Pokémon Art Appreciation, Day 15: Snorlax 109/159 This post is part of a series for WeblogPoMo 2024. Each day in May, I’m sharing my appreciation for my favorite Pokémon card art. View all of the posts in this series. Today’s card is Snorlax from the Crown Zenith set. It’s card number 109/159, released in 2023, and illustrated by Asako Ito. It looks like this: In the same way that Yoka Morii’s...

The saying "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" is at its essence about risk management. The traditional wisdom goes that if you buy from a big company, you're going to be safe. It may be more expensive, but big companies project an image of stability and reliability, so buying their wares is seen as the prudent choice. Except, it isn't. Certainly not any more. Meta killing Workp...

CSS4 RFC is live and ready for community feedback! The CSS4 Community Group has been meeting weekly to categorize every CSS feature into CSS3, CSS4, and CSS5. Yep, you read that right, CSS5. Curious what features are in each bucket?The RFC has it all laid out. Disagree with a categorization?Make a comment! We want to hear from you. Help us ensure we've mapped the features into...

When I was growing up in the 80s and 90s, I had friends who were socially awkward nerds, friends who were cool but didn't like school at all, friends who were good at school but couldn't muster the will to finish their math homework, and friends who were tomboys. None of these kids ever got a diagnosis. They were all well within the spectrum of what constituted "normal" back then. ...

The internet was supposed to set us free, to expand our minds and...

Pokémon Art Appreciation, Day 14: Noivern V 196/203 This post is part of a series for WeblogPoMo 2024. Each day in May, I’m sharing my appreciation for my favorite Pokémon card art. View all of the posts in this series. Today’s card is Noivern V from the Evolving Skies set. It’s card number 196/203, released in 2021, and illustrated by Mitsuhiro Arita. Here it is: Like Kagemaru Himeno from yes...

How I build a website for choosing movies

Anchor positioning in CSS enables us to position an element relative to an anchor element anywhere on the page. Prior to this we could only position an element relative to its closest positioned ancestor, which sometimes meant doing some HTML and CSS gymnastics or, more often than not, resorting to Javascript for positioning elements like tooltips or nested submenus. Anchor positioning is cur...

I’m working with git and make a big boo-boo. Now I’m facing a situation where I’ve deleted a local branch with all my work and there’s no backup on GitHub. “This is git. There has got to be a version of this things still on my computer somewhere, right? RIGHT?!” So I start searching online: “how to recover a deleted branch in git?” A few results later, I find this gist. Not one to copy/paste CL...

Pokémon Art Appreciation, Day 13: Psyduck 20 This post is part of a series for WeblogPoMo 2024. Each day in May, I’m sharing my appreciation for my favorite Pokémon card art. View all of the posts in this series. Today’s card is the Psyduck promo card from the original Wizards of the Coast Promo set. It’s card number 20, released in 2000, and illustrated by Kagemaru Himeno. This is the card: H...

We all live in our own reality tunnels. The beliefs, experiences,...

My son gets a weekly magazine delivered to our home. It’s full of his favourite comic strips by fantastic authors and artists, he gets the pleasure of receiving something in the post just for him, and (even better) it doesn’t come with a load of plastic tat like you get with magazines in the supermarket. It’s not packed full of ads either, apart from a few for the comic book company’s workshops...

Pokémon Art Appreciation, Day 12: Moltres & Zapdos & Articuno SM210 This post is part of a series for WeblogPoMo 2024. Each day in May, I’m sharing my appreciation for my favorite Pokémon card art. View all of the posts in this series. Today’s card is Moltres & Zapdos & Articuno GX from the Sun & Moon Promos set. It’s card SM210, released in 2019, and illustrated by HYOGONOS...

Pokémon Art Appreciation, Day 11: Greedent V 120/159 This post is part of a series for WeblogPoMo 2024. Each day in May, I’m sharing my appreciation for my favorite Pokémon card art. View all of the posts in this series. Today’s card is Greedent V from Crown Zenith (the last of the Sword & Shield era sets). It’s card 120/159, released in 2023, and illustrated by Saki Hayashiro. Here it is: ...

In my experience, a key skill to develop is the ability to separate one thing from another. To prevent the small from becoming the all.Take a policy, for example. Could be a government, or a school, or a home owner’s association, or something at work. Whatever it is, you don’t like it. You don’t agree, you don’t like the decision maker, you don’t like how it was enacted, pick a reason, it do...

In November of 2022, I wrote about the waning days of DEI's dominance, and enumerated four factors that I saw as primary drivers of this decline. Those waning days have now been brought to a close, and DEI, as an obsessive, ideological preoccupation of the corporate world, is done. Witness this tabulation of DEI (and ESG) mentions in earnings reports, reported by Business Insider: ...

The creator economy is a shiny veneer hiding an ugly truth: it ha...

Pokémon Art Appreciation, Day 10: Plusle 193/182 & Minun 194/182 This post is part of a series for WeblogPoMo 2024. Each day in May, I’m sharing my appreciation for my favorite Pokémon card art. View all of the posts in this series. Today we continue our recent theme of “people and Pokémon,” this time with a bonus double-card edition featuring Plusle 193/182 & Minun 194/182 from Paradox...

The promise of the creator/passion economy is simple: follow your...

If you’re here to read my review of the Apple Magic Trackpad, you can skip the AI rant and scroll down to the brief review. Otherwise, enjoy my AI rumblings. Logitech MX Master S3 for Mac is a great mouse. It is a good-looking product, built like a tank, very customisable, and has this fancy electromagnetic scrolling wheel. I liked it a lot until the recent Logi Options+ software update to ver...

I’m sure I’m not alone in noticing the recent proliferation of articles lamenting the impending (or, indeed, already happening) destruction of the web as we know it, due in large part to the influx of AI-generated content. For the most part, I share their pessimism. It’s hard not to see the devaluation of human content as anything but a negative. But in the face of all this gloom, I think it’s ...

The first-ever #11tyConf caught me by surprise, as I only found out about the conference on Mastodon while it was already in progress. That’s why I missed the first two talks, but I can watch those too, because all talks are available online. And watch I will, but for now, rest assured I’ve enjoyed everything I’ve seen live. Talks & Speakers “The Future of 11ty” by Zach Leatherman “Hints &...

Ep #2The Pile element layering layout machine replaces many use cases for position: absolute offers group or individual keyword alignment can be intrinsically sized based on content Watch episode 2: The Pile The latest Mini Web Machine on Chrome Developers · Tiny bits of code that power great UX.

Many years ago, flow-root has been added as another value for the display property. I’ve encountered it in DevTools, where it is shown among the other values in the display property dropdown, but I never felt the urge to learn more about it. Until now. Part of CSS Display Module Level 3, the idea behind flow root was to end the clearfix hack, which has been a thing back in the day, and som...

Matthias Zöchling wrote on May 9, 2024 at 04:44 The oldest piece of content on my site is a link to “The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)” by @[email protected]. Yesterday I found out @[email protected] has written a follow-up:tonsky.me/blog/unicode It never ceases to amaze me how in-depth an...

It's easy to get caught up in the short-term game. Quarterly earn...

Pokémon Art Appreciation, Day 9: Steelix 208/182 This post is part of a series for WeblogPoMo 2024. Each day in May, I’m sharing my appreciation for my favorite Pokémon card art. View all of the posts in this series. Today’s card is Steelix from Paradox Rift (the same set featuring the Garbodor card from Day 1 in this series). It’s card 208/182, illustrated by nisimono. And this is what it look...

This isn't just about one awful ad. I mean, yes, the ad truly is awful. It symbolizes everything everyone has ever hated about digitization. It celebrates a lossy, creative compression for the most flimsy reason: An iPad shedding an irrelevant millimeter or two. It's destruction of beloved musical instruments is the perfect metaphor for how utterly tone-deaf technologists are capable of bein...

Deny requests to your Rails app.

Pokémon Art Appreciation, Day 8: Drampa 184/162 This post is part of a series for WeblogPoMo 2024. Each day in May, I’m sharing my appreciation for my favorite Pokémon card art. View all of the posts in this series. Today’s card is Drampa from Temporal Forces, the most recent Pokémon set to be released internationally (as I write this). It’s card 184/162, released in March, and illustrated by M...

Few numbers exemplified the early growth of Rails like attendance at RailsConf. I think we started with something like 400-600 attendees at the inaugural conference in Chicago in 2006, then just kept doubling year over year, as Rails went to the moon. If memory serves me right, we had something like 1,800 attendees in 2008? It was rapid, it was wild, but next year, it'll be over. RailsConf 2...

The web is always changing and that’s one of my favorite things about it. But there’s a unique sadness in visiting a URL and seeing a 404 where your work once was.I make websites for a living and most of the time it’s for companies. I don’t have any delusion about who owns that work. Don Draper voice: “That’s what the money is for!”But that work is still also mine: the product of my brain and h...

Pokémon Art Appreciation, Day 7: Gulpin RC12 This post is part of a series for WeblogPoMo 2024. Each day in May, I’m sharing my appreciation for my favorite Pokémon card art. View all of the posts in this series. Today’s card is Gulpin from the Generations set (specifically the Radiant Collection subset). It’s card RC12, released in 2016, and illustrated by Tomokazu Komiya. Here’s how it looks:...

We all have biases. Every single one of us.They're shortcuts, heu...

Adam Silver wrote “Don’t use the maxlength attribute to stop users from exceeding the limit” which seems like one of those obvious things that needn’t be said, but I’m glad he says it. Have you heard of the “error prevention” heuristic? It means “do everything you can so users don’t make mistakes”. And it’s good advice. But some designers take this to mean “don’t let users see an error” which ...

Pokémon Art Appreciation, Day 6: Charmander 044 This post is part of a series for WeblogPoMo 2024. Each day in May, I’m sharing my appreciation for my favorite Pokémon card art. View all of the posts in this series. Today’s card is Charmander from the Scarlet & Violet Black Star Promos series. It’s card 044, released in 2023, and illustrated by MINAMINAMI Take. It was included in the Obsidi...

The classic startup founder story goes like this: our hero was li...

I wanted to experiment with the new CSS function light-dark() and get a sense of how to use it in a CSS architecture of nested (web) components. I think it’s going to be a powerful tool in the new responsive world of component architecture but I don’t want to recommend something unless I have experience with it in a project first. My first pass was to add light-dark() to my components… /* globa...

Pokémon Art Appreciation, Day 5: Bulbasaur 046 This post is part of a series for WeblogPoMo 2024. Each day in May, I’m sharing my appreciation for my favorite Pokémon card art. View all of the posts in this series. Today’s card is Bulbasaur from the Scarlet & Violet Black Star Promos series. It’s card 046, released in 2023, and illustrated by OKACHEKE. It was included in the 151 Poster Coll...

An unseasonable gloomy spring in Austin, TX. The kids are nearly done with school for the year and summer plans are shoring up. My son goes to middle school next year. Unbelievable. We’ve battled some on-and-off sicknesses these past couple months and with all the holidays every week has felt like a false start. But here we are, barreling into summer. I’ve already been out on the lake to surf o...

Pokémon Art Appreciation, Day 4: Drapion V GG49/GG70 This post is part of a series for WeblogPoMo 2024. Each day in May, I’m sharing my appreciation for my favorite Pokémon card art. View all of the posts in this series. Today’s card is Drapion V from the Crown Zenith Galarian Gallery (a sort of set within a set). It’s card GG49/GG70, released in 2023, and illustrated by Yuka Morii. Here it is:...

Greys. Who doesn’t love ’em? When it comes to building websites, it can be handy having a few shades of grey at your disposal, no matter your colour palette. We use them for borders and subtle dividers, shadows, and to indicate state changes without overwhelming the user with colour. Some designers feel that a website needs quite a few shades of grey in order to convey subtleties. I once worked...

I’ve been doing this for 25 years, so I’ll often be asked why I’m still in it and how I stay motivated.It ain’t the money, as I’ve been fortunate enough to make more than I’ll ever be able to spend.I enjoy the work and we have a great crew, each a true pleasure to work with. I remain filled with ideas. So that’s part of it.But it’s more that than. It’s more of a justice thing, really.Look at...

Pokémon Art Appreciation, Day 3: Loudred 136/185 This post is part of a series for WeblogPoMo 2024. Each day in May, I’m sharing my appreciation for my favorite Pokémon card art. View all of the posts in this series. Today’s card is Loudred 136/185 from Vivid Voltage, released in 2020, and illustrated by miki kudo. It’s a bit different from the prior two that I’ve covered so far in that it’s no...

Visionary billionaires investing in cutting-edge transportation? ...

Did you know there are texts from ancient Greece that talk about ...

There’s something special about starting a new web or software project. Like a blank canvas, it has so much potential. Surely this is where we’re about to do our best work... In this piece for Branch magazine, I explore the theme of “Perfection is the enemy of progress” by considering how those of us concerned with building a humane web can weave incremental change into our work — without allow...

The rad Kevin Powell and I share our favorite CSS features that aren't new but are seldom used. How many of the 23 did you know‽ Watch on YouTube · Checkout Demos

Pokémon Art Appreciation, Day 2: Magikarp & Wailord GX 161/181 This post is part of a series for WeblogPoMo 2024. Each day in May, I’m sharing my appreciation for my favorite Pokémon card art. View all of the posts in this series. Today’s card is Magikarp & Wailord GX (161/181) from the Sun & Moon era set Team Up. It’s a Tag Team card illustrated by Kouichi Ooyama. Here’s what it lo...

Microsoft announced it is deprecating support for the CSS properties -ms-high-contrast and -ms-high-contrast-adjust in favor of the forced colors standard. There will be a deprecation period and there's an origin trial and a feature flag so you can ensure your updated CSS is working correctly. All the details are over on the Microsoft Developer Blog: Deprecating support for -ms-high-contrast a...

Step 1: Write down the problem in a message you plan to send to a co-worker. Most of the time you’ll solve the problem before you’re done with Step 1. However, if you complete Step 1 and still have the problem, continue to Step 2. Step 2: Hit the “Send” button. Shortly after sending, the solution will present itself. I don’t know why this is. I don’t make the rules. But the solution frequently ...

John Williams wrote on April 30, 2024 at 17:14 So: pointer-hands for buttons on web pages? I’ve been maintaining the line for years that you shouldn’t override the browser defaults for links vs buttons, but it’s starting to feel like an intensely academic argument, like whether people say “aluminum” or “aluminium”. This matters to me at the moment because I am trying to decide how hard to push...

Pokémon Art Appreciation, Day 1: Garbodor 204/182 I don’t post to this weblog very often, and I often feel a little guilty about that. So when Annie recently announced the excellent WeblogPoMo challenge, I jumped at the chance to try writing something here every day for a month. So, here we go. Each day this month, I’m going to blog about Pokémon card art! (Yes, seriously.) Before you roll your...

Elon Musk just fired the entire Tesla Supercharger team. Why?It's...

When I was interviewing for a role with Microsoft Edge in early 2016, I got to my final interview in the loop and I can still remember sitting across from my soon-to-be manager when he asked about the future of the web. HoloLens had been announced, so I must have had that in my mind because I answered with a question. "What if you could crawl into a web page?" And began to describe wh...

End of April, folks! It’s time for a regular drop of the most exciting resources I found around the Web in the past month. Some accessibility resources for frontend devs out there, a great list of tips for git ninjas, an introduction to CSS Container Queries, an exciting move in the JS runtimes world, new exciting proposals to ECMAScript, and more. Enjoy! How screen readers read special ...

Matthias Zöchling wrote on April 30, 2024 at 16:07 I’d like you to check out “The CSScade” by @[email protected] It went live only recently, and already contains loads of great content. Also, blending #CSS with another word, what’s not to like?

There's an interesting psychological phenomenon where programmers tend to ascribe more trust to computers run by anyone but themselves. Perhaps it's a corollary to imposter syndrome, which leads programmers to believe that if a computer is operated by AWS or SaaS or literally anyone else, it must be more secure, better managed, less buggy, and ultimately purer. I wish that was so, but there ...

Why we need OOP, even in Clojure

Looking for an ergonomic way to define components

Between running Rubocop style rules, Brakeman security scans, and model-controller-system tests, it takes our remote BuildKite-based continuous integration setup about 5m30s to verify a code change is ready to ship for HEY. My Intel 14900K-based Linux box can do that in less than half the time (and my M3 Max isn't that much slower!). So we're going to drop the remote runners and just bring c...

Whoopsie, when I wrote »Is CSS alive?« earlier this year, I completely forgot to mention another Baseline 2023 feature: The media query range syntax, which allows us to be more concise when querying the viewport size. But in my opinion this is not even the best part. First things first. This is how the range syntax differs from the good old viewport size media queries. @media (min-width: 48em) ...

In the 1990s, the alt and punk music scene was a hotbed of creativity....

A fine post by Ethan Marcotte called The negotiation cycle led me to an incredible essay by Alan Jacobs called From Tech Critique to Ways of Living. It references an old idea called “The SCT1” which is new to me but based on thinking by the likes of Ursula Franklin and Neil Postman who I am familiar with. Neil Postman’s Technopoly2 –which I read in March– was one of the best books on technology...

In high school, I had a friend named Joe who owned a Honda Trail 110, a small motorcycle with enough history for its own Wikipedia page. It didn’t go very fast (40MPH tops if you’re going downhill) but Joe rode that thing to school every day — or at least he tried, it often broke down on the way. On those cold, winter mornings in the desert you’d find Joe striding into school five minutes befo...

tldr; A focused update on color, contrast inspection, poppin on top (welcome aboard Firefox!), and an update to manifest v3. I've needed to update to manifest v3 for a while… I was really putting it off. But then, Firefox got popover, and well, now that's a feature reason to update VisBug! Chrome Extension · Firefox Addon Side note: always fun to find VisBug bugs. Feels like A...

How do we create a just, equitable society? How do we live sustainably? What is a life well-lived? How do I make the place where I live better? How do we make computer systems that empower people? Richard Feynman reportedly kept in mind a list of his twelve “favorite problems.” Whenever he encountered a new idea, he would compare it against each of these problems to see if it helped him with...

After more than twenty years on the mac, it was always going to be difficult for me to leave Apple. I've simply not been in the market for another computing platform in decades. Sure, I've dabbled a bit here and there, but never with true commitment. It wasn't until Cupertino broke my camel's back this year that I suddenly had the motivation needed to uproot everything. And when I did, I lea...

Osmo Wiio was a Finnish researcher of human communication. His laws of communication are the human communications equivalent of Murphy’s Laws.Wiio's laws state...If communication can fail, it will.If a message can be understood in different ways, it will be understood in just that way which does the most harm.There is always somebody who knows better than you what you meant by your message.T...

Here's a fun use case for CSS paint-order Codepen · MDN · CanIuse?

Илья рассказывает, как мы просрали многозадачность, а Никита ругает консольный интерфейс Гита.

The Babylon Bee ran this amazing bit last year: "Study Finds 100% Of Men Would Immediately Leave Their Desk Job If Asked To Embark Upon A Trans-Antarctic Expedition On A Big Wooden Ship". Yes. Exactly. Modern office workers are often starved for ambition, adventure, and even discomfort. This is why there's an endless line of recruits willing to sign up to work for leaders like Musk...

Matt Haughey wrote a blueprint for his “Dream CMS” and we had him on ShopTalk to talk about it. That got me thinking about what features I’d want in my dream CMS. It’s fun to think of what a modern CMS might have like inline editing, asset serving, monetization/membership functionality, and more imaginative comment moderation. Most of my dream CMS features center around improving my writing and...

The first tech company I ever really despised was Microsoft. This was back in the 1990s, the era of "cutting off the air supply", of embrace-extend-extinguish, of open source as a "cancer", and of Bill Gates before he sought reputational refugee in philanthropy. What made the animosity so strong was the sense of being trapped. That the alternatives to the Wintel monopoly ...

It’s been a while since I posted a like/dislike kind of post. I accumulated a bunch of things I wanted to share in Apple Reminders. The fact that I accumulated a lot more things that I like than the ones I am not a fan of makes me feel optimistic. Let’s go! Liked Kintsugi Lindt EXCELLENCE Dark Sea Salt Bar The Fastest Maze-Solving Competition On Earth The year Twitter died: a special series f...

Here’s an example of some icons that transitioned well in the Big Sur-ification of macOS icons: And just for good measure, here’s a few more — I love this stuff. While some apps made this transition fun (and further infused their brand with character), others did not. They did the bare minimum and moved on. A few years ago I tweeted about this “bare minimum” phenomenon where app maker...

In case you missed it, my site now distinguishes between regular notes and links. Again. I already had this separation in place many years ago, but at some point I did merge everything under the Notes roof. Last month I had a change of mind, and thus I wanted to undo the merge. Instead of browsing the git history to find a point in time where the separation was alive and well, I went through al...

Matthias Zöchling wrote on April 24, 2024 at 07:18 Ah, yes, the inaugural #JSNakedDay. I didn’t have time to prepare anything, but I’ll join in spirit. Let me run the numbers for you. At the time of writing, cssence.com has 314 pages, this note already included. 27 of them contain no JS, namely the RSS feeds. Out of the remaining 287 pages, 286 contain JS but function without it. That leaves u...

Google's announcement that they're done discussing politics at work widely echoed the policy changes Coinbase and we at 37signals did a few years back. So yesterday, I did two separate interviews with media outlets on the topic. And we spoke in part about those early weeks of reaction to our changes, as Twitter went crazy in response to the story. What was it like to briefly be the main, hat...

1. Only make what matters to you, and do it with authenticity, tr...