I’m a web designer and developer and my career arc is about helping you get better at those things. Sometimes people talk to me about that.
With Alex Vazquez, I’m the co-founder of CodePen, a social front-end web development environment. With Dave Rupert, I’m the co-host of a podcast called ShopTalk.
I built CSS-Tricks, a website all about building websites, and ran it for 15 years, from 2007 to 2022.
I’m big on the power of writing as a way to think better and improve yourself.
In Bend, you can’t miss the illustration work of Megan Marie Myers. It’s absolutely everywhere. There are murals. There are calendars for sale everywhere. Prints are hung up at coffeeshops, sometimes as whole exhibitions. She’s got books, stickers, hats, postcards, notecards, and heck, even neck gaiters. If her art wasn’t as charming and well done, […]
Most internet travels by wire. Straight through the dang ocean. Josh Dzieza in a feature for The Verge: These fragile wires are constantly breaking — a precarious system on which everything from banks to governments to TikTok depends. But thanks to a secretive global network of ships on standby, every broken cable is quickly fixed. […]
You’re doing yourself a grave disservice if your writing opens with something boring or banal. You’re going to lose me, at least. I’ve got a list of stuff to read and watch as long as your arm. Maggie really digs into this, in an effort to get better. Your challenge is finding the compelling problem […]
I’ve heard the new cooperative version of Scrabble made fun of a few times. These pansy youths just wanna hold hands, drink warm milk, and avoid any conflict. Whatever. Nobody is threatening the value of competition. Me, I think cooperative games are awesome. There are still challenges. You work together to solve them. Like, I […]
The best bit of kids technology that we have, and this has been true from say age three to now six, is the Amazon Fire HD Kids. The operating system on it is fine. It loads up decently quickly. It’s locked down to only kids stuff. It’s not upselling stuff for the most part, there […]
This popup that 1Password does by default isn’t my jam: My problem with it is that it isn’t actually helpful. If you do use the feature and save the login, instead of that popup you just get another one that looks essentially the same that you can click to log in. That’s no better! If […]
I just heard about GitButler from a Discord friend. I’m kind of ripe for toying with Git clients I use, as I just switched to GitHub Desktop. I don’t regret the switch, but I don’t love GitHub Desktop so much I couldn’t imagine another switch. Little stuff bugs me. GitButler is free (the FAQ makes […]
(For clarity, this isn’t sponsored, even though Automattic did sponsor me in the past for quite a long time. I just find it fascinating following the products they put out.) For a long time, the message and branding for WordPress.com was “this is the one you use if you want to use WordPress but don’t […]
Dave mentioned in Discord the other day that he listened to a podcast called Finding Drago. He said: It was recommended to me by a vagrant on the beaches of Chala and it changed my life. I powered through it and it’s a hell of a strange journey. Strongly recommended, if you feel a podcast […]
That was the joke the camel guy made when we went camel riding in Cabo San Lucas on our vacation. The actual camel ride was about 250 seconds long and not something I’d go out of the way to do again, but the dad jokes were impressively thick. Yep — we went to Cabo again! […]
Updated my robots.txt file to what looks like the latest list of User-agents to block. Not that I have any faith that it’s actually going to help prevent my writing from getting into a model without my permission. All it takes is one scraper website that republishes the content and doesn’t have an identical robots.txt […]
I signed up for the paid version of PJ Vogt’s Search Engine show. One of the latest (free) episodes, Who’s behind these scammy text messages we’ve all been getting?, was fascinated and very effecting. I’ve always liked the idea of good, paid media. Sometimes it’s hard to know what’s going to be worth it, but […]
I’m super close to getting productivity-sniped by Godspeed. It appears there is quite a few cool features. I like the focus on speed. I like the file attachments to individual to-dos. I like that recurring to-dos seem like first-class citizens. I like the commitment to keyboard-first usage and the “just remember Command-K” thing. I’m Apple-y […]
We’re all familiar with processes like “write a weekly status update” that start strong and eventually fade out to low participation, engineers automating their updates, and gibberish. When you ask people why participation faded you hear the same thing over and over, “It didn’t feel like anyone was reading it”. In this scenario, we’ve Pushed. […]
The glider was a sister to the lilac and the bee, the slime mold and the earthworm, blossoming forth, bubbling up from the generative froth of the universe, its spontaneous complexity cascading from page to page, filling the grid with evidence for a theory that could not be articulated and did not need to be […]
Shaw with some helpful advice on live audio: A friend explained it to me like water. Gain is controlling how much water to let in, and Level is controlling how much water to let out. Lower gain means less sound picked up overall (which helps with feedback) and the level will control how much you […]
This all started here. Where that ended was ordering new gear that seemed better suited to this recurring gig than what I was doing. All that gear has arrived and I’ve used it now, and I’m happy to report it was a good improvement. The setup is: Those five inputs to to a Mackie ProFX12v3 […]
Brad follows up on some some of the chatter and happenings since the big Global Design System concept dropped. In addition to many of the positive responses, I heard plenty of skepticism, open questions, and apprehension. So much of it is valid and shared by me! Chris Coyier published a great post that sums up a lot […]
Great story from Chris Zacharias about slipping a browser support banner into production on YouTube that probably did more to drive down usage of that browser than the collective public whining of web developers at conferences. Instead of outright dropping IE6 support, what if we just threatened to? How would users react? Would they revolt […]
I’m going to leave the title off this post and see what happens. Titles are a lot of pressure! I think there is a reason that the big text-based social networking sites (Mastodon, X, Facebook, Threads, LinkedIn, Bluesky, etc.) don’t have titles. Especially for short posts, the title just isn’t necessary. Just say the thing. […]