June 26, 2025
There’s some productivity traps I fall into on a regular basis. They all tie into my personal flavor of ADHD but it’s not totally fair to blame the ol’ meat-wad brain when I know when, where, and why it happens.
June 25, 2025
Text reflow on the web has an interesting relationship with Responsive Web Design. As a column gets smaller text wraps and becomes taller1. But for large format display text, that’s not always what you want2. What I’ve wanted for awhile now is a way to inversely size text based on...
June 18, 2025
We had Peter Pistorius on ShopTalk to talk about RedwoodJS and the project’s pivot to an almost entirely different project called RedwoodSDK. I am a complete outsider but I liked what RedwoodJS (the old project) was trying to do and didn’t fully understand why they felt the need to reboot....
June 18, 2025
Chekuskin dreamed he was in a factory sidling up the walkspace, besides some immense machine. But when he put his hand on it to steady himself, instead of cold metal the surface he felt was lively and warm. Little tremors ran through it, but not mechanical ones. The machine he...
May 30, 2025
Careless People is a tell-all book that walks through Facebook’s rampant (and criminally?) inept responses to it’s growing role in global policy, from it’s role in the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar to the election of Donald J. Trump. The book, written by Facebook’s former director of foreign policy Sarah Wynn-Williams,...
May 27, 2025
Take My Hand, Precious Lord (also known as the inverse Precious Lord, Take My Hand) is an old gospel hymn with a unique and special tie-in to the American Civil Rights story. Written in 1932 by Thomas Dorsey after he co-founded National Convention of Gospel Choirs and Choruses (NCGCC), the...
May 22, 2025
It’s been an eventful three months since my last update. I nearly burnt myself out powering through a big internal release at work in February, a season of back-to-back family activities March and April, I turned 45 at the end of April and school lets out next week. Summer has...
May 20, 2025
As the world turns, so doth productivity apps churn. Readers of this blog will know I’ve been a user of Notion for the last seven-plus years. The block-based editor, the database features, and general “webbiness” of Notion suited me and let my inner productivity- and systems-wonk flourish.
May 12, 2025
I’m finishing up my move from Notion to Obsidian and one complexity I encountered was all my saved links. In the almost seven years of using Notion, I amassed a ~1.2 GB database of links. This is because of how the Notion Web Clipper creates a backup of the article...
May 07, 2025
Last year I attempted to do some newsletter-style link aggregation… that good intention imploded spectacularly. But I switched to Obsidian this month and now I have a better system for aggregating links (post on that coming later). Inside this issue you’ll find some games, some homelab server hardware, some AI...
April 28, 2025
I want you to have a blog. Despite this being nearly my entire online ethos, one situation I struggle with are design systems and UX blogs on Medium. A lot of them exist. Yet. I have difficulty understanding UX and design professionals in this space who yield their UX and...
March 19, 2025
“Enshittification” is a termed coined by Cory Doctorow in 2023 to describe a pattern of decreasing quality observed in online services and products. Since Doctorow’s post, there’s been no shortage of think pieces on enshittification and its role in our society and to a large extent I agree with them...
March 09, 2025
I’m a bit behind in my RSS feeds and I didn’t realize Susan tagged me to answer a series of questions about my blog. I’ve read dozens of these and to be honest was feeling a little left out, so thanks Susan for including me! (Susan’s one of my favorite...
March 01, 2025
Happened upon a good example of the problem with AI generated alt text. It’s a gif of the infamous scene from Star Wars Episode II where Hayden Christensen playing Anakin Skywalker tells Natalie Portman’s character Queen Amadala, “I don’t like sand.” It’s the first phrase in the worst lines of...
March 01, 2025
February 22, 2025
As the weather in Texas flip-flops weekly between sunny Spring and snowy Winter, I’ve been dealing with a bit of personal health this last quarter. From my ADHD diagnosis, to trying meds for the first time, to back-to-back sicknesses, then constant migraines, and then I think I got the Norovirus...
January 28, 2025
January 26, 2025
The other day I sent my wife a link to a new set of ceramic pans and asked, “What do you think?” assuming she’d be as impressed as I was of the picture of eggs sliding off the pan. Her response: a grimace. Using my sixteen years of husbandly intuition,...
January 25, 2025
January 20, 2025
January 20, 2025
I have a confession to make. You probably sensed it, but weren’t able to articulate what was happening. Your loved ones think you’re losing your grasp on reality. For the last six months I’ve been incrementally changing the color scheme on my website every single day. I boiled you like...
January 15, 2025
Now that I have a job where I’m writing web components full time, I see the this keyword more than I ever have in my whole life. It’s not a problem, per se, but you can see how it’s a little repetitive. I started wondering what my options were to...
December 30, 2024
For last year’s check-in, I foreshadowed a year of changes for ol’ Dave Rupert and boy was I not kidding. New job, new car, new pets. But before we get into all that – for accountability’s sake – let’s check in on my resolutions from last year and see how...
December 28, 2024
Hottest October on record. November weather was much nicer, but lacked the much needed rain. We now pass the solstice and crash into the new year without so much as a sneeze from the gods of winter. My son’s team took second in the Fall baseball championship game. My daughter’s...
December 26, 2024
I always promised myself that if I was ever unemployed that I’d make a video game. When life dealt me an unpaid work hiatus though, the last thing I wanted to do was code in my spare time1. I worried I would have to let that dream, that part of...
December 23, 2024
I’ve realized something obvious again, this time about CSS; that CSS wants to be a system. At the core of CSS is a series of cascading rules and classes marrying and mingling in an elegant symphony of style application. Dozens and dozens of declarative instructions for painting pixels on the...
December 19, 2024
I’m in the middle of a design tokens project and I thought I’d share something I’m learning that is probably obvious to everyone else; every design token is a feature.
December 11, 2024
December 06, 2024
This month I got my official diagnosis for Adult ADHD. It’s fun to share experiences with friends. While ADHD presents some new waters to navigate, it isn’t exactly news to me. Thanks to Dr. TikTok, I’ve suspected this outcome for a few years now. It’s nice to have a proper...
November 26, 2024
October 22, 2024
I bet if you were someone who could make a hammer that would have been a good stable job for years, centuries even. Almost everyone needs a hammer at some point in their life.
October 21, 2024
October 11, 2024
School is back in session, sports are in full swing, we’re tossed and turned by the weekly routine. This past month has been a season of fixing and repair and I’m thankful everything went well and we’re (hopefully) through the hard parts.
September 14, 2024
Every two-to-four years my body chemistry changes and my armpits start to reject my deodorant with an intense itch. All that aluminum has gunked up the works I guess. Usually cycling out deodorants works fine, but this time it didn’t work because my armpits were overpowering all the other deodorants....
September 13, 2024
Brian LeRoux posted a few thoughts about forms and the idea of a “good form” resonated with me so I dogpiled some of my own thoughts and experiences on it. Here’s a compilation of those ideas. I’m sure this is incomplete and would love to see your list.
September 12, 2024
I saw a tweet awhile back that sent my brain to a far off galaxy…
September 03, 2024
Weeks ago I was looking in to a performance issue for our animated spinner component and stumbled across a tool in DevTools I hadn’t used before: The Performance Monitor Panel. In you open Dev Tools > More Tools > Performance Monitor you’ll see some helpful high-level charts and graphs of...
August 24, 2024
The temperatures soared over 100ºF and the yard is dead and everything smells roasted. But the ten day forecast shows a ten degree dip and that is cause for celebration. Another school year has started. My son has started middle school and my daughter is now in third grade. It’s...
August 08, 2024
I’ve become a bit obsessed with how much it costs to fuel my body during the working hours.
July 18, 2024
4:05am The windows are open, hoping to capture the faint winds and convert them into a mythical cooling cross-breeze. A gust passes through vacuuming all the doors shut, cancelling hope for a miracle. I’m awake. It’s cool but I’m on top of the covers and not cool enough. The plastic...
June 30, 2024
The algorithm sucked me into another model craft hobby: Mini 4WD racing (ミニ四駆). A Mini 4WD is a 1:32 scale model that is a mix between slot cars and RC cars. You don’t control these cars with a remote control nor do they drive in an electrified slot, rather you...
June 29, 2024
The cicadas hum their ancient alien tune in the treetops above. The asphalt is hot to the touch. Cars and homes fill with the white noise of air conditioning in attempts to keep those inside alive. My enemy, the Sun, beams its photonic radiation at me –only me– and mocks...
May 28, 2024
Through stalking the #WebComponents hashtag and my Frontend Masters course, I’m privy to a lot of developers’ first experiences with web components. There’s a wide range of people digging in, but the most common first-time experience I come across is a developer coming from a classical component framework like React...
May 16, 2024
Last Monday was my first day as an official employee of Microsoft where I’ll be working on web components as part of the Fluent design system team. As longtime readers already know, I’ve had a long term relationship with Microsoft – from Paravel’s 2012 responsive redesign of the Microsoft homepage...
May 05, 2024
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...
May 05, 2024
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.
April 29, 2024
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...
April 25, 2024
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,...
April 10, 2024
April 10, 2024
March 29, 2024
“You know those body builders with the big arms and skinny little legs? Your jaw is like that.”
March 21, 2024
March 19, 2024
A couple weeks ago I joined a conversation about John Romero and prototypes. Tyler posted some thoughts about Romero’s autobiography, Matthias shared a quote from a Tim Ferris podcast where Romero chided prototypes, and Matthias looped me in because I love prototypes.
March 09, 2024
Howdy. It’s March already. Let’s catch up. In January, Austin had a freeze but thankfully uneventful. Brings up a lot of “my dumb hyper-capitalist ultra-Libertarian government has created a failed state” trauma though. In February, my family and I have been battling sickness on and off. Switching over to care...
February 29, 2024
I’ve been co-hosting a weekly podcast for nearly 12 years with over hundreds of guests and I want to tell you the secret to getting invited on a podcast. Are you ready? Here it goes.
February 22, 2024
Duolingo does a great job capturing the novel delight of learning a new language. You hop on, take a short quiz, and a little green owl waves at you and hops towards a trophy. You can add friends, join group challenges, and there’s a weekly ranking system to compete with...
February 20, 2024
It’s been a couple years of working full-time on Luro and we’ve travelled through at least three (or four?) different distinct architectures. If that sounds like a lot, I’d agree. It’s been educational to say the least.
February 16, 2024
I’ve read the entire internet so you don’t have to and here’s some links I found. Is this the start of a newsletter? 🤷♂️ I tried this two years ago. Anyways. Here’s some links.
February 16, 2024
“UI is a function of state” is a pretty popular saying in the front-end world. In context (pun intended), that’s typically referring to application or component state. I thought I’d pull that thread a little further and explore all the states that can effect the UI layer…
February 15, 2024
AI. It’s the talk of the town (or at least this year, that is). I’ve been in dozens of conversations about AI in recent days. The likelihood that the next big feature or product I build involves AI seems to be going up. No idea where it’s all headed –...
February 06, 2024
Two years of working on Luro full time has taught me a lot about #startuplife. While I could probably fill a book with what I’ve learned so far, the biggest takeaway is you’re always busy if you’re on a small team. Here’s a list of jobs that you always need...
February 06, 2024
February 05, 2024
You and I are partaking in something magical.
February 01, 2024
Often when I talk with folks who know me from my podcast they will say something along the lines of, “I used to listen to your podcast!” Then they blush because their statement implies they don’t listen anymore (Exhibit A). And I just wanted to say…
January 29, 2024
The EU Digital Markets Act is making waves in the Apple ecosystem. For the first time ever you’ll be able to install a browser other than Safari/Webkit on iOS (as long as you live in the EU). While there are other browsers on the iOS App Store, they’re all Safari/Webkit...
January 29, 2024
January 27, 2024
One thing I love about the new’ish :focus-visible pseudo-state is that it allows me to create bigger, bolder, and more obvious focus states for my keyboard users than I normally would with a :focus pseudo-state that might flash or linger on a click. For example, my default :focus-visible is pretty...
January 24, 2024
The heart of Luro has always been a tool to enable deeper collaboration in a broader team context, so we architected it that way (a few times). It’s important that teams working on the same app are able to look at the product with the same lens of understanding, not...
January 24, 2024
Last year, an investor we were talking to sent us a tweet that expressed her hesitancy about investing in products in the design systems space that went…
January 24, 2024
Sarah Hendren’s What Can a Body Do? is a beautiful meditation on disability and the different ways bodies meet the physical world. In a word, there’s often a “mismatch” between how the world is designed and how people interact with it. There’s a chapter in the book where Hendren talks...
January 23, 2024
It’s so easy nowadays to get up and going on a project. I can burp some npm commands into my terminal, burp some more to setup a deployment pipeline and blam! Website. The time to product demo is so low. You can get far on your own… very quickly… but...
January 23, 2024
I often feel overwhelmed deciding what to do with my spare time. It’s a problem with volume moreso than ambition. When the feeling hit the other weekend I scribbled down seven ideas rattling around in my head and stared at the list blankly. I’ve used different prioritization systems in the...
January 19, 2024
More than making money… more than that feeling of launching a new product, feature, website, or app… the idea I am coming to value most in my professional life is the feeling of “play”. Sometimes play is being on my own with high autonomy and low consequences, sometimes it’s getting...
January 18, 2024
A post from Jason Velazquez called “Where have all the websites gone?” crossed my socials. It’s a good lament about the dearth of interesting content on the internet and how we’re stuck in the same boring content silos.
January 16, 2024
For years the latest articles list on my homepage had a neat little CSS trick where each post had wobbly “rough boxes” around them. To create the effect I used a script from css-houdini.rocks aptly named Rough Boxes. One minor problem, CSS Houdini paintlets aren’t – and probably never will...
January 14, 2024
You might look at my office and the 32 plastic robot models on my shelf and think “This guy is a collector!” Or you might look a the bass guitar, electric guitar, long neck open back banjo, closed back resonator banjo, tuba, saxaphone, ukelele, and shamisen in my office and...
January 14, 2024
From time to time I need to stitch together two or three images into a horizontal or vertical image. It seems so wasteful to spin up a whole design document for that task. What I wanted was a CLI that does that for me and I found one that does...
January 12, 2024
Have you heard about Dropout? Spun off from College Humor, Dropout is a paid streaming service with hours and hours of high quality improv content. For $6/month (less than half a Netflix) you get access to a large swath of independently produced shows that are a guaranteed laugh.
January 11, 2024
In a recent post I covered how to get MDX-style posts with web components and people come to me every day, tears in their eyes, and ask me to go into more detail.
January 11, 2024
January 11, 2024
I’m coming to the realization when you’re a family with a small fridge you cannot be all these platonic ideals at the same time:
January 10, 2024
January 09, 2024
January 02, 2024
2023 has been a memorable year and –at times– downright existential. Looking at the scorecard, it’s pretty clear there’s been more downs than ups. Despite everything, I maintain a positive outlook and am forward-looking.
December 23, 2023
Went on a little video game bender thanks to Donkey Kong: A Record of Struggle on Shmuplations, which translates an interview from “bit” magazine with Hirohisa Komanome, a programmer at Ikegami who Nintendo contracted to build their first arcade games. The handful of minor happenstances that led to the invention...
December 21, 2023
The year is almost over. The weather is delightful in Austin and walking the neighborhood is a joy. Happiness arrives in holiday cards. The tree is up and the ambient stress of moonlighting as an assistant to a jolly, fat norseman takes its toll. The power grid still hums but...
November 17, 2023
November 10, 2023
I spent the last week refactoring a single file on a single service of Luro to fix a production-only bug, which caused our server to fall over and took over 5+ hours to finish the weekly cronjob. Taking the bitter pill, we buckled down and did the work.
November 08, 2023
The weather is changing. The cool rains of Fall have arrived after a brutal “hottest on record” Summer. My wife is back working at the school, family adjusted to the new routine, kids plodding through the days with school and sports. Baseball is already wrapping up while my daughter continues...
October 30, 2023
October 27, 2023
October 26, 2023
As part of my weight loss journey, I’ve overhauled the fluids I consume. I’ve ditched alcohol (mostly), diet sodas (completely) and sparkling water (completely) and have settled into a mix of coffee (morning), tea (afternoon), and (in the evenings) something we around the house call “fun water”.
October 26, 2023
October 26, 2023
As part of my weight loss journey I’ve been buying a lot of premade meals at Snap Kitchen. My poor eating habits don’t come from emotional eating or binge eating, but rather from not recognizing I’m hungry until it’s too late. After an entire morning of coffee, coding, and meetings...
October 26, 2023
As part of my weight loss journey I’ve started taking more vitamins and one guilty pleasure is I buy them all as gummies. The gummy vitamins, while possessing myriad mystical benefits, have an add-on effect of being a habitual substitution for buying candy from the gas station.
October 26, 2023
⚠️ Content Warning: Weight Loss. Personal. I don’t need your advice, thanks.
October 25, 2023
It’s just regular markdown but you use custom elements.
October 20, 2023
🎉 Last week I released <fit-vids> a wrapper web component to make your <iframe> video embeds a little bit more responsive, just like the old jQuery FitVids. It works like this now:
October 10, 2023
I 🩵 Feedbin and there’s a lot of features I can’t shut up about. Like reading RSS feeds on a lazy Sunday. Or the feed of likes feature myself and a handful of others use to run a small clandestine social sharing network over RSS. Or how I funnel email...
October 02, 2023
With Luro, I’ve found myself in the accessibility tooling space. I’m bullish on the need for automated accessibility testing to help designers and developers do a minimum viable good job, establish a baseline experience, and diagnose problems before they are giant problems. Even though automated tests cover 20-30% of WCAG...
September 29, 2023
I love having web browsers read blog posts to me. Through years of training with podcast, my audio processing skills are much better than my reading skills. I use it like a piece of Assistive Technology to keep my overactive brain from getting distracted mid-post. But I could never get...
September 19, 2023
September 15, 2023
September 11, 2023
As we’re approaching a pretty big milestone for Luro, I’ve been thinking a lot about all the effort that’s gone into the product. Not just the effort from members on the team, but also from the people beta testing our app. A trickle here, a flood there, I squeal with...
August 20, 2023
A lot of people on social media are talking about chips and as a professional who has a dual masters in both potato and corn chips, I thought I’d chime in with some facts about chips.
August 19, 2023
I flew on a plane from my land locked metropolis to the beach in a different state. After a few taps on my phone, I am transfigured into an expert on local marine life and tide cycles. A work trip to a city I’ve never been to? Tip-tap, I have...
August 18, 2023
August 17, 2023
August 16, 2023
In a recent post I answered a general question about Web Components and their lack of widespread adoption. I’m back with what is probably the most frequently asked question about Web Components:
August 15, 2023
August 14, 2023
August 13, 2023
Cicadas electrifying the treetops, the hot air hotter, crispy grasses under sandaled feet, asphalt sizzling to the touch. Children ebb and flow from camps, playdates, sleepovers, long days, missed bed times, and the familiar feeling of parental shame over too much screentime. School starts tomorrow, back to the top of...
July 31, 2023
All the roads in Austin are awful. It destroys my faith in civil engineering a bit. There’s a couple spots (southbound Burnet near North Loop) where you can catch air on a storm drain if you’re going the speed limit. The extreme Texas heat determines a lot of the road...
July 28, 2023
Rem recently asked:
July 27, 2023
I have nearly 2,000 unreads in my RSS reader since the last time I zeroed it out. That’s a lot and sometimes I get overwhelmed. On the positive side, nearly ~1,500 of those posts are from ~30 personal blogs I follow. That makes me happy that friends are posting on...
July 21, 2023
After five+ years of negotiation with my wife, I got the gift of a wonderful dad-ass recliner for my 43rd birthday. It’s petite and looks like a regular leather dad chair before it’s glorious transformation into a relaxation station. Per tradition, kids aren’t allowed to use dad’s recliner; it’s the...
July 21, 2023
I have a brief window of opportunity where my brain is allowing me to change my default drink of choice. It could be my taste buds evolving, some secret recipe update, or the news that the WHO is saying aspartame as “possibly carcinogenic”… but for whatever reason Diet Coke doesn’t...
June 12, 2023
Our family reached the end of what I call “The Luge”. At the beginning of every school semester my family and I hike to the top of the metaphorical mountain, buckle ourselves into a bobsled, and yeet ourselves downhill on a wild and uncontrolled ride.
May 31, 2023
May 26, 2023
May 25, 2023
The other day, Josh “Triple-Threat” Collinsworth challenged me in the ShopTalkShow D-d-d-discord on why I always caveat Svelte with “if you’re comfortable with the compiler” (which I said in Ep537):
May 25, 2023
There’s a lot of “same-ness” across design systems. Yesenia Perez-Cruz said it well:
May 25, 2023
The shorthand for embedding an image in Markdown is the following:
May 22, 2023
May 18, 2023
Spurred by last week’s ShopTalk I rolled out View Transitions here on my static Jekyll site. I hadn’t realized View Transitions for multi-page apps (MPAs) and static sites are ready for testing behind a flag in Chrome 113+. View Transitions for MPAs are a feature that’s high on my CSS...
May 10, 2023
Robb Owen writes on the state of front-end development…
May 08, 2023
April 28, 2023
One of my favorite ideas for Twitter was by Oliver Reichenstein in a post called “Make Bots Identifiable”. Oliver makes the case that apps should notify users if the author of the post is a feed, a bot, or an actual human and the UI of the application should reflect...
April 20, 2023
It’s been two months since my last vibe check. I needed a break. My last Jan/Feb vibe check was so bad I forgot to include the part where my wife had COVID for a week. Anyways, she’s fine now and went to the hospital for an entirely different reason.
April 10, 2023
April 08, 2023
Your kennel name was Lyla. Your previous owner called you Kate. We called you Rudy, Rudo, Rudo Prosciutto, Dodo, Dody, Rude dog, Rudiosis, Rudiosis Montosis, Rudy girl, Girly, and Sweet girl. Didn’t matter what we called you, you came. You were the sweetest dog we could have ever imagined.
March 15, 2023
I’ve been thinking a lot about limitations. Nearly all the rabbit holes I travel down end up with the same theme: “Limitations exist and we need to understand them and work within them”. This of course that got me thinking about the limitations we do and don’t put around building...
March 01, 2023
My son Otis wants me to help him make a video game. When he says “we should make a game”, he means “me” because despite a lot encouragement from his parents he hasn’t shown interest in coding classes. I also have a lot going on with the whole “starting a...
February 20, 2023
My wife and I did a poor job sharing Christmas wishlists with each other this year. It dawned on us how our hobbies (hers tennis, mine gunpla) are so specialized we either A) have the stuff we need or B) our needs are so specific or subjective that even gifting...
February 20, 2023
I had a free night on the calendar, so I tumbled out of my office with a stack of necessary supplies: a laptop in case I wanted to blog (or work more), my iPad in case I wanted to watch YouTubes, a gunpla set and all my tools in case...
February 15, 2023
I frequently find myself in a cycle where I’m switching between phases of “Feature Work” and “Maintenance Work”. Sometimes the cycle is morning-to-afternoon, sometimes weekstart-to-weekend, sometimes week-to-week, sometimes month-to-month. I don’t think this is unique so much as I have noticed that these two different phases require different mindsets —an...
February 12, 2023
One day my friend Bryan told me to come look at something on his computer. I respected Bryan, he was a bit older, and his opinions always weighed heavily on me. This seemed urgent, so I shuffled in his office as quick as I could.
February 11, 2023
February 11, 2023
An unusually warm Texas January; 70ºF days, cool nights, my son had baseball try-outs, then…
February 02, 2023
This post is part of a series:
January 30, 2023
Last year I got into Gunpla, a hobby where you build little plastic model anime robots. What I like most about the hobby is that the models are “press-fit”, meaning you can build the entire model by pressing the parts together with your fingers. No gluing, no painting, just fingers....
January 29, 2023
We are creating some How-To Videos for Luro. Exciting to be at that point in product development, but it would be nice if our videos had captions from day one to set a precedent. We could pay to have them all transcribed, or pay for some automated caption service, or...
January 27, 2023
Friday evening at 5pm on my way out of work I was about to push a feature fix up to add some encryption and decryption using crypto-js. The API looks like this:
January 24, 2023
2022 was a massive year for CSS. We got CSS Layers, more subgrid support, the impossible :has() selector, and WE GOT CONTAINER QUERIES! 🎉 Thank you to everyone who worked on those. A lot of the success for CSS this past year was due to an incredible cross-browser effort called...
January 20, 2023
I sometimes think about what it would take to start a successful JS framework project in the year 2023…
January 19, 2023
In my last post I dug around and found a crawl error in Bing Webmaster Tools…
January 18, 2023
I wrote about my DuckDuckGo (and Bing) shadow ban in a previous post. It made the rounds, so in the interest of transparency (and so I remember for next time this happens), here’s steps I’ve taken to fix this, what I know so far, and what I know…
January 14, 2023
It came to my attention that my site does not appear on DuckDuckGo search results. Even when searching for “daverupert.com” directly. After some digging, DuckDuckGo used to get their site index from Yandex, but now gets their site index from Bing and sure enough… I didn’t appear on Bing either....
January 05, 2023
January 02, 2023
I’ve written and rewritten this five times and decided to go with a brief, brutal, bulleted list of a December I don’t want to experience again.
December 31, 2022
Another year has come and gone. I can’t believe it. I think I’ll look back on 2022 as a year of milestones. It’s been a year of new jobs, new challenges, new products, and new hobbies. This is my second year piecing my year together from my monthly vibechecks. I...
December 25, 2022
December 12, 2022
It was always “Oh, you’re only at risk of automation if your job has a high degree of repetition, creative jobs are less at risk” but it feels like over the course of the past year Copilot, Dall-e, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and ChatGPT have decided upend that assumption. Writing, code,...
December 05, 2022
This, the 23rd retelling…
November 30, 2022
November 30, 2022
November 29, 2022
November 27, 2022
One of our family pandemic purchases was an electronic piano, a Yamaha P-121. My son was showing interest in music and we thought we’d be good parents and nurture that. His interest waned fast (read: in minutes), but I still play it! I grew up with a piano in the...
November 22, 2022
November 18, 2022
In recent weeks, a handful of people asked me what’s been happening in Web Components Land. Well, as President of Web Components, I have good news and the state of Web Components is pretty strong right now.
November 06, 2022
Spooky season has come and gone. We’ve put away our trademark giant inflatable Beetlejuice sandworm. Halloween in our neighborhood is a great time. Almost everyone pitches in to make it special for the hundreds of kids that take to our streets. A genuine piece of Americana.
October 29, 2022
October 20, 2022
It’s been some years since Tab Atkins-Bittner first proposed Cascading Attribute Sheets. I had a situation come up which made me think about them again and I thought I’d share.
October 19, 2022
October 09, 2022
A break in the Texas heat, Fall is in the air, and baseball is back on the menu. Neighbors having small conversations on the walks to-and-from the elementary school and kids putting on lemonade stand fundraisers for their friends. Humming birds saunter by my window each day. Texas comes alive...
September 24, 2022
I was using the Crunchyroll app on my iPad this weekend and noticed my level of frustration rising because the most annoying feature of the Crunchyroll iPad app is that while using it, I can do nothing else. The developers of the application didn’t add Picture in Picture or background...
September 23, 2022
This month I finished Michael E. Mann’s The New Climate War, a treatise on where we’re at with climate change. After my post on climate change a handful of people mentioned it and the book does a fantastic job at opening your eyes to the deflection tactics and information warfare...
September 22, 2022
Last year I read the book 101 Things I learned in Architecture School. It’s a good book. Good enough, I thought I’d share 26 Things I learned from “101 Things I Learned in Architecture School”. Meta. A lot of this will, of course, be applied to web design.
September 21, 2022
One of my favorite #oldgold resources is Shmuplations; they scour old video game magazines and translate them to English. I love it so much I support the work on Patreon. Cruising through the archives, I found a translation of a 1989 issue of BEEP magazine which features one of my...
September 20, 2022
I came across a Circuit Breaker Podcast episode called Understanding Prototyping to Learn. This episode is a MUST LISTEN! Bob Moesta and Greg Engle come from a hardware/manufacturing product development background but it all applies to prototyping on the web. Bob and Greg give some much needed language to the...
September 19, 2022
September 19, 2022
A healthy but aging bearded man in a light vest walks the streets of the capitol city, weaving in and out of streets and light traffic, making his way to the local farmer’s market. It’s a typical sunny morning but the desert air is still cool from the previous night....
September 10, 2022
August brought about some pretty sweeping changes. Kids are going back to school and I’ve found myself stepping back from some commitments.
August 26, 2022
When I first heard Nicole Sullivan talk about OOCSS, I thought “Oooh, smart.” When I read Jonathan Snook’s riff on that idea in SMACSS I thought “Oooh, smart.” When I heard Harry Roberts say “never use IDs in your CSS files” I said “Oooh, smart.”
August 17, 2022
The responsibilities of the front-end web are ever increasing.
August 15, 2022
August 04, 2022
July 2022 was a bit of a country music song. A friend’s brother passed away while she was visiting, nearly everyone we know got COVID, took my broken guitar to get fixed by the guy that fixes Willie’s guitar, got a flat tire on the family car, the oil change...
July 29, 2022
I’m not dying, but before I do I want to share with you — future generations of rockers — what I know about putting on a live music rock show.
July 28, 2022
At the beginning of the pandemic, Joe McCann wrote a speculative future piece called The New, New World Order (use a private tab if Medium paywalls you). Predicting the future or forecasting trends is never exact work, but Joe made some thought-provoking claims even if everything doesn’t pan out as...
July 27, 2022
This summer marks the summer my kids got online. I gave them “the talk” and set down some ground rules.
July 26, 2022
July 25, 2022
July 24, 2022
This summer has been hot. Not the hottest summer I’ve had in Texas but hot enough. More worryingly, it’s another summer in what looks like a trend of increasingly hot summers due to unstoppable climate change. It’s hot enough that the grass is dying in places that don’t have shade....
July 05, 2022
As Q2 FY22 wraps up, it’s a good time to reflect on all that’s happened.
June 29, 2022
E = ( p 2 c 2 ) + ( m 0 c 2 ) 2
June 22, 2022
June 17, 2022
In 1995, I got my first PC with Windows 95 and my first web browser, unbeknownst to me at the time, was Internet Explorer 1.0. I dialed my computer into AOL checked my mail, checked my favorite chat rooms, but I soon learned the Internet I wanted existed outside the...
June 05, 2022
May is over already which means the kids are now out of school, summer has begun, and work is ramping up at Luro. Here is the retelling of vibes…
May 27, 2022
In Austin we have three types of trash: trash, recycling, and compost. And then if I’m honest there’s a fourth and fifth variety: e-waste and a bag of old clothes and toys to donate. The big three live outside in the side yard and those last two live in piles...
May 09, 2022
One principle I’ve come to embrace is that the answer is rarely ever a spectrum. At first glance, a single-axis spectrum might make perfect sense, a reduction of the problem, a right and a left, a binary dichotomy but with a grey area in the middle. But as I grow...
May 04, 2022
Long time readers of the blog will know I’m a fan of esoteric content delivery protocols. While compulsively checking for updates on my Playdate (a small, yellow, Gameboy-like device with a crank) and I came across this tweet:
May 03, 2022
April was a busy month of new happenings and finishing projects. I did a new workshop, we got a new lawn, my kids are learning new skills, my wife got a new (short term) job, new developments at my new company, a new blog design, and to cap it all...
April 28, 2022
April 26, 2022
I got some landscaping done this month and as a reward the YouTube algorithm brought me a new genre of video called “Tall Grass”. These are the lawns with shoulder high grass, filled with mice and snakes, endlessly consuming buildings, fences, and concrete. It’s complete and utter ASMR for me....
April 25, 2022
Howdy! If you frequent this website often, you’ll notice some changes. This weekend I started on my planned redesign, but as I started nudging my About section, I found myself in a fight with my typography. After some hemming and hawing, I made the drastic decision to nuke my stylesheets...
April 22, 2022
In February, I got nerd-sniped by a mention on Twitter about a productivity system called PARA. PARA is a way to organize your digital life in to separate buckets: Projects, Areas, Resources, and Archives.
April 21, 2022
Providing visibility into your work is one of the most underrated developer soft skills. Coworkers are often too busy to keep track of what’s going on with engineering work, even if it’s their job to know what’s going on with engineering work. It’s generally not out of malice or lack...
April 14, 2022
This week I finished my Frontend Masters Web Components Course. To market it celebrate that accomplishment, I wanted to share ~7 tips and tricks I’ve learned preparing my course or I feel aren’t super obvious about Web Components.
April 04, 2022
One day I came across this video about Muharrem, a deaf man, and how his whole neighborhood conspired against him for a surprise.
April 02, 2022
March came and gone. I chased fitness. We went on Spring Break. Growing a business. Baseball games. Failed on blogging. Here is a retelling of the vibes.
March 31, 2022
March 08, 2022
March 08, 2022
February was a month that felt like ten months; cold, hot, beautiful, windy, busy, stressful, and globally catastrophic. But beyond that last part, it’s been a month of growth, reorganizing, and learning about stress.
March 02, 2022
Here’s something I’ve been mulling around. Often in programming you hit a situation where you have to choose two paths:
March 01, 2022
I know a bit about Japanese folk music (民謡), but Pete Seeger opened my eyes to and old song called “Genbaku O Yurusumaji (Forgive us the atom bomb)”, an anti-nuclear Japanese dirge.
February 27, 2022
“The Accordion” (Τ’ ακορντεόν) is an old, popular Greek song written by Manos Loïzos (Μάνος Λοΐζος) in 1967 while Greece was under far-right military junta control. It’s an unassuming anti-fascist song with it’s slow, folksy tone and fluttering accompaniment, but it’s final words offer a somber battle cry: “Fascism will...
February 26, 2022
Throughout history, across the world, humans have shared their culture with others through song. Songs from their faith, country, region, race, culture, subculture, futbol team, or even the local tavern; a shared connection. The following is one of the songs from my community, a lament, I’d like to share with...
February 11, 2022
Another week, more links. I’ve split this up a bit and added a section of cool (open source) projects.
February 08, 2022
I’m not planning on leaving the industry (yet), but before I go I’d like to offer up what I know when it comes to complaining about web browsers.
February 04, 2022
Inspired by Kottke’s Quick Links, Jeremy Keith’s Links, and my desire to get off Twitter as the primary means of sharing interesting links, I’m trying a new weekly-ish post format. I also have a process for collecting links in Notion that should make this easy to sustain.
February 03, 2022
Buckle up. This month turned out to be a big one. Writing it all out feels like an entire year went by, so I’ll start with the bad that happened at the beginning of the month and move towards the good.
January 31, 2022
Today Chris and I released the 500th episode of ShopTalk. That translates to 10 years of weekly episodes (taking off holiday breaks and that one time one of us had a kid). That’s a lot of showing up and doing the work. And when I say weekly, boy howdy, I...
January 29, 2022
I situated myself in the premium white leather chair, lowered the rollercoaster-like safety harness over my torso, and carefully weighed options on the console in front of me.
January 25, 2022
I was leaving a doctor’s appointment and as I rounded the corner to the waiting room I could hear the dulcet tones of a ukulele, but it sounded close.
January 10, 2022
In Open UI there’s been some discussion about what default ARIA role the proposed <popupdialog> element should have, if any…
December 31, 2021
How do you quantify a whole year? I’ve attempted it before and this one is different because I didn’t set out to achieve anything. The mantra for the year was “No goals, only vibes” and while that’s non-commital, I like to think I operated in this spirit. I wandered aimlessly...
December 31, 2021
Phew. December. The most hectic month. End of year celebrations, wrapping up work projects, wrapping up presents, another round of last minute shopping, credit card charges ballooning, decorating projects, transcontinental road-trips, shipping logistics, finding a dog sitter, dog sitter falling through, what about the sick cat, where’s the iPad charger,...
December 21, 2021
Reading the first page of a new book Reading 10% of the way through the book. Reading 25% of the way through the book. Reading 50% of the way through the book. Finishing the book.
December 16, 2021
You see it all the time; a repo with a thousand issues, a hundred open PRs, a thousand forks. v2.0 is on the way but there’s no clear roadmap or communication. Those of us who have worked on open source can spot it, burnout is afoot. The project got bigger...
December 01, 2021
On the Monday before Thanksgiving, I had surgery on my nose for my skin cancer. I’m glad to report that surgery went fine and I’m cancer free (for now). The procedure involved cutting away 1mm layers of flesh at the tumor site and looking at each layer under a microscope,...
November 30, 2021
November 05, 2021
Gamers aren’t known for being the most intelligent people around…
November 04, 2021
Frustrated by the emotional weight of hundreds of thoughts lingering in my blogging kanban, I chucked a good bit of time into a week of high-powered blogging and achieved great results. Garnered eight blog posts this month and a one week streak. One of the best months of blogging I’ve...
October 26, 2021
My kids hold beef. And they hold it forever. If one kid in the neighborhood did something they’ll talk about it every other day like it happened yesterday. The friend’s neighbor who is slightly younger but was annoying once? Annoying forever! Even if you’ve played with him since! That new...
October 22, 2021
I blogged about my Blogging Kanban. This post is about the multi-step process that happens after I deem posts finished and ready to move to the actual blog. It consists of three main tools… Write Good Linter, Microsoft Edge’s Read Aloud feature, and Squoosh. It’s about 30-50 minutes worth of...
October 21, 2021
October 20, 2021
For the past year I’ve been on a team of folks inside Open UI dedicated to figuring out how get a native, accessible <tabs> element into HTML. We’re a team of people with varying backgrounds; spec authors, browser vendors, implementors, and normie practitioners like myself. Open UI is a community...
October 19, 2021
On a recent ShopTalk Video about Breakin’ up CSS Custom Properties where we discussed the different degrees of CSS Custom Property usage, I mouthblogged an idea about using CSS Houdini to help make this easier. It stuck with me so I took it out of the mouthblogosphere and made it...
October 18, 2021
October 16, 2021
In precoronatimes I attended an end of year BBQ luncheon put on by my financial advisor at Edward Jones. I’m financially engaged with Kevin and I like Texas BBQ, so I thought I’d go. I also thought my former neighbor Cleo was going to be there and wouldn’t it be...
October 15, 2021
This week I came across an article titled “Why don’t video games take sex seriously?”… so naturally I clicked it. I was pleased to find the article featured Robert Yang, one of my favorite game designers that I follow on Twitter. I like Yang because our lives are so entirely...
October 07, 2021
Out on the lake on our neighbor's boat.
September 24, 2021
September 23, 2021
In my weird role as hybrid contractor/consultant I get asked, “Is it possible to do {{some_feature}}?” and what goes through my head is a bastardized version of the Apostle Paul saying:
September 23, 2021
Six years ago, I started a good blogging habit of writing down any idea I had as a draft post. This was a good practice because the idea was now out of my head and I wouldn’t stay up at night thinking about it. Over time that grew to about...
September 01, 2021
This last month lasted ten months. It started with some travel to Houston (Pasadena, actually) to visit my mom. I did some solo-parenting as my wife had some planned end-of-summer travel and an unplanned funeral. In these Delta times travel brings along some low-grade stress, as our doctor friends text...
August 27, 2021
August 18, 2021
I caught whiff of some #hotdrama the other day surrounding native CSS module scripts, a new addition to JavaScript — yes, native CSS-in-JS.
August 01, 2021
I got back from vacation and abruptly resumed the grind. The project I’m working is approaching its launch date, but we hit a small issue where pre-generating 12,000+ routes was causing long build-times. Jamstack tooling has some issues to iron out, I think. The issue is the delta between what...
July 27, 2021
The other day Jen Simmons solicited some open feedback about WebKit, asking what they might “need to add / change / fix / invent to help you?” First of all — brave. Brave of Jen to open her timeline up for everyone to vomit their opinions and snark. I, too,...
July 23, 2021
One thing my wife and I are coming to terms with is that memories —or experiences— cost money. Typically this is in context of making memories or providing experiences for our children, but it could about our relationship or even about to chasing week-to-week personal interests.
July 22, 2021
A while ago Sarah Drasner wrote a great post on her view of Developer Experience (DX) at Netlify and how that manifests in roles like Developer Advocate. I felt prompted to write a bit about how I, a consumer of DX, experience DX and what good DX is to me....
July 21, 2021
petite-vue is a new cut of the Vue project specifically built with progressive enhancement in mind. At 5kb, petite-vue is a lightweight Alpine (or jQuery) alternative that can be “sprinkled” over your project requiring no extra bundling steps or build processes. Add a <script> tag, set a v-scope, and you’re...
July 07, 2021
This vibe check should be short. June was another month of hard work and even harder discussions. The month ended with my family and I leaving town for a much-needed vacation on a roadtrip through Colorado and Arizona. First we headed to Snowmass, Colorado for a family reunion, then southwest...
June 22, 2021
June 21, 2021
Whenever my family attempts a major buying decision (TV, couch, computer, remodel, shed, dining table, etc) we’re inevitably confronted with a choice between two options:
June 03, 2021
June 01, 2021
Two vibes dominated this month: Work and Refinancing my house (which is more work). Work continues to be busy, a constant refrain, but this past half-year has been some of the hardest I’ve worked in my whole life. The tl;dr is that it’s hard to build a startup and do...
May 06, 2021
I turned 41 at the end of April. Another pandemic birthday in the books. This one was special thanks to grandparents coming to visit which allowed my wife and I to escape to a hotel for a night. A small relief to be off parenting duty for ~18 hours after...
April 27, 2021
April 05, 2021
Three packages of arrived to my door last month and I realized they all have something in common, they’re all visualizations of data and algorithms, so I thought I’d share.
April 02, 2021
I love that data can change my perspective or illuminate a topic. In the last couple weeks some new data has dropped about a couple topics I care a bit about: Accessibility and Mobile Web Performance. These are industry-impacting studies and I hope you’ll read and consider the findings yourself,...
April 01, 2021
Hands down this was one of the busiest months of my career. Aggressive turnaround on launching a client’s new product and checkout experience, got close-to-launch on one of the most impactful sites of my career, wrapped up a two-year design systems project, landed a months-long mega-refactor on an app we’re...
March 03, 2021
February, whew. My February was dominated by two significant and polar opposite emotional events: my new backyard office shed is finally finished and the Great Texas Freeze of 2021. To be honest, the massive pendulum swing between those two vibes has nearly wiped out all other vibes.
March 03, 2021
There’s a website where you can use cryptocurrency to buy an NFT for a planet and there’s something horrifyingly poetic about being able to buy an unreachable planet while simultaneously hastening the demise of our own.
February 10, 2021
February 06, 2021
One of the best books I read last year was Creative Selection by Ken Kocienda. It gives a behind the scenes look at the prototyping process that created the native Mac browser Safari and the innovative iPhone keyboard. Incredibly inspiring and solidified some of my thinking that maybe the current...
February 05, 2021
Dearest Martha,
February 01, 2021
Since my new years resolution this year is “No goals, only vibes” I thought it might be fun to do monthly-ish vibe checks to see what I’ve been pursuing. How fun will it be to look at all the little paths I took throughout the year. Let’s get started.
January 31, 2021
The YouTube algorithm has been very good to me lately and led me to a channel for the 竹中大工道具館 (Takenaka Carpentry Tools Museum) which is based in my old home prefecture’s capitol, Kobe. Japanese carpentry is always a fun rabbit hole to dive down and for me it often borders...
January 12, 2021
Dan Mall tagged me, so I’m doing the thing. I’m very much a product of daily rhythms so I’m happy to share.
January 06, 2021
Your personal site is your playground. Overhearing some recent chatter about putting the personality back in personal websites, I thought it might be helpful to share how I’ve been approaching art direction on my blog. I have a bit of experience here, in fact years ago during the heyday of...
January 04, 2021
December 26, 2020
What a fucking year, huh? A global pandemic, social unrest sparked by the continued murders of black men and women at the hands of those sworn to protect, and another heated election cycle between a qualified candidate and a petulant narcissist. I feel like I aged a thousand years while...
December 09, 2020
I am writing this post from my new 13” Macbook Pro with an Apple M1 Chip. If you’ve been following the five year long #davegoeswindows saga, then this might come as a sudden surprise. I will be honest, it comes as a surprise to me too. The decision was a...
November 28, 2020
Polygon recently did a write up on the history of Street Fighter Alpha, a small fork in the Street Fighter Universe that impacted and informed later games in the series. I’m consistently inspired by game development stories and this article is ripe with interviews from the game’s planners and developers...
November 27, 2020
Tis’ the season for spinning up new side projects and I feel compelled to free up some brain space. Here’s some prototypes of some ideas that have been lingering in my head for upwards of 7 years. These prototypes were tinkered on over various nights and weekends when I had...
November 09, 2020
Some time ago, I wrote about the need for simple HTML5 form validation in ~6 lines of JavaScript. Well, I’m back on my bullshit, this time in a Vue 2/Nuxt application. I finally hit the point on this project where I needed some form validation. Rather than jumping headlong into...
November 02, 2020
Some time back, I was working on a project where it felt like the timebomb of technical debt was exploding in our faces. We couldn’t refactor the whoositz because of the whatsitz and when we asked about the whatsitz no one knew about the whatsitz and how it exactly worked...
November 01, 2020
As we hurtle towards an election my mind is consumed with thoughts of the historic division in America. As luck would have it, two related videos about conspiracy theories appeared on Kottke’s website that intensely appealed to my interests. It’s frightening to look at fringe culture, but I think it’s...
October 19, 2020
Last week I got the opportunity to work on a side project that has no plans to include IE11 in the support matrix and let me tell you; what a wonderful feeling! This opens the door to a lot of fun CSS, namely Custom Properties. Adding a proper “Dark Theme”...
October 18, 2020
One day this summer, my friend Richard and I masked up and headed to the Amazon Books store here in Austin. He had picked up a reading habit and was looking for a Kindle and needed some consulting on the purchase. I also hadn’t left the square mile around my...
October 15, 2020
I made a mistake. Three weeks ago I settled into a nice blogging flow and had a decent stream of published posts. It felt so good to get ideas out of my head. Sitting on a handful of nearly done posts, I was putting the finishing touches on one of...
September 16, 2020
Frozen II is a masterpiece to me. Whereas the original Frozen was very much a princess movie (with a twist), Frozen II is a rock opera adventure. The power ballad anthem “Into the Unknown” sets the scene for adventure and the haunting refrain perfectly instills the mystery ahead. The overarching...
September 15, 2020
September 14, 2020
The other day I was in a meeting discussing alt text and while I’m fairly savvy about Accessibility, I finally made the simplest of all connections: alt text is like a paragraph. Word pictures. Basic I know, but it helps me contextualize how to write good alt text as well...
September 11, 2020
Last month I worked on a prototype of three simple pieces of technology: Eleventy + Tailwind + Netlify CMS. I love a good mashup. Those are fairly distinct technologies with well defined roles, so I didn’t anticipate too many hiccups. I was more on the lookout for limitations or deal...
September 09, 2020
This post is an experiment. I was thinking about how I tend to avoid reading a lot of longform content on my phone. I tend to push off a lot of news (NYT), some RSS, and tech articles. Longreads feel longer when scrolling one paragraph at a time interrupted by...
September 09, 2020
There’s an old Freakonomics podcast about the cost of boredom that I think about and re-listen to regularly. It starts with a fascinating study performed around the First World War. Britain created the Industrial Fatigue Research Board which sought to measure the productivity of fatigued factory workers and whether or...
September 04, 2020
In May 2019 I attended a talk by Mike Taylor who works on webcompat at Mozilla. Mike told the sordid story of window.event, a non-standard IE invention that was replicated in Konqueror, which showed up in Webkit, which stuck around in Blink, and was now Mike’s problem in Firefox. It...
August 14, 2020
This week has left me in an unexpected posture of regrouping and re-figuring out some of my life goals and short term objectives as some plans have completed and some have fallen apart. This year has already had a lot of priority shifting and malaise due to the virus and...
July 29, 2020
This is Part II of a two-part series on dual-screen and web design. For more context, you may want to read part Part I first.
July 27, 2020
In late 2019, Microsoft announced two new foldable devices: the smaller Android-based Surface Duo and the larger Win10-based Surface Neo. PC fanboy that I am, I got excited about these new devices and my brain jumped to thinking about how this new class of foldable devices (with a split down...
July 09, 2020
That’s not how airplane maintenance works.
June 25, 2020
This little gem came across my Twitter feed. In April of 1996, Ross Callon messaged the IETF’s Networking Working Group with an RFC that was less a request and more of a list of anecdotes that “apply to networking in general, and are not limited to TCP/IP, the Internet, or...
June 17, 2020
June 14, 2020
June 10, 2020
Reading Maeda’s Laws of Simplicity in my twenties had a profound impact on me. Law 1 (Reduce) has been beneficial over the years as I think about UIs and experiences. Learning how to reduce complexity is probably the biggest skill you can learn in your career in UX, accessibility, performance,...
May 18, 2020
I’m approaching a Version 1.0 milestone on a Design System project and it has me thinking broadly about my 8+ years of experience with Design Systems. Unrelated to that project specifically, I came up with an abstracted list of five key milestones I feel exist in the life of a...
May 04, 2020
Soon the Windows May 2020 Update (20H1) will be released upon the world. This update will contain some nice UI improvements, but most relevant to me it allows Web Developers on Windows to upgrade to WSL 2. This is a significant milestone in the #davegoeswindows saga and it’s worth posting...
April 28, 2020
Reading and exploring the Web is losing a little bit of its luster. In a single day, I encounter nearly a dozen paywalls and app/sign-in walls. Paywalls want you to pay a cover-fee for content. App/sign-in walls are just paywalls where you pay with your privacy.
April 15, 2020
My friend Mina has a mood ring that I am enameled enamored with… technically, it’s not a ring, it’s a pin that she got off of Kickstarter. A simple circular pin with five emotions (Tired, Functioning, All Good, Apathetic, Happy!) and a spinning arrow labelled “Today”.
April 13, 2020
I first met Christopher in 2010 after giving my first talk at a local meetup on (Webkit-only) CSS Animations. A tall, soft-spoken man wearing Chuck Taylors approached me afterwards to say he enjoyed my talk and we instantly bonded over Doctor Who. I was smitten by his excitement and energy...
March 20, 2020
A while back I was able to shave off ~33 seconds from my page load time by fixing how I load fonts.
March 11, 2020
I asked on Twitter about naming database tables. It goes without saying that Twitter polls are extremely scientific and a trustworthy tool for decision making.
February 28, 2020
I’ve always abided in the idea that “HTML is accessible by default and then we come along and mess it up.” In a lot places this is very true and by just using a suitable HTML element instead of a generic div or span we can have a big Accessibility...
February 24, 2020
A couple Windows issues have been slowly gnawing at me over the last half year and, if I’m quite honest, have made me consider ending my ~5 year #davegoeswindows experiment and switching back to Mac (now that the Macbook Pros have good keyboards again). But I’m happy to report that...
January 31, 2020
In 2013 I spoke about Responsive Deliverables at SXSW. While it felt in-tune to the emerging web design trends and my personal experiences, I didn’t really anticipate that I’d personally spend the nearly every day of the next 7 years working on component-based design systems. The work has been a...
January 08, 2020
Every year or so a friend or family member will reach out to me and ask about starting a podcast. I’ve started a few podcasts and have a modicum of experience in this domain, so here’s my standard advice…
January 06, 2020
Anonymous writes in…
December 30, 2019
As 2019 comes to a close, I’ve taken some time to reflect. I’m aware of this self-brag blogging cliché, but I’ve done this before and find some value from it. So without further ado, here’s just some of the highs-and-lows from this year.
December 16, 2019
December 13, 2019
I learned something this week and I thought I would share it. Earlier this year I read Adrian Roselli’s post “Details/Summary are not [insert control here]”. In this post Adrian says <details> is not a tab set, it’s not a subnavigation menu, not a dialog, not an accordion, not a...
November 22, 2019
This past summer I came across a tweet from Kitze about starting a project with a limitation of five dependencies:
November 21, 2019
November 02, 2019
This week I wrapped up a three year stint on a client project. The client services business can be emotional sometimes. Not just the flash mobs of new relationships and entanglements you enter into, but the emotional investment in various projects as well. I often feel that more than the...
October 23, 2019
<spoilers>
October 03, 2019
October 01, 2019
September 06, 2019
As I write this I’m back in the home office. It’s been an adjustment, but so far so good. “Crash-ins” from the kids are obviously more common now but so far they’ve been tolerable. Compared to the beginning of the summer when I was last here, the kids are much...
August 26, 2019
Death Stranding is an upcoming cinematic game from famed game director Hideo Kojima, designer of the renowned Metal Gear series. The trailers for Death Stranding have been surreal, dark, cryptic, and heavily feature a naked Norman Reedus and a gloved Guillermo del Toro. Weird, but intriguing.
August 24, 2019
Over the last month so, I’ve been working with Dr. Julian Jones to port some design system projects from Jekyll over to Eleventy, the feral possum of static site generators. Why undertake a whole replatforming initiative? Well, there were two primary issues we were trying to solve:
August 16, 2019
July 17, 2019
Over the past six months I’ve had the opportunity to work on a simple PWA using Vue. To speed up the learning curve we brought in Eduardo San Martin Morote, a Vue core contributor, to help us on the project. If you ever get the chance to hire someone who...
June 30, 2019
My wife and I celebrated our 11th anniversary, we’re still in love. There was Father’s Day, I’m still a dad. Then last Tuesday I decided to ride my gravel bike to work.
June 13, 2019
June 12, 2019
A couple months ago I was dumpster diving in the Twitter Explore tab and stumbled across a list of “Management book recommendations” from Alex MacCaw.
June 11, 2019
This has been a monumental month in the life of Dave Rupert LLC. For the first time in 12 years I’ve taken the plunge and rented a private office instead of working from home.
June 10, 2019
Over the last 11 days I travelled over 3500 miles with my family on two separate back-to-back trips. It has been great but I think we’re all exhausted and looking to stay home for awhile.
May 09, 2019
Last week I turned 39 and to be honest it was a bit of a downer. I know, I know, too sad. It could be run of the mill birthday depression, but I attribute it to the 5 hours of consecutive meetings I had that day. I couldn’t quite shake...
May 06, 2019
Mr. Rupert we’re calling to let you know you’re overdue on your homeowners insurance policy and if you do not make a payment by midnight tonight your policy will lapse.
April 17, 2019
In early March my wife and I ventured down to the southern tip of Baja, Mexico to a town called Todos Santos on our first kid-free excursion since… well.. since the kids arrived five and a half years ago. The Pacific coastline was remote enough you could look and see...
April 11, 2019
Big news! This site is no longer using Google Analytics and I’ve switched to a self-hosted version of brand new analytics product Fathom.
April 09, 2019
If you feel the need to write, write.
April 06, 2019
Humans are a gameable system. Exemplified by the fact that .99 pricing is more compelling than flat pricing, we tend focus on the left digits rather than the right. You don’t have to look far for anecdotes.
April 04, 2019
Because I’m a remote worker, voice chat apps are an issue near and dear to my heart. Having sat through a lifetime of technical difficulties, I can say without a doubt that the most important piece of UI in any voice chat app is the Mute Button.
March 22, 2019
February 25, 2019
This entire month has been a slog against servers. Whether its lower environment outages, issues with provisioning auto-scaling AWS instances behind a load balancer, or even INVALID_REQUEST after INVALID_REQUEST against OAuth API endpoints. It’s been a series of setbacks drawing out even the most trivial of tasks. I’m fatter and...
February 11, 2019
Inspired by Paul Robert Lloyd and Andy Bell, I’ve decided to ride the “Weeknotes” wave. Hope that’s okay. This is “#2” because at the end of last year I wrote a post called “RSS Digest No. 1” which is essentially the same concept of sharing somethings that I did and/or...
January 29, 2019
I’m working on a Single Page Application with some accessibility requirements on the horizon. However, the recent legal ruling against Domino’s requiring ADA conformance, some recent #hotdrama around a CSS-Tricks article, as well as a private conversation I had with an accessibility expert who mentioned SPAs were one of the...
January 08, 2019
It’s been almost 4 years since I pitched #davegoeswindows on Shop Talk. I’m a happy Windows user by most accounts and don’t really see myself switching back any time soon. But there are things on Mac that I miss! I feel as if I’ve finally reached the plateau of productivity...
January 07, 2019
I had a conundrum last summer on an Angular project. We got a bug report from an influential stakeholder and attached to the bug report was a screenshot of our beautiful website mangled in IE11. There was another similar bug filed for Edge 15.
December 26, 2018
This past year was a mix of successes and heartache. My family bought and sold a house, moved to a new area of Austin, we shed tears in doctors’ offices, our oldest learned to swim, our youngest jumped in a pool while no one was watching but thankfully my wife...
December 12, 2018
Reagan Ray just published an awesome digest post of things he’s recently found and enjoyed on the Internet. I love this style of post so much. It sends me down rabbit trails of enjoyment. This past weekend I cleared out some ~500 RSS items in my RSS reader. I thought...
December 07, 2018
The Web Development world has been rocked by some unexpected news: Edge is switching to Chromium. As an Edge user this is a somewhat personal change for me. And let it be known, I’m totally comfortable with the possibility that I’m the only Edge user you know on the Internet....
November 12, 2018
“Any jackass can knock down a barn, but it took a carpenter to build it.” — Sam Rayburn
November 05, 2018
November 02, 2018
I’ve been thinking about the needs of decisions (technical or design) to translate across the self, the team, and the organization. On any project I belong to each of those “bodies” simultaneously. Choices I make needs to cascade across each context. One such decision I’ve been mulling is the option...
October 24, 2018
October 15, 2018
I’m interested in the User Experience costs of third-party scripts. Every client I have averages ~30 third-party scripts but discussions about reducing them with stakeholders end in “What if we load them all async?” This is a good rebuttal because there are right and wrong ways to load third-party scripts,...
October 02, 2018
September 26, 2018
Estimating project costs is hard. Do a project based bid… uf, it’s prone to your own optimism bias and you end up over a barrel. Hourly? Great. Fair for both parties, but as time drags on mistrust can grow as cost directly relates to the speed of development. In either...
September 10, 2018
August 24, 2018
Summer is winding down and I find myself reflecting on change. In late March my family moved to a new house in a different part of Austin. We moved 13 miles for a bigger house and better schools, but it feels like we moved across country. It’s amazing how much...
August 06, 2018
I returned from a conference last week and began to feel the creeping pain of Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI) in my hands and wrists. I finally have enough data points to make the connection that conferences and client visits exacerbate my RSI. It’s now obvious that using my laptop and...
August 02, 2018
🚀 Announcing a new open source project called A11Y Nutrition Cards
July 24, 2018
I’ve developed a Twitch habit. I’ve even started streaming a bit and hosting some friends. It’s fun and I’ve even made it to the Affiliate level so that I can accept digital currency (“bits”) from chat as well as monthly paid subscriptions (“Ya heard about Twitch Prime, chat?”). I’m having...
July 19, 2018
After a recent talk on Accessibility, I was asked during the Q&A about what Assistive Technologies (AT) I test with while I’m developing. Such a good question! I hadn’t ever thought about what I actually test with and as I rambled on I thought it might help to write it...
July 18, 2018
Today I added 4 analytics/ad/tracking <script> tags to a page and the number of requests went from ~13 to 38. If there was one problem I wish all webfolk could gather together to demand a fix for, it’s this. The other is more high-level accessible controls.
July 11, 2018
July 06, 2018
July 04, 2018
June 08, 2018
Capturing...
June 05, 2018
Lately I’ve been smitten by the concept of “Telepresence”, the idea that technology can transport and make you feel like you’re present elsewhere. Over the past few months, I keep connecting dots and am realizing how much of my life is actually centered around this concept.
June 01, 2018
One oft-repeated phrase I hear in blog posts, talks, and podcasts is “React is just JavaScript.” I think this catchy truism is good marketing, but also false.
May 23, 2018
Brad Frost recently shared a post called “My Struggle to Learn React”. Inspired by that, I thought I’d share something I’m bad at: Testing Code.
April 25, 2018
This month I recently had the unfortunate pleasure of re-installing Windows on all my computers due to some botched Windows Insider updates. Yeah… ouch.
April 12, 2018
While researching another post, I came across Tesler’s Law named after former Xerox PARC employee, Larry Tesler. Tesler’s Law is an interesting concept that makes you evaluate who should bear the burden of needless complexity.
April 11, 2018
It is my life’s goal to have a anecdotal law named after me. That or a breakfast taco platter.
April 09, 2018
April 06, 2018
It’s “Fund Drive” season on almost all of my favorite podcasts. As a listener of NPR, it makes sense that podcasts would share the same listener supported business model. I listen to a lot of podcasts, so karma is nudging me saying I should support good content that I enjoy....
April 05, 2018
I’m currently in the process of rolling out yet another Card UI. Since Pinterest, the end-state of every list view with decent imagery is to become a Card UI. But thar be dragons! I’m here to share some of the pitfalls Paravel have encountered building Card UIs over the years....
April 04, 2018
April 02, 2018
Being such a new industry, web design job titles are endless and all of them feel completely made up. Job titles do hint at specialization, which is nice, but to me there are really only four jobs:
March 29, 2018
For a client project we tasked ourselves with building out one of those cool radial progress bars. In the past, we’ve used entire Canvas-based based charting libraries (156k/44k gzip), but that seemed like overkill. I looked at Airbnb’s Lottie project where you export After Effects animations as JSON. This is...
March 22, 2018
“I fear that machines are ahead of morals by some centuries and when morals catch up perhaps there’ll be no reason for any of it.” – Harry Truman
February 20, 2018
It was 5:06 am on a foggy morning when the autocab dropped me off at the job site. I remember the time because I got to see the cargo drone drop off the shipping container filled with the day’s supplies. Exactly the right amount of supplies. No more, no less....
February 01, 2018
While doing some art direction on a recent post, I felt like the main header feature needed just a smidge of …*gulp*… parallax. Before you cast judgement, parallax is a nice effect sometimes… sometimes.. very sometimes.
January 18, 2018
This past month has been a brutal succession of hidden hardware flaws being exposed. First, the revelation that iOS has indeed been throttling CPUs on older devices based on their claim to improve battery life. Second, the Meltdown/Spectre attack vectors threaten to slowdown CPUs ~20% in order to fix a...
January 10, 2018
When I think about all the books I’ll never read, the movies and TV shows I’ll never see, podcasts I’ll never hear, and the games I’ll never play; I get a bit overwhelmed. It sounds a bit mid-life crisis’y, but sometimes it feels like the world and news is moving...
January 09, 2018
I’m happy to announce the launch of my next podcast venture: ❬ASIDE❭ QUEST with my friend Danh Hoang. It’s a video games podcast for people who are too busy to play video games.
December 29, 2017
2017, what a year. A constant garbage fire. Despite all the bad stuff, I have a few things to celebrate…
December 12, 2017
Originally posted on May 16, 2014 over on Medium, the last time the FCC tried to destroy Net Neutrality. I regret to inform you that the FCC is back on its bullshit. Join the Battle for the Net
December 08, 2017
December 07, 2017
The best talk I think I ever saw was by Scott McCloud at InCtrl Orlando 2014. Scott, a comic artist and graphic novelist, spoke about the evolution of comics as an art form and a communication medium. The talk was not web-centric at all but the parallels between Comics and...
December 01, 2017
November 29, 2017
November 27, 2017
Somewhat embarrassingly, I picked up a YouTube-while-working habit in 2017. What I’ve learned is this, watching other people code makes all the difference in improving your development skills. Especially if you’re a lone developer or work from home with few chances to pair program.
November 22, 2017
November 17, 2017
I recently embarked on improving the client-side form validation for a client. There were about 400 lines of form validation code stuffed inside a 1000 line form_helper.js. I looked for lightweight form validation scripts but after some hemming and hawing I decided to try my hand (again) at native HTML5...
November 10, 2017
I’ve had a few similar conversations lately with colleagues I admire in the Web industry. They’ve all mentioned that they are a bit tired and burnt out. This happens, especially over time. But there is a trend. For most it comes down to the fact that the etherial World Wide...
November 02, 2017
Let me break this down for you.
November 01, 2017
The following is an accurate account of me listening to any song by The Police:
October 26, 2017
This is the story of picking the right JavaScript for-loop. On a client project Julian Jones and I casually wrote heaps of NodeList.prototype.forEach() for the DOM manipulation in our Pattern Library.
October 16, 2017
Welcome to the brand new Dave-Rupert-Dot-Com! It’s been about 5 years since I did any kind of redesign to my site and it feels good finally get this done. Allow me to give you a tour of some of the new features.
October 02, 2017
“A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.” – Frederik Pohl
September 23, 2017
September 05, 2017
As a Front-End developer nothing bothers me more than seeing an unexpected horizontal scrollbar on a website. While building out a checkout layout with CSS Grid I was surprised to find something mysterious was breaking the container. I thought Grid sort of auto-solved sizing.
August 11, 2017
August 10, 2017
It was early 2011 when I first read Sarah Mei’s “Gender is a Text Field” pull request. While I thought this post-structuralist idea was an interesting differentiator for the budding open source social network Diaspora, I wondered if it was overkill. Was skipping the gender field or lying about your...
August 07, 2017
August 04, 2017
I typically take a conservative approach to building websites, layering in modern functionality in order to reduce code and technical debt and extend my client’s investment further into the future. A recent project uses Grid with Flexbox fallbacks and minimal ES6 features that are all ran through Autoprefixer and Babel...
July 03, 2017
I’m building a pattern library in Jekyll. I like Jekyll for this because I can store all my reusable components in the _includes/ directory and use Jekyll’s {% include my-component.html %} tag to import components as needed. And those components can be seeded with ⚡REAL DATA⚡ from the client’s database...
June 06, 2017
The other day I met another dad at a kid’s birthday party at a zoo. After introductions we began the custom of figuring out what eachother do for work.
June 05, 2017
It’s been four years since I wrote about Responsive Deliverables. Since then I’ve been working steadily with companies to build out their own “tiny bootstraps”. I’ve been reflecting on this work and I thought I’d share some of the things I’ve learned.
May 09, 2017
The other day my son was telling his best friend, our 81 year old neighbor Cleo, about another boy at his school. This particular classmate has autism and from the perspective of my 3 year old son characteristics like limited communication or not sharing interests seem like misbehaving. So he...
March 24, 2017
March 21, 2017
I stirred up some discussions the other day with a Twitter poll about :
March 20, 2017
March 16, 2017
Lately I’ve been sharing some CSS Tricks I’ve stumbled in to while trying to solve some problems on client work. It’s been fun uncovering new little solutions.
March 09, 2017
Let’s say you’re making a blog post layout. Content is entered into a CMS inside a WYSIWYG editor field. You echo that content to the page. You pull it up on a mobile device and notice the paragraphs go edge-to-edge. Yikes, it’s a little uncomfortable. So you add some kind...
March 03, 2017
Web development moves fast. This post is old. A new step-by-step guide to setting up a Windows 10 web developer environment is now available.
February 22, 2017
January 27, 2017
In October my family took a trip to Disneyland. I couldn’t help but be infected by the magic of Disneyland that allows you to feel young at heart and compells you to wear mouse ears on your head. Walking mile after mile through the park it’s very clear this magic...
January 04, 2017
Part of my switch to the Bash on Ubuntu on Windows (can we call this “Winbuntu”?) means that I’ve been using apt on a regular basis. The Advanced Packaging Tool (apt) is a package manager for installing Linux packages, not too different from web tool package managers like bundler, gem,...
December 16, 2016
While waiting for the updated specs on the laptop I said I was going to buy in the #davegoeswindows finale, I put it together that I could build a custom PC “gaming rig” with VR capabilities and buy a VR headset for considerably less money than the laptop + core...
November 15, 2016
This summer I saw a video of a guy playing Pokémon Go crash his car into a police car.
November 11, 2016
There is a problem that I think every online community inevitably must face. One with potential to destroy the community from the inside; the Shitlord.
October 26, 2016
My good friend, colleague, D&D party member, and fellow dad, Lon Ingram and I got into a good discussion the other night about Native Apps vs. Mobile Web vs. Desktop Web. In part, it was sparked by Google’s decision to fork their search index into mobile and desktop. It’s a...
October 25, 2016
The Verge says “Windows Phone is Dead” every six weeks or so. Whenever a claim like that is made, I can’t help but think about it and how to begin to fix such a giant problem. How do you resurrect a mobile platform?
September 30, 2016
How do you design and build a new paradigm for gaming while simultaneously designing and building the hardware that will enable this paradigm? This is an interesting question! Thankfully the Shmuplations blog has dug up 1996 Japanese language strategy guide interviews with Shigeru Miyamoto and the developers who created Super...
September 29, 2016
September 28, 2016
“The Web Is Ruined and I Ruined It” by David Siegel is a remarkable piece in the history of Web Design. For those unfamiliar with David Siegal, he’s the Father of Web Design. He literally invented the spacer.gif technique for styling websites using tables. That hack earned him the (self-proclaimed)...
September 27, 2016
Having just switched back to Windows after 13 years on Mac, this bit of #oldgold from 2006 feels highly relevant. As a response to a Joel on Software post about UI design gone bad, Moishe Lettvin shares a behind the scenes look at how Windows Vista ended up with all...
September 26, 2016
It’s SXSW 2004, the heyday of the Web Standards movement, at a panel called “Accessibility for Everyone!” Jeffrey Veen appears on stage and leads with the following statement, “I don’t care about accessibility.” Wow. I imagine this went over like a lead balloon. A statement so apostate to the culture...
August 01, 2016
This job never came with a manual. If you’re like me, you got into the business of building websites writing bad teenage poetry or photoshopping crude posters for your band. Eventually, you learned the skills to put your creation on the Web and became addicted to the thrill of instant...
July 29, 2016
July 19, 2016
It’s been one year since I uprooted my dev environment and made the switch to Windows. I’m happy to share that after a year of ups and downs, I’ve made the decision… dramatic pause …to… more dramatic pausing …stick with Windows.
July 07, 2016
Lately I’ve been thinking about how the Web could benefit from a Standardized System of Measurements, especially in how we discuss performance.
June 21, 2016
Web development moves fast. This post is old. A new step-by-step guide to setting up a Windows 10 web developer environment is now available.
June 09, 2016
At the end of March, I was invited out as a part of the #davegoeswindows experiment to attend Build 2016, the annual Microsoft developer conference. Think WWDC or Google I/O, but for Windows developers. Over three days of keynotes, roundtables, breakout sessions, and an expo I was able to learn...
May 27, 2016
I’m sure it’s not a rare use case, but between working hours I’m a mobile-only user. Young kids mean I need my hands free and not having a laptop in the house has made for better work/life balance. As a result of being mobile-only for half my waking hours, I...
May 13, 2016
Over the past 9 months, I’ve been exploring what alternatives exist to the lackluster reality of Lists, Details, and Flows, a personal journey to cure my boredom. New frameworks, switching programming languages, and changing build tools every 6 weeks keeps me on my toes; but what I really seek are...
April 19, 2016
I’ve become a bit discontented. In a fit of base reductionism, my brain has begun boiling down digital design (apps/web/product/interface/etc, all the same thing) into to three types of designs: lists, details, and flows.
April 08, 2016
Web development moves fast. This post is old. A new step-by-step guide to setting up a Windows 10 web developer environment is now available.
March 28, 2016
Here’s how it all started. I’ve been tinkering with a little Slack bot recently and wanted to deploy it on BeepBoop. BeepBoop requires a Dockerfile to deploy. “Okay,” I said, “I don’t really use Docker, but why not.” I set about trying to install Docker for Windows.
March 18, 2016
Springtime is a great time to tend to your blog. On a recent 4 hour flight with no WiFi, I got my hands dirty and MURDERED THE HELL outta some things. Here’s the tl;dr on what’s new:
February 23, 2016
Occasionally I’ll run across the need to record a quick screencast for a blog post, client, or presentation. In the past I’ve made gifs with LiceCAP. Gifs can be large, have low framerates, and a low color profile. The better, free, easier, and more web performant way is HTML5 video....
February 22, 2016
I’m constantly revisiting my opinion on what makes a good website. For years it was the immersive animation of Flash that defined a great user experience. Then it was the Web Standards, the quality and poetry of the underlying code that symbolized greatness. Just as my passion for Web Standards...
January 19, 2016
Last week a group of some high profile open source developers banded together to write an “Open Letter to Github” to express their sepecific frustrations with Github Issues. At the time of writing the number of co-signers is over 1200 individuals. Their demands are simple:
January 15, 2016
Every holiday season I try to lock my computer in a safe so I don’t see it for a couple weeks. As I pulled the Surface its vault and powered it on, I had a short conversation with myself:
December 07, 2015
The leaner/faster your site is, the more noticeable/painful image loading becomes, especially with hero images. Layout getting recalculated when each image arrives results in a spastic hurk-jerk page reflow. This bothered us enough on DayTrip to find a fix.
November 17, 2015
This week Paul Lewis (@aerotwist) posted a talk on “The Cost of Frameworks”. In his talk Paul raises the question on whether the cost of MVC frameworks is too high since their inclusion and execution likely means you’ve blown any respectable performance budget. Paul provides some data and a tool...
November 09, 2015
Chrometophobia is the Fear of Money. It’s not serious or life-threatening but, as far as phobias go, it’s a unique circumstance that governs my life to some degree.
October 23, 2015
Paravel recently updated the look and feel of our portfolio site. Redoing your portfolio is always an exciting opportunity to express the newest and latest methods of how your organization likes to build things. We added color, trimmed copy, simplified content, and moved it all from a custom PHP Frankenstein...
October 22, 2015
The Surface had a blowout. The computer went to sleep and when I tried to wake it up, the Type Cover wasn’t responsive. Hardware bugging out isn’t strange to me, so I restarted the computer. It didn’t work. I finally found a troubleshooting document that looked promising. So I followed...
October 20, 2015
My wife and I have noticed that whenever we make coffee, it’s completely different despite the fact we use the same grounds, the same filters, the same coffee maker, the same water faucet, and the same measuring devices. We were both stunned that the flavor of our morning brew depended...
October 07, 2015
Web development moves fast. This post is old. A new step-by-step guide to setting up a Windows 10 web developer environment is now available.
October 02, 2015
September 18, 2015
August 27, 2015
Over the last month or so since switching to Windows I’ve been slowly piecing together my development environment and I have lots to share on what is and isn’t working. This post will be about Programming Languages I’ve played with and I’ll save Code Editors and Shells for another post....
August 03, 2015
It’s official: I’m going Windows! After my original blog post, I started a few conversations with Rey Bango from Microsoft who surfed all the proper channels and secured for me a Surface Pro 3. Over the past week or so I’ve been migrating over to the new machine.
July 31, 2015
There’s been a lot of talk lately about “the New IE”. Heck, the Verge even tried to hang all their performance problems on it. There’s also been a lot of great (and not-so great) criticism about it all.
July 07, 2015
Terrifying Robot Dog is an excellent futurist/technologist podcast by Kelli Shaver and Jonathan Stark. This past week they discussed Amazon Echo and its Alexa natural language processing (NLP) software.
June 30, 2015
Last week’s 99 Percent Invisible tells the fateful journey of Air France 447. On its way to Rio De Janeiro the flight mysteriously fell off the radar. The plane’s automated systems failed, the fly-by-wire autopilot disengaged, and a critical mistake was made. The co-pilot –whose skills had atrophied from his...
June 29, 2015
One of my favorite podcasts, 99 Percent Invisible, recently told the story of Victor Gruen, the man who invented the American shopping mall. Is he a sinner or a saint? Listen to the episode to find out.
June 23, 2015
Craig Hockenberry had a powerful post this past weekend over on the Iconfactory blog. Last week Iconfactory’s flagship app, Twitterific, was one of around 20 apps in the App Store’s “Popular Apps Using VoiceOver” feature. To sum up this impact, Iconfactory posted a graph of their downloads over the last...
June 22, 2015
I probably think about Loki’s Wager on a weekly basis. It could be too many Thor comics. But even now, there’s a healthy debate stirring up again about Progressive Enhancement needing a re-brand. Ye olde “Web Apps” vs. “Web Sites” debate. Can/should we draw a line? Yes, but no.
June 19, 2015
WIRED recently ran a thinkpiece on Apps being cannibalized by the Operating System. I think the thesis is justifiable. I mean, just ask Spotify or Flipboard how they felt about the WWDC2015 keynote. Software has finished eating the world and is now eating itself.
June 17, 2015
Alex Russell had a great post this week about Web Sites in an App World, he even coined a new term “Progressive Apps” which I enjoy immensely. Progressive Apps, in Alex’s view, are (web)apps that earn their spot on our homescreens over time and preserve the URL-based nature of the...
June 16, 2015
The annual updates to Webkit and Safari are exciting for a web developer like me. A feature finally shipping on Mobile Safari tends to mean it’s now a feature we can actually use. Here’s my recap of what’s new.
June 15, 2015
While watching AMC’s Halt and Catch Fire, I learned about the “Doherty Threshold”, a discovery from a 1982 IBM report called “The Economic Value of Rapid Response Time”. The report is old gold and reads like a modern day #webperf article.
May 06, 2015
I fully believe in designing and building websites Mobile First. Both on a theoretical level and a data-driven level. Three particular stats convince me we’re well past the tipping point: Google mobile search traffic is over 60%, 73% of all daily Facebook users access from a mobile device, and 80%...
April 23, 2015
On this week’s ShopTalk (162: Rapidfire 42), Chris and I received a somewhat frequently asked question, “What do you guys think about Linux as a developer environment?” Our answer devolved into a discussion about the Mac monoculture (which Chris and I are bought into) that seems to be pervasive in...
February 16, 2015
UPDATE: Heroku has removed Dropbox Sync support. This technique will not work anymore. Recommend Netlify for easy static site deployments.
February 05, 2015
The Legend of John Henry is the tale of a steel drivin’ African American labor hero that defeated the Machine that came through town to take his job.
December 03, 2014
December 01, 2014
November 21, 2014
August 11, 2014
July 30, 2014
Building off of my previous post on RWD Bloat, the following is step-by-step how I made my site faster over the course of a few days. For the purposes of this test, I’m hyper-focused on my Speed Index numbers for my Home and Article templates (the 2 most visited templates...
July 24, 2014
One of Responsive Web Design’s biggest critiques is that it is responsible for slow load times and extreme page bloat. The best response to this criticism is Tim Kadlec’s Great Divorce:
February 20, 2014
Some recent posts have highlighted the challenges facing Podcasting as a medium. Stan Alcorn’s “Is This Thing On?” explains how audio rarely goes viral and Joe Steel’s rebound “Let Me Share This Podcast With You” explains some of the deeper challenges of sharing. I believe that by using HTML5 we...
January 16, 2014
This year at CES 4K televisions were a big deal. 4K UltraHD displays for computers have been available for awhile, there’s even one on Apple’s website, but at $3,500 they’ve been cost prohibitive. That all changes with the announcement of new 4K displays priced at less than $1000.
November 13, 2013
A few months ago I attended an event where a young woman was sitting in the back row frustratedly signing with a friend. She seemed visibly bored, idling on her phone and unable to engage or maintain interest due to the lack of a professional interpreter. That struck me.
October 30, 2013
My wife and I are in the process of getting our small (36ft²), moldy “master” bathroom remodeled. During a break in jackhammering, I peeked around the worksite and noticed an empty concrete bag stashed away behind newly hung sheet of drywall.
October 11, 2013
September 20, 2013
Due to the birth of my firstborn, Otis, I spent two weeks on paternity leave. My hands were literally filled (read: with poop) and I was confined to “mobile”1 devices for consumption: 90% iPhone, 10% iPad mini. Holding a newborn is really a quite “immobile” activity. ↩
June 14, 2013
Lots has happened in the world of Responsive Images since I wrote Mo’ Pixels, Mo’ Problems. And by lots, I mean nothing at all. It’s been over a year since The Great WHATWG Responsive Image Debacle and we’re still at square one.
April 03, 2013
Over the past 60+ episodes of ShopTalk, Chris and myself have amassed a lot of incriminating content. After a few requests, we decided it’d be helpful to our listeners to add the ability to deep link our episodes, modeled after the way YouTube handles deep linking. After we built it...
April 02, 2013
During the era of Print Design, companies would approach agencies for a brand identity system. Don Draper would then hire one of two people: either Paul Rand or Saul Bass. Paul Rand’s work with Westinghouse makes a great case study for building a design system.
March 15, 2013
When I began blogging in 2002, I ran an emo webzine called Wimpkiller. It was the online continuation of a paperzine my friend DadBeard and I did in high school. There I chronicled my unemployment, employment, unemployment, three years spent in Japan, and more. The site had an active Phorum...
March 06, 2013
At a recent conference I had the pleasure of witnessing a few startup demos. Genuinely interested, I did what any FOMO-suffering technophile attendee would do, I pulled out my phone to visit the URL on the screen. These are all brand new businesses, but the majority of the websites I...
January 14, 2013
I’ve been making websites for nearly 19 years and my biggest struggle is that I don’t have a good grasp on accessibility. Other web developers I’ve spoken with have similar feelings, a secret shame about not knowing enough. Universal Access is core to the philosophy of the web, yet it’s...
January 04, 2013
For 2013 I’ve made a few resolutions. Spurred on by Chris Coyier, I’ve decided to blog my plans for the next year. This year is a little different than most because I made a conscious effort to formulate emperically measurable goals.
December 12, 2012
The number of characters per line is an important part of typography. It’s the basis of how comfortable or exhausted a visitor will be while reading your site.
November 07, 2012
Since May I have been deconstructing my site and rebuilding it bit by bit. Trying to keep the soul of the last version (which I liked) yet having an all new perspective. The new design is now em-based, mobile first. I think I’ve got the hang of this mobile first...
May 03, 2012
Now, Uncle Dave is no stranger to video in responsive web design and I currently have a situation where I need to use Video.js on a project. Out of the box, Video.js isn’t super flexible. My first attempts at responsivizing1 it went awry, but I eventually grokked out a 3...
April 09, 2012
Inspired by Elliot Jay Stocks’ article “Better Background Images for RWD” and comments therein, I combined 2 of my favorite concepts for great success: Thierry Koblentz’ Intrinsic Ratios + background-size: cover.
November 18, 2011
In a single column “mobile view”, taller images appear more important than wider images. We came across this unexpected maxim while working on a recent responsive design. Our design employed a ~3:1 hero image with three ~4:3 thumbs below it. At full width it was the proper hierarchy: Biggest ==...
September 06, 2011
Last week, Trent Walton tweeted about the frustration of getting standard video players to work in a responsive design:
August 03, 2011
In association with MIX Online and An Event Apart, Paravel is proud to take part in the launch of The 2011 10K Apart: Responsive Edition. It went fast but we had fun handling the the design process and frontend buildout of this year’s contest site.
July 12, 2011
We now have CSS3 transforms, transitions, animations, media queries, HTML5 audio & video, Canvas, inline SVG, and even WebGL for full 3D rendering. Infinite possibilities and combinations that keep me up at night. Better Browsers, Better Devices, New Interactions Responsive Web Design by Ethan Marcotte has spurred my thinking about...
June 07, 2011
We love texture at Paravel. When you settle on a good texture, there’s nothing better than a slighly embossed horizontal rule to give a letterpress like feel in between sections.
March 18, 2011
I recently had the opportunity to speak at AustinJS about Lettering.js, the jQuery plugin I created for The Lost World’s Fairs. The presentation starts at ~4:23 and is followed by a 10 minute Q&A. My favorite part of the whole talk is when I invent a brand new CSS property...
December 03, 2010
It’s been a busy year at Paravel, no doubt. In addition to client work, we at Paravel put a high value on personal side projects, famously The Many Faces Of, because through goofing off we can stay at the top of our craft. In order to quantify the benefits side...
September 14, 2010
Oh wow! Lettering.JS now has it's own website with a little mini-gallery.Check it out to see how other people are using it. Paravel has just wrapped up an exciting secret project with three of the web's most talented designers: Jason Santa Maria, Frank Chimero, and Naz Hamid. These designs are...
June 30, 2010
On Episode 4 of the ATX Web Show, I interviewed Kyle Simpson and we discussed Web Performance and Google’s plan to “Make the Web Faster”. Since then, Google has announced they will start rewarding your site’s page speed and they hint that the bar is set at ~1.4 seconds. I...
June 15, 2010
8xMobile internet adoption has outpaced desktop internet adoption by eight times. # 1.03M1.03 million touch screen phones sold per day in 2009. # 100k100,000 Android phones activated per day in May 2010.# 2011Smartphone sales will surpass worldwide PC sales by the end of 2011 .# 1BHeavy mobile data users are...
May 05, 2010
To date, my blog has had 3 themes in just 7 short months. Just about as many posts as themes really. But I’m making a concernedconcerted effort to change that. To start, I thought I’d write a little bit about the process of this version. The Prototype The new theme...
May 05, 2010
Trent Walton seeded the idea and asked me to make a Dribbble plugin, so I created one that (by default) mimic’d the wonderful UI created by Dan Cederholm and Rich Thornett. After a couple emails with the gentlemen from Salem, we got their permission to use some assets and a...
March 29, 2010
The web is advancing with CSS3 Transitions. At Paravel we’ve been thinking a lot about the best practices and approaches to using these fancy jQuery and CSS3 animations. While our thoughts are loosely coupled with the HTML5 vs. FLASH debate, the web is moving forward and we’re excited about how...
March 01, 2010
Occasionally my wife and I will record a song together and release it on our blog. I was using the WP Audio Player plugin to show off these little ditties, but at some point this month it unexpectedly broke and ceased loading. I couldn't be bothered to track down and...
November 05, 2009
I just launched the ATX Web Show! A podcast that aims to feature the best and brightest in web design and development in Austin, TX. I’m pretty excited about it. It started as a late night idea then turned into a code binge. Less than 24 hours later it was...
October 28, 2009
Paper news is heading the way of the cassette tape. It used to be the primary method of distribution, but it has been made obsolete by faster, smaller, more portable forms of news. Waking up and reading the paper will soon be replaced by grabbing your Apple iTablet from your...
October 24, 2009
This week my framework of choice CakePHP forked. Now there’s CakePHP (the mothership) and Lithium (the project formerly known as Cake3). Let me tell you, oh people of the interwebs, it’s a weird feeling to wake up on a Friday morning to find out the leaders of your “online community”...
January 29, 2009
"5 options when website budgets get slashed" -great article, sent me to the following sites: "Good Designers Redesign, Great Designers Realign" - This A List Apart by the famous Cameron Moll says "The desire to redesign is aesthetic-driven, while the desire to realign is purpose-driven". Sure it's great to have...
January 26, 2009
Let me start off by saying, I know what this looks like. This appears to be “the little emo-kid trying to raise a huge ruckus by throw rocks at Digg because his/her articles never get dugg”. But, let it be known, I have no gripe my lack of success in the...