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Lately, I’ve been binging the back catalog of videos from my internet friend Willow on their YouTube channel: Questing Refuge. Willow is an autistic transgender parent who explores being different and finding belonging as portrayed in popular media. I’ve previously shared their fantastic video on disabled representation in Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts. More recently, I’ve very much enjoy their videos on the portrayal of disability in the show Hawkeye, how neurodivergence is dismissed in…
If you’ve ever been to a really good museum or botanical garden or an IKEA, they typically have a maze-like layout. Rather than a central hub with clear in-and-out spokes, they encourage you to wander and meander. They have small little side paths, sometimes unlabelled on the map, where you can often find surprises or hidden gems (metaphorical, not literal). Websites of days past were like this, too! Before blogs and UX-as-a-discipline and every-ecommerce-site-looks-like-a-Shopify-template,…
My friend Evan recently wrote a very well documented article on how AI isn’t inevitable, it just feels that way because it’s constantly foist upon us. He lays out the many many ways that it is, to be blunt, objectively immoral and unethical to use these tools, regardless of “how good” you think they are. In it, he notes… Except in cases where your boss forces you to use “AI” or be fired, it is entirely possible to eschew the use of these tools today. We have not yet reached the point with “AI”…
I’m so continually disappointed by how many people have absolutely no standards if it means being inconvenienced or “standing out” in any way. Yea, Elon sucks, but the Tesla is just suck a good car. Or… Yea, Twitter is a Nazi party, but I get more reach there. Or… Yea, AI is using all the drinking water and causing coal plants to reopen and taking peoples jobs, but I don’t have to write those reports anymore. Or… Yea, {thought leader} makes women and minorities uncomfortable, but he said some…
Over the last few weeks, I’ve made a lot of updates to my digital garden… All of the old guides have been harvested and replanted as new ones. I added a fully updated guide on Web Components that reflects how I build them today. I completely rewrote my guides around testing, with a detailed guide on Playwright, and stubbed out guides on TDD, Biome, and Typescript. I added some new guides on gardening topics. I created some guides on books and shows I really enjoy. I added a list of tags to the…
You didn’t “have a conversation” with ChatGPT. It doesn’t “think you should…” It doesn’t think. It didn’t “tell you that…” It doesn’t speak. It doesn’t “feel that the best option is…” It doesn’t feel. AI is a cheap parlor trick. You provide words, and it provides words back that are most likely to occur alongside the words you provided. It’s like when a psychic says some bullshit like this, “I see a feeling of regret looming over you.” The psychic doesn’t know shit, but it’s pretty fucking…
Today, I wanted to show you how to detect when an element’s visibility changes using the JavaScript IntersectionObserver API. Let’s dig in! The Use Case I was recently working on a Web Component that calculates how much of the viewport it occupies, and automatically resizes itself to make sure it never overflows. As a standalone component, it worked fine. But in real-world use, it was nested inside Kelp’s toggle tabs component. When it ran it’s calculations, it was inside a [hidden] parent…
Nearly every day, I hear someone say… Like it or not, AI is here to stay. This is self-fulfilling. The same thing has been said about numerous social ills throughout history, from monarchies to smoking. It’s only inevitable if we allow it to be. Don’t let the big techno-fascists tell you what is or is not inevitable.
A few years ago, one of my big goals for the year was to watch less TV and read more books. I like a lot of nerdy sci-fi, dark fantasy, and dystopian media that my wife doesn’t particularly enjoy, which means I’d typically end up watching my shows after we watched our shows together and she went to bed. TV shows keep me awake in a way that reading does not (even when I read ebooks on the glowing screen of my iPad). This led to me staying up far too late most nights, waking up tired, and…
Yesterday, I ran into a weird bug in Chrome and Webkit (but not Firefox) using the .visually-hidden class inside an element that had overflow set to anything other than auto. The visually hidden elements would create a gap at the end of the overflow element, compounding the more of them there were. I wanted to document the details of the bug, and how I fixed it, because I’m sure I’ll run into this again. The .visually-hidden class A .visually-hidden class is used to hide content visually while…
Over a decade ago, I decided I wanted my article URLs to live at my site’s root path / instead of a subpath (like /blog or /articles) “for SEO purposes.” That made sense when I had a few dozen articles and hosted with WordPress. Today, I have nearly 3,000 articles generated as a flat HTML files with Hugo, and navigating my file system on the server is an unruly mess! I finally decided to fix this, moving all of my articles to the /articles subdirectory. But I also wanted to sure that all of the…
As part of my ongoing updates to my personal site, I decided to add icons after all external links. Today, I wanted to show you how I did it. Let’s dig in! Why? I do a lot of linking on my site, and it’s not always obvious when a link will keep you on-site vs. take you somewhere else. Using [target="_blank"] forces links to open in a new tab or window, but this is considered an anti-pattern for accessibility reasons. It can be confusing, and it robs users or choice and agency. An icon lets them…
This morning while I was taking my dog to the groomers, the song Violence by Rise Against came on my playlist. And I started crying. Are we not good enough? Are we not brave enough? Is the violence in our nature just the image of our maker? Are we not good enough? Are we not brave enough? To become something greater than the violence in our nature? Are we not good, good enough? Or is it all a dream? The violence I’ve been listening to punk music for 30 fucking years. I grew up during a time…
Last week, I learned that the punk band Rise Against has an acoustic symphony album called Ghost Note Symphonies. We’ve had rainy acoustic music weather here the last few days, and one song on the album really stood out to me: Miracle. (Here’s the original punk version if you’d prefer it.) It’s a song about not waiting for the change you want to happen. About getting out there and making your dent in the universe. But we don’t need miracles To tumble from the sky To part the seas around us Or…
I’ve been doing a lot of work on my digital garden over the last few weeks, and wanted to briefly mention some updates. I completely replanted the Reference Guides. Rather than being “recreated MDN,” it’s now big bucket of notes and how-to articles, filterable with tags. I’m harvesting content from the old guides, cleaning it up, and planting it anew. I’ve added new garden sections. I now have dedicate planters for my favorite media, places I’ve been to, info about my D&D characters and MtG…
The Which Side Are You On? (remix) by Rebel Diaz came out 11 years ago, and it’s more relevant than ever… Gave the money to suckas while our community’s still poor Withdrew the troops but started another war Colonized and terrorized and created an oil crisis So they could make a killin’ on food and gas prices Prisons is fillin’, they tryna lock up the future Militarize borders and control of computers While the stupid bumping music that ain’t healthy for the shawties Povertize the schools and…
I just updated the CSS for my website to use a fork of Kelp UI, which includes a much more consistent and easy-to-maintain class system than I had before. Quick aside: if you see any bugs in your travels, please let me know! While it mostly looks the same as before, the biggest change was to the color palette. I’m now taking advantage of relative colors with the oklch() CSS function to dynamically generate all of the colors used on this site from just six hex codes defined as CSS variables.…
An obsession with work is a colonial, patriarchal, and capitalist construct. As such, the anti-work movement is an important part of decolonization, feminism, and anti-capitalism. Work is a tool of oppression By anti-work, I don’t mean that no one ever works. That’s preposterous of course. There are things that need to get done, and people need to do them. But this obsession with hard work as a virtue, as a good and righteous thing to do, the glorification of toil and sweat and labor… that’s a…
Last week, I wrote… I used to love this industry, and I do still love many of wonderful people in it. But as we’ve shifted from a craft to industrialization, everything I loved about the work itself has died. I’m constantly wondering, “What would I do next if I wasn’t in tech anymore?” And I keep coming up short. Trade & Craft I plan to keep riding the tech train for as long as possible, but treat it like a trade rather than a personality the way folks in plumbing or carpentry do with their…
tl;dr: I’m ending my Daily Dev Tips newsletter, and transitioning to RSS exclusively. I will still be publishing articles here (just not by email). I’m done I end up quoting Anna Cook a lot here. Recently, she posted on BlueSky… I’m so tired of the tech hype machine. Idgaf how you’re optimizing with AI, what the hell are you doing for people? How are you making the world actually better? Idgaf what your job title is or what you’re selling. I could give two fucks about your manifesto or your…
One common refrain I hear from American liberals is something to the effect of… Demanding basic human rights is not political. And like… I get where they’re going with this, but it seems so fucking naive and obtuse. Everything is political. Politics isn’t some “other” that’s separate from life. If you don’t agree, it might be because you’re in a privileged enough demographic that the politics of life don’t affect you much.
Over the last few years, I’ve lost touch with a handful of folks I considered internet friends. This sort of thing happens all the time, of course. But more recently, I had two folks who I used to chat with almost every day block me on Discord. Normally, I don’t find getting blocked to be all that big of a deal. But when it’s people you thing you’re good friends with, and you’re not sure why it’s happened, it hits different.
I recently had a complete a server migration for PAWS New England, the animal rescue we’ve adopted our last few dogs from. I’ve been working with them for at least 15 years now, and the server we were using was running an aging version of Ubuntu. It was time. Normally, I dread server migrations. With static websites and flat-file storage like my personal sites, they’re not that bad. But PAWS architecture has a mix of a static site generator and two self-hosted WordPress installs (a suboptima...
Content warning: this article includes mentions of addition and mental health struggles. Back in January, I wrote a bit about the unhoused friends I made while handing out tents and sleeping bags before a big storm that was coming to my state. Three weeks ago, I got a text message from one of them that cops had raided their camp and taken everything they didn’t have on their backs.
