léonie gave an absolutely fantastic talk. You can now read the whole thing: Accessibility is resistance! She makes the very good point that generative tools are a necessary accessibility recourse when humans have failed to do their job properly. Images without alt text? Somebody messed up. But this is damage that can be routed around with large language models. So if you—like me—don’t like the idea of people using extractive generative tools…

In preparation for my jaunt to a Greek island, I figured it would be good to have some Greek-adjacent reading material with me to peruse on the beach. So I scoured the shelves of my local library to find a modern retelling of a Greek myth that I hadn’t already read. That’s where I found Medea by Rosie Hewlett. The book attempts to rehabilitate—or at least give context to—one of the women of Greek legends who has been cast as a villain. See also Clytemnestra, Elektra, and more. On the face of…

Exactly one year from now, UX London 2027 will be wrapping up. Mark your calendar: July 6th, 7th, and 8th, 2027. If you really want to be ahead of the curve, you can grab a very limited super early-bird ticket now before the price goes up. I’m about to start putting the 2027 line-up together. The real reason why I’m mentioning an event that’s still a year away is that I’d like you to consider speaking at it. Yes, you. Here’s the form you can fill out with your proposal. It can be a 30 minute…

“Radharc álainn” I said. Beautiful view. “Nach ea!” he replied. Isn’t it? He sounded surprised to be addressed in Irish. We were, after all, very far from Erin’s shores. The beautiful view in question was of the bay of Loggos on the Greek island of Paxos. But I knew that this person was a fluent Irish speaker. That’s why I figured he wouldn’t mind a chat as Gaeilge while we were both strolling along. I was talking with Liam Ó Maonlaí. We were both on Paxos for the same reason; the annual Irish…

The Vaster Wilds is a remarkable book. It somehow manages to be both harrowing and uplifting at the same time. I had read one of Lauren Groff’s previous books, Matrix, and liked it well enough. But The Vaster Wilds is in a different league. It starts with urgency, suffering, and wonder, and that combination never lets up for the whole book. The plot is decepetively simple. A servant girl escapes a starving colony in 17th century America—probably Jamestown—and runs through the woods in…

It started in Dublin. Myself and Jessica got there in the afternoon and I went straight to The Cobblestone in Smithfield for some tunes. Then I went up the street to the headquarters of Na Píobairí Uilleann, a beautiful Georgian building on Henrietta Street. I was there to deliver my talk on the making of The Session. There weren’t that many people there in person but quite a few people watched it live online. You can watch the video of the talk if you want. I’m pretty pleased with it. The few…

This is a collection of short stories by one of Ireland’s best playwrights. I think you can tell that these stories were written by someone who’s at home with the stage. The dialogue really shines. And some of the stories feel like scenes in a play. But that’s no bad thing. If most short stories are like mini-novels, why not have short stories that are like mini-plays? Some of the stories are very short indeed, just long enough to convey the mood of the piece. That mood is often wistful,…

CSS Grid Lanes has started to ship in browsers. It’s in Safari and behind a flag in Chrome and Edge. It enables masonry layouts, where items get packed together in the most efficient way possible. Unsurprisingly, I’m a fan of a layout tool where the browser does all the hard work. It very much aligns with the idea of declarative design; you specify the boundary conditions, and then browser does the maths and heavy lifting. There’s a handy website called The Field Guide to Grid Lanes where you…

I’m giving a talk this week. Usually this wouldn’t be a big deal. I’ve been giving talks for over twenty years now. But this one is different. I’m going to speaking at Na Píobairí Uilleann, the Society of Uilleann Pipers, in Dublin. They have a monthly series of lectures called Notes and Narratives all about Irish music, and they’ve asked me to deliver this month’s talk. So this will not be my usual audience. I will be talking about a website, The Session, but I won’t be talking about the…

I give Apple a hard time. That’s mostly due to how they treat the web on their own mobile devices. Though iOS ostensibly supports the ability for websites to be added to the homescreen, they make it so difficult for users to do, the functionality is practically worthless. It’s dispiriting to see the web so hamstrung by that decision. The Webkit team has come in for other criticism too. For a while there, Safari was lagging so far behind in features that people were calling it the new Internet…

Sarah Canary is an odd book, in the best possible way. On the one hand, it’s a relatively straightforward narrative. An adventure story set in the Pacific northwest in the late 19th century. The viewpoint shifts from character to character, with one exception. The inscrutable title character is a living macguffin that everyone and everything else revolves around. That all seems straightforward enough, but if you squint at the story just right maybe it’s a story from a very different genre…

I’m heading to Amsterdam for CSS Day. It’s one of those events I try my best to get to every single year. I have no doubt that this year will be brilliant as usual. There’s another event the day before CSS Day: The Web You Want: What would the web be like if it was up to you? There’ll be workshops and talks, all absolutely free. I’ll be giving a talk. It’s supposed to be about the web I want, but I’m going to do my usual shtick of looking back at the history of the web to see what kind of…

The Session existed in a very basic form since the late 1990s. It was just me posting a different tune every week. But The Session as it is today—a community website where everyone can add tunes—first went online on June 3rd, 2001. That’s 25 years ago today. Considering the typical lifespan of a web page, I’m proud of having a website still online and thriving a quarter of a century after launching it. At this point it’s fair to say that thesession.org is my life’s work. Though, really, I’m…

I few weeks back, I got an email with the subject line, Screenshot in an Exhibition: I am currently developing an exhibition celebrating the thriving folk musics of these islands for the Royal College of Music Museum and one of the showcases looks at the Sharing of folk music and collections. As an incredible and heavily used repository of tune collections, I would like to print a graphic screenshot of a page from The Session to demonstrate digital dissemination, sharing and preservation of…

Bhí me i Londain an deireadh seachtaine seo caite mar gheall ar an Gaeltacht cois Tamaise. Cúpla lá iontach ba ea iad! Bhí na ranganna ar siúl Dé Sathairn agus Dé Domhnaigh, ceithre huaire an chloig gach lá, i gColáiste na Rí. Bhí ceithre leibhéal ann—tosathóiri, meanleibhéal-iseal, meanleibhéal-ard, agus an ardleibhéal. Bhí gach rang lán le foghlaimeoirí. Roghnaigh mé an rang meanleibhéal-ard agus bhí an leibhéal foirfe. D’fhreastail Jessica ar an rang tosathóirí agus dúirt sí go raibh a…

I enjoyed Kim Curran’s debut novel, The Morrigan, so when I saw a copy of her brand new book in the local library, I snapped it up. Like The Morrigan, Brigid is modern retelling of Irish mythology, but in a very different time period. Whereas The Morrigan was set in a mythical time of the Fomorians and the Tuatha Dé Danann, Brigid is set in the relatively recent past of early Christian Ireland. I was curious to see which Brigid this book would be about: the pagan goddess or the Christian saint?…

When I told you about the schedule for UX London 2026, I said: After your afternoon workshop there’ll be one final closing talk at the end of each day before we head to the bar. These closing talks are a way of bringing everyone back into the same space after spending the afternoon in different workshops. It feels right to start the day and end the day with a shared experience. On day one, discovery day, the closing talk will be delivered by Michael Kibedi. It’s called Whose English gets to be…

Lesbian necromancers in space. That’s the usual pitch for Gideon The Ninth and it’s not wrong. Though there’s a lot more necromancy than space or lesbianism. The book begins in an environment fairly dripping with death, all bones and darkness. It sounds like it should be grim, but thanks to the sarcastic attitude of the protagonist, the tone is actually quite fun. Sassy goth; that’s how I would describe the general vibe. Once I settled into it, I found that tone thoroughly enjoyable. The bulk…

There’s just under a month to go until UX London 2026—exciting! You can peruse the full schedule if you need to decide wether you’re coming for just one day or for all three. The event is designed to flow together, from discovery day to design day to delivery day, but each individual day is also designed to be a standalone experience by itself. Day one on Tuesday, June 2nd has a focus on research: Maria Isachenko will talk about how You don’t need more research time: You need a system that…

In the latest issue of Matthias’s excellent Own Your Web series, he describes the recent betrayal by Google: The search engine no longer says “here, go read what this person wrote.” It now says “here, I’ve already read it for you.” The contract is broken. He’s absolutely right. But… Have you ever clicked on a result from a search engine? Unless you’re lucky enough to land on a nice personal website, you’re more than likely to be confronted with pop-ups to allow tracking, or a desparate plea to…

Nothing can travel faster than light. And if you manage to travel close to the speed of light, things get weird. Technically, we all experience time differently depending on how fast or slow we’re moving. But the differences are so imperceptible as to be non-existent. That’s how we can describe events as being “simultaneous”, even though according to Einstein’s theory of relativity, there’s no such thing. It’s thanks to these small relativistic effects that GPS works. But when you approach the…

After reading The Morrigan I was hungry for more retellings of Irish myths and legends. I tracked down the 1994 novel Finn Mac Cool by Morgan Llywelyn. When I was devouring modern retellings of Greek myths, I commented on an interesting difference in the tellings: The biggest difference I’ve noticed is the presence or absence of supernatural intervention. Some of these writers tell their stories with gods and goddesses front and centre. Others tell the very same stories as realistic accounts…

People talk about the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of large language models as though all tasks are comparable. But it strikes me that there are three broad categories of work that large language models are applied to: Compression. Transformation. Expansion. Compression is when you feed a large language model something big that you want to make small. Summarise this book. Give me the gist of this meeting. Large language models are generally pretty good at this, which makes sense given...

Times are tough out there. I know that a lot of people are looking for work, which can be a very stressful experience. One of the things that can make the job search stressful is uncertainty. There’s a real taboo around talking about salaries. This taboo ends up benefiting employers and punishing potential employees. There’s an information gap that can be exploited (see also: job postings that don’t list salary ranges). That’s why I’m always pleased when people voluntarily share their inco...

Sometimes I look back through my blogging archives and notice what’s changed over time. For example, I used to write quite enthusiastically about the arrival of a new operating system from Apple. That is no longer the case, to put it mildly. I’m currently holed up on Sequioa, trying to resist all the nudgings to “upgrade” to the tacky design nightmare that is Tahoe. I feel like the protagonist of Pluribus. I used to write about software I really liked. Sometimes it was software made by App...

Four years ago I wrote about something that has long puzzled me in the world of front-end development. Trust: The mindset I’ve noticed is that many developers are suspicious of browser features but trusting of third-party libraries. Developers are more likely to trust, say, Bootstrap than they are to trust CSS grid or custom properties. Developers are more likely to trust React than they are to trust web components. That post got some thoughtful responses but I never really unders...

People of Brighton, mark your calendars: Saturday, April 4th. That’s when Salter Cane will be playing in The Hope And Ruin. It’s not just Salter Cane though. We’ll be joined by Skyscrapers from Lewes, and The Equatorial Group from Eastbourne. We’ve played with them before, and they’re superb! Tickets are available now. They’re £8 in advance. It’ll be £10 on the door. So please get your ticket in advance! Doors are at 7:30pm. Skyscrapers will be on stage at 8pm, The Equatorial group at 9pm...

I was in the library the weekend before last when I spotted something on the shelf of recently-returned books. Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir. I knew the film adaptation was coming out later that week. Ideally, I’d like to read the book before seeing the film. It would be a race against time! The film would be out in days, and the book is over 450 pages long. Could this nerdy white guy rise to challenge and overcome the odds? As it turned out, it wasn’t all that arduous. Project Hail Mary...

You should come to UX London in the first week of June. Why? Because it’s going to be awesome, that’s why! You probably knew that already. You probably already decided to get a ticket because you’re smart like that. But don’t dilly-dally! Early-bird tickets are available now but in just over one week, they won’t be. So get your ticket by Friday, March 27th. If you get your ticket now, it’s a win for everyone. You get a cheaper ticket. We know for sure that you’re coming. Every time someo...

When I was summing up my reading habits in 2022 I said: I think the lesson this year is: you can’t go wrong with Octavia E. Butler or Ursula K. Le Guin. I stand by that. But maybe I’d recommend some Ursula K. Le Guin books more than others. A Fisherman Of The Inland Sea is a good collection of short stories. But it’s not a great collection of short stories. If you’re looking for a great collection of short stories, read The Unreal and the Real. When it comes to Ursula K. Le Guin, the...