Royal Icing — Patrick George Wyndham Smith

Combinatorial Implosion LLMs contain models for a wide range of observable systems.

Faster pull requests are faster horses Perhaps we should throw out the rubber stamp and just commit to main?

Stop treating pull requests like you’re adding a chapter to the bible Code review has gotten so blown up in importance the past several years.

Indispensable atoms of the computing universe Transistor Datagram TCP segment Transaction URL S3 object Token Each invention carefully draws a boundary around essential complexity, encapsulated as a dependable unit with a stable contract and clear failure…

Agents of Our Own Illiteracy I worry our software industry is drifting towards illiteracy.

Death by a Thousand Comments Gergely Orosz of the Pragmatic Engineer newsletter/podcast writes: I’m seeing so many VC-funded, internally built infrastructure and bootstrapped solutions around “building a context layer for engineering teams.”

Something Is Rotten in the State of Pennsylvania In the two decades John Gruber has been in this racket, I’ve never been angrier at him for missing a review than I am about him not reviewing the iPhone Air.

Software is Made of Fickle Loops You can use the lens of iterative loops to look at software development today.

Levers of Light Light and movement becomes action.

Imperative Core, Sandboxed Shell What if instead of implementing using functional programming, which often copies data that has to be later collected, we wrote code that matched the operation & memory model of the underlying compute?

Immediate mode in Microsoft’s new Edit TUI Microsoft released a new open source code editor.

Do not default to object-oriented or message-passing Object-oriented programming is good for some problems.

Apple’s App Commodification and the End of Delicious Differentiation Apple used to differentiate itself with software.

Test Driven Vibes Test-driven development (TDD) is the perfect match for vibe coding.

Electric Bicycle for the Mind Steve Jobs coined the idea of the “bicycle for the mind”, where computers could take a person a lot further than they could alone, just like a bicycle could let you travel further, more quickly, and more efficiently than runn…

Automated Tests or Documentation?

Demos are Forcing Functions John Gruber writes about Apple Intelligence’s vaporware aspects in Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino.

Generative UI vs Curated UI In the media I think there’s been much too much recency bias with Generative AI and Wearables, where since they are recently developed people assume they are the natural next step.

How Components and Behavior-Driven Tests Overlap They are contracts of what and some other system works out how.

What does RSC stand for?

WebAssembly Core, Imperative Shell Outline: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/screencasts/catalog/functional-core-imperative-shell Write the core in WebAssembly.

Examples of modes Guillermo Rauch said “One of my North Stars in design is No Modes, or mode minimization.

An Optimist uses a Pessimist’s Wi-Fi “What’s your Wi-Fi password?”

Think of your visual UI as progressive enhancement on an accessible core So often making for the web as a sighted user I think of the visual experience first.

Web App vs Site vs Hybrid I first started as a website designer, and now call myself a web app developer.

Introducing Orb: a friendly Elixir DSL for writing WebAssembly 🕷️🕸️ HTML works on pretty much any computing device you buy today.

How is a WebAssembly module like a Ruby class?

Clash of the KVs Today Vercel announced a range of storage options, from Postgres to an S3-like object store.

Introducing Calculated World Calculated.World is now live!

Introducing Collected Press: Markdown Directly Loaded from GitHub, Rendered on the Edge For a while, I’ve had a blog running on WordPress.

Comparing HTTP Latency When an HTTP request is made, a response comes back, right?

An Idea for Figures in Markdown Markdown has a built-in way to add images.

WebAssembly allows <script> tags everywhere The web is a flexible medium.

Write Once, Integrate Everywhere Write once, run anywhere clearly fails.

When Can Users Do X?

The Missing App Economy In the late 90s Steve Jobs was faced with a dilemma.

Mocking window.location in Jest It’s sometimes necessary to mock window.location in Jest tests.

Accessibility-First Tool Concepts Twice now I’ve created desktop apps for designing UIs.

Appreciating Legible Diagrams I do love a good monospaced diagram co-located with the code it describes.

The Apple Experience Augmented — Part 2: Developer Experience Apple has been iterating for years on a curious set of APIs called ARKit that has been largely ignored by the iPhone & iPad developer community, which hints that more compelling hardware is com…

The Apple Experience Augmented — Part 1: User Experience I want to cover what the user experience of an AR Glasses product from Apple could look like, and how it might integrate with today’s products.

Vary variables not rules in CSS media queries A common pattern you’ll see when implementing responsive design with CSS is to redefine rules in media queries: h1 { font-size: 2rem; } @media (min-width: 720px) { h1 { font-size: 2.5rem; } } @media

Tips for concatenating URLs in JavaScript You might have a base URL from configuration, that you then concatenate with paths to produce a full URL.

Tim Bray on subscribing to publications Tim Bray writes why he won’t subscribe: Their arithmetic didn’t consider their chance of getting me to click on “Subscribe.”

Biasing your business to producing value in a public manner Some ancient 2011 advice from Patrick McKenzie: Businesses create value with almost everything they do.

My most used commands for front-end # Measure HTTP response time httpstat "https://example.org/" # Run Google’s PageSpeed Insights npx psi "https://example.org/" --strategy=mobile # Run Axe Core across multiple breakpoints npx evaluatory "https://exampl…

When a third party library schedules a focus via requestAnimationFrame() and blows all your tests up The Reach UI components are great.

Useful React hooks for accessibility import { useMemo } from 'react'; import { v4 as uuid } from 'uuid'; export function useLabelledBy(): readonly [ string, { 'aria-labelledby': string } ] { const uniqueID = useMemo(uuid, [uuid]); return [uniqueI…

A better alternative to TypeScript’s non-null assertive operator TypeScript supports using !

Deno hits 1.0 Deno has reached version 1.0.