Go Make Things

There’s an older deaf gentleman in my town who’s very friendly, and likes to communicate with rudimentary hand gestures, but I have a hard time understand what he’s trying to say. I’d love to learn American Sign Language (ASL) at some point (shoutout King Ron), but until then, I wanted an app that could convert speech into text. Every transcription app I found required a pretty expensive subscription… so I decided to build my own using web technologies! Demo Before we dive into how this all…

Last week, I needed to make some pretty major updates to a web component in a design system I use for clients. I’m a big fan of TDD, but I wasn’t mentally in a place to write my tests first. I decided the easiest thing to do was document how the new component would work… before actually writing any code to implement the updates. It was an entirely ADHD-driven decision, but it unlocked something for me! Writing the docs forced me to think about how the component would work: customizations I’d…

We recently moved from a rural suburb in Massachusetts to a small coastal village in Rhode Island. It’s been transformative, and I wish I’d done it sooner! Trickle-Down Effects Unlike a city, a village has homes with yards. Unlike a suburb, a village has businesses and parks intermixed with homes. It’s the best of both worlds. Being able to walk or bike places has trickle-down effects. Instead of driving 20 minutes one-way to get groceries, I can ride my bike there in 5 minutes. Because the…

About 14 years ago, we moved out into the rural suburbs. I loved the quiet, the abundant wildlife, and our proximity to farms. I didn’t realize just how often doing anything at all would require a car. The Sprawl Absolutely nothing was walkable. We lived at the very top of a very high hill, so things weren’t really bikeable either. Groceries, restaurants, entertainment, friends, the library, and so on… you need to get in a car and drive at least 15 minutes for all of it. And as a result, we…

I saw this on Mastodon today (saved the image, lost the source), and it just brought me so much joy! Did you know that we live in a world where octopuses dream, otters have a favorite shell that they carry with them all their lives, cows have best friends, and bees have different “dialects” of dance depending on the region? Or that cats purr at a frequency that accelerates bone healing, the forest grows flowers first after a fire, and dolphins give each other names and respond to them, and…

I just ordered a bunch of leftist patches to put on my backpack, because virtue signaling is good, actually. One patch I kept seeing over and over again is… No human is illegal on stolen land. I get it. It’s supposed to point out the hypocrisy of complaining about illegal immigration in a country that was founded by stealing it from and genociding the people who already lived here. But it also kind of implies that if we hadn’t done that—if we’d found an empty continent just waiting to be…

I’m loving the resurgence of zines! Violet B. Fox just released on on radical books that aren’t a slog, a collection of books for leftists that aren’t super dense theory by old dead white guys. There’s so many good ones to choose from, but I started with The Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler. For posterity, I’ve saved a local backup, but you should visit Violet’s site instead.

In native gardening, the most effective way to prevent unwanted plants (aka weeds) from growing is to crowd them out with plants you do want. Rather than well-space plants with large gaps of mulch, you packed plants densely together, just like you’d find in nature. Without the space to take root, weeds are (mostly) kept at bay. This is a metaphor about life and social change. I spend a lot of time fighting against social injustice. It’s important to fight back against bad things, like it’s…

Today, I realized that running my own business (successfully for a while) is a big part of what made me hate capitalism so damn much. For nearly a decade, I grew a blog I started while learning to code into a tech education business and dev consultancy. First it was a hobby, then a side hustle, then a full time job. I loved having control of my work and my time. I got to decide what I worked on and who I worked with. I didn’t need permission to take a day off to enjoy time with my family. I…

Almost immediately after finishing the Dungeon Crawler Carl series, I started re-reading the books. I’m blown away by how much the series has pushed me even further into anarchist, community-oriented behavior. We recently moved from MA back to Rhode Island. We were making a lot of trips back and forth between our old house and the storage unit we rented near our new place. After one particularly long day, I pulled off the highway for a quick bite to eat, and saw one of the homeless folks I know…

In countries outside of the US, “libertarianism” is often synonymous with anarchy. In the US, it typically refers to folks who are really into unrestrained capitalism without the social support. I was talking about this with a libertarian friend some time ago, and they said something along the lines of… What you’re describing means you’d have to really depend on other people. They meant it in a bad way. But the reality is, if you absolutely love capitalism and freedom and rugged individualism……

So many anarchist principles seems like they would “never work”… because they literally cannot under capitalism, but would work just fine under a different system. One really good example of that is abolishing patents. Patents are silly, actually A patent says a person or company legally owns “an idea” or way of doing things, and no one else can use that idea or approach for many years. If you think about it for a bit, that seems really silly, doesn’t it? How can anyone own an idea? If you talk…

I made another unhoused friend today. Jon is a tattoo artist who suffered a chronic injury his thumb a year ago and can’t do his work anymore as a result. He only recently became homeless. He told me the same thing I’ve heard from so many unhoused folks I’ve talked to over the last year. It’s embarrassing. And I always tell them some version of the same thing. You have nothing to be embarrassed about. You’re still a person with worthy and deserving of kindness and love. You didn’t fail. The…

This weekend, I finished tending my guide on AI that I had planted a seed for in my digital garden. It includes links to various articles on it’s roles in environmental destruction, labor exploitation, economic failure, degrading critical thinking skills, and fascist empowerment. I’ve also included my own personal thoughts, and links to various other thought pieces from other people that I’ve found useful or informative. You can find the guide here.

I don’t particularly care for Dolly Parton’s music, but I loved Dolly Parton. She was literally the best of us. Unapologetically herself whether people liked it or not. Did not give a single fuck about what was “expected” of her based on her age, gender, career aspirations, and so on. Could have been a billionaire, but chose to invest tremendous amounts of money in communities that were underserved instead. A highly visible counter-argument to the idea that older white cishetero folks can’t…

There’s a rather popular flavor of social media content focused on helping unhoused people. The creator will give out sleeping bags, socks, and care kits; sit down and have a meal; or take the unhoused person shopping. Sometimes they help them find work or start a GoFundMe to get them off the streets. It does a lot of good. But it’s also gross AF! Imagine you’re cold, hungry, and desperate, and someone offers to get you all the things you need… if you consent to having a camera shoved in your…

This week, I had to write CSS for a design where a list of elements got a bit of extra design treatment if there were at least three nested items inside it. <!-- Base design --> <ul class="magic-list"> <li>Item 1</li> <li>Item 2</li> </ul> <!-- Extra design --> <ul class="magic-list"> <li>Item 1</li> <li>Item 2</li> <li>Item 3</li> <li>Item 4</li> <!-- ... --> </ul> I really wanted to avoid using JavaScript to add/remove an extra class, and the the :has() pseudo-class a

Back in March, I shared a bit of a sad update on my unhoused friends. Cops raided their camp and took everything they owned. Within the week… Mike had relapsed Manny got arrested for stealing copper Ron was all by himself But last Friday, I got an amazing phone call from Mike! Sometime over the winter, he checked himself into rehab. He’s several months clean now. He’s doing therapy to address the trauma that’s caused him to use. He’s in the process of getting a job helping other addicts get…

I’m a huge fan of the Buy Nothing Project, a movement that promotes the sharing and giving economy over one where people buy ever more shit. The spirit of Buy Nothing is sharing with your neighbors. It’s wonderful. But as it’s popularity in my area has grown, I’ve noticed that some folks have started using it as a way to just offload shit they’re too lazy to drive to a donation spot or throw away. It’s nearly always people who sign up just to give away a bunch of stuff, but are otherwise never…

The album Let’s Get Free by Dead Prez came out 26 years ago. As a teen, it spoke to my angst. As a whole ass adult, its wild to look back on it and realize just how much nuance and bigger picture I missed in their lyrics. Yesterday, their song “Propaganda” came on a random playlist I was listening to… You can’t fool all the people all of the time But if you fool the right ones, then the rest will fall behind Tell me who’s got control of your mind? Your world view? Is it the news or the movie…

The video Constructing the Revolution talks about how to start prefiguring the future you want today. (Heads up: the middle section of the video gets into some pretty heavy territory near the middle.) Early on, there’s some important conversation about rebuilding and repairing communities that have been shattered by a system that deliberately pits us against one another. All hierarchies of power desire to keep us separate, competing, and individualistic, because because we’re easier to exploit…

A major part of anarchy and socialism is the concept of anti-work. An obsession with work is a colonial, patriarchal, and capitalist construct. As such, the anti-work movement—a focus on working less overall and sharing labor more equally—is an important part of decolonization, feminism, and anti-capitalism. A common criticism of this is that reducing the amount everyone works to something like 20 hours a week instead of 40+ means we would have to give up a lot of conveniences. No more 24/7…

Last winter, I wrote about prefiguration: building the future you want within the shell of existing structures. Rather than focusing solely on tearing down systems you don’t like or pointing out what’s wrong with how things are, prefiguration aims to start laying the foundation for what you’d like instead… right here, right now, with the tools you have available. One of the frustrating things about the approach is that while it allows you to take immediate action, it never really feels like…

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…