Andy Bell

I read Mat​hia⁠s S​chäf⁠er’s excellent post, titled The death of web development education. I was thinking about how I can contribute to the conversation and really struggled to articulate the problem. The most effective way I can contribute, in my opinion, is a crude sketch I just did of Piccalilli‘s Stripe chart for all time sales: That’s a whopping 67.5% reduction since 2025… Pretty bleak, huh? Something really does have to change or you’ll miss publishers when they’re gone.

Ever since Piccalilli started to get traction, I’ve always seen CSS-Tricks, Smashing Magazine and A List Apart (among others) as peers. We all help each other behind the scenes and importantly, back each other. When CSS-Tricks was initially acquired by DigitalOcean, I was really happy for Chris. The work that he’d put into that publication was unreal with thousands of articles published along with elevating writers (including me) to building audiences of their own. It’s certainly something I…

My music collection is ever-growing and I have a habit of listening to the same stuff on repeat. Mostly, it’s overwhelm-related because as you can see by this album covers view, there’s a lot to choose from. I thought RSS could be useful here, so I wrote a little feed that picks a random album, each day, then serves that as the single RSS item. This works great because my RSS reader, Feedbin will happily build those up if I don’t get around to checking. Try it for yourself. You might discover…

Recently, during a very relaxing holiday in Cyprus, I had a revelation of sorts: my brain was rotting. I know this because I read a lot of books on holiday. It’s the only time I do read books! Well, I did read a lot on holiday, but the last couple of years I really struggled to focus. I used to put it down to “I’m just super tired, man, I don’t have the mental strength to concentrate” but that was probably only a part of it. I struggle to concentrate all the time — brains, innit — but it looks…

Pretty grim day of news in the industry today, with Salma Alam-Naylor stepping away from developer relations work permanently, Josh Comeau taking a sabbatical from making courses and GSAP’s once-vibrant forums descending into a ghost town. The reason your token guzzler “produces” anything that could be described as “good” is because of the years of hard work from people that actually care deeply. The reason what we do was fun was because of the soul that these great people — along with many,…

I’m a huge Zelda sicko and recently — maybe it’s the buzz of Ocarina of Time being re-made — I’ve decided to play the games in timeline order. Well, almost, because I’ve already started Minish Cap, which also inspired this little challenge because I forgot how rad the four swords stuff is. I’ve beaten a good portion of these games already over the years, but for this challenge, I’m going to beat them from scratch again. Yes, that includes the monstrous Breathe Of The Wild and Tears Of The…

I really like this blog by Barry Prendergast. I’m getting quite into the AT protocol stuff and their writing is really helping with my broader understanding of how this stuff works. Barry does a great job of shining a light on not just the technical stuff, but everything else too, which is great because this stuff moves so fast and there are so many good humans doing good work. Check it out

Graze, the company that do really good stuff around AT protocol user controlled algorithms, have announced that they’re trying to “Billionaire proof inference” by creating an AI cooperative called co/core. It’s quite an interesting idea, where users share their own personal spare compute, from devices like an old MacBook, with a network of other users doing the same thing. The idea is that LLM tasks are run on each other’s machines and everyone appears to mutually benefit. The logical endpoint…

It seems like everyone is integrating Standard.site on their personal websites (and beyond) at the moment. It’s mainly been encouraged by Bluesky’s recent update to the treatment of sites integrated with Standard.site. Sam has a good explainer here. It’s a cool feature! There’s loads of different platforms doing cool stuff, all using different data structures, so the standardisation was really needed. Integrating is fairly straightforward too. If you’re using WordPress, for example, it’s as…