2025 was chaos: a cross-country move, framework docs, AI tools, and pickleball. At the same time, it was also full of the kind of growth you only notice when you actually pause. So, despite my instinct to just skip it, here's my reflection on the year: www.bencodezen.io/blog/reflect...

One of the biggest obstacles i’ve found with personal productivity is a bias towards quantity over quality. Not surprising given quality is often subjective while output is most easily quantified, but the fact that the todo list is still the standard for individuals leaves much to be desired.

happy new year! 🎉 instead of grandiose resolutions, wishing y'all a year full of consistent and meaningful progress in the things that matter most to you.

Something I love about couch co-op games is that it tells you a lot about how people navigate the world. Are they inclined to share items? Survive at all cost or figure out how we win together as a team? Upon reflection, it's interesting to think about which side my closest friends fall on.

I think the #Angular Aria docs are some of the best docs (for one of the nicest features) the team has ever delivered! Check out especially the retro tabs on the component patterns: angular.dev/guide/aria/o... Thanks @bencodezen.io and the rest of the team!

🚀 New micro-project: Grid Paper. A little app for creating printable grid and graph paper. grid-paper.daverupert.com

As AI tooling becomes more ingrained in people's workflows, the ability to question your own reality and push back on "yes you're absolutely right!" is critical to creating quality work.

Ahh the never-ending pain of having your terminal sending you down the wrong rabbit hole to debug something when it's somewhere else entirely...

🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 credit to @skeletonclaw.bsky.social

I watch a lot of open source projects’ issues on GitHub. On a regular occurrence, maintainers are politely asking “could you please disclose if you used LLM to generate this PR”. This is the polite and exhausting way to say “this looks like incomprehensible bullshit, why are you wasting our time?”

Just replaced all of my `- [ ]` in Obsidian with `-`. When the backlog is too massive, sometimes the best thing you can do is just declare todo bankruptcy to recalibrate.

So many great enhancements to Bases in this upcoming release!

Man I love CSS Grid... The ability to just reorder things with the areas property is soo good. Mad props to the team who created this standard and made our lives so much easier.

Never thought that learning to question my own reality would end up being a very practical skill as I continue learning to navigate the complexities of learning how to leverage AI properly...

“Good docs are still good docs” 🔥🔥🔥 I chatted with @taylorbar.net, Staff Product Manager at @netlify.com, & Lyle Schemmerling, Senior Software Engineer at @fusionauth.io, about LLMs and Developer Experience for this episode of @redmonk.com's MonkCast. redmonk.com/blog/2025/09...

a directory called 'docs/' filled with markdown files is 1000% better for internal documentation than notion

We’re live!! My brand-new course, “Whimsical Animations”, is now available. 🥳🎉 whimsy.joshwcomeau.com I’m so excited to share all of my animation tools and techniques with y’all. 😄

best tutorial i've read all year! anniemueller.com/posts/how-i-...

I don't know what new LLM magic just got injected to Spotify's Discover Weekly algorithm, but the recommendations are absolutely solid this week.

Nuxt UI v4 it out ✨ It unifies Nuxt UI and Nuxt UI Pro into a fully open-source library with: - 100+ components - 10+ free templates - Figma Kit for everyone nuxt.com/blog/nuxt-u...

Vibe coding is fun and interesting in its own way, but I still get a ton of satisfaction building something from scratch and just typing things out the old-fashioned way.

I just spent the last hour fighting build tools cause it kept trying to refer to a path to a .nvm package. 💀 Uninstalled the package... nuked nvm... purged the cache... nothing. It ended up being a sneaky little file that had hardcoded the path... 💀

On agents and Obsidian

I'm excited for this one!!! 🥳

Second 8TB HDD installed in my first NAS setup! 🎉

The Future of Coding Sale ends TODAY! Save $100 on yearly membership + unlock: ✨ Personalized Paths ✨ AI & DevOps Learning ✨ Quizzes & Flashcards ✨ 250+ awesome courses + a fantastic roadmap for more ⏳ <24 hours left! Don't miss it

Did you know that since 1972, keyboards have been responsible for generating 90% of all code?

This looks very promising for changing how users interact with their notes in @obsidian.md. Excited to try it out soon! notebooknavigator.com

Does anyone have any file scaffolding / code generation tool they really love and use? I used to use hygen but it's not really maintained anymore. Curious what people are using!

in light of the current supply chain attacks, I've just published a @github.com action to detect packages that _lose_ their provenance. 📦 supports pnpm-lock.yaml, package-lock.json, yarn.lock (v1) 🎨 inline GitHub annotations ✅ JSON output + configurable 💪 published in TS with zero deps

"Who am I doing this for?" - The question I wish I'd asked sooner. We spend so much time filling others' cups that we forget our own. Working extra hours, attending obligations, helping everyone but ourselves. www.bencodezen.io/blog/the-wor...

Absolutely love the attention of detail made to this company's site. It's a mini OS while having some fantastic animations. Incredlbe job to the @posthog.com team! posthog.com/blog/why-os

📢 Brand new tutorial for @angular.dev signals is now live! angular.dev/tutorials/si...

I know this is by design, but it frustrates me that AI call-to-actions are so matter of fact. "🤖 Explain error" gives off the impression that the AI knows what went wrong, yet the reality is that: "AI will find a reason for you, but you still have to validate it." What would I prefer?

If you ever wanted to take my Vue courses on @frontendmasters.com and/or waiting for a deal, you're in luck cause it's $100 off yearly memberships this week! There are over 250 courses, live workshops, and new personalized learning paths. Sale ends 9/28 → frontendmasters.com/sale/

I got tired of looking up the syntax for checking what processes are running on the 3000 port, so I created an alias for it:

📝 New blog post: "Immortal Finish Lines" www.bencodezen.io/blog/immorta...

🔴 Live Stream in Session Surprise! "Ben's Office Hours" is back and today I'll be taking a first look at a sync engine that's been on my radar for quite some time: Zero. As always, come hangout and/or bring any questions and I'll be happy to chat! www.youtube.com/live/Ya6QPV9...

🛠️ Uppy 👉🏻 A powerful, modular JavaScript file uploader. 👉🏻 Upload not just from local sources (whether files or a webcam) but also remote services like Dropbox or Google Drive. 👉🏻 Integrates with frameworks like React, Vue, Svelte, and Angular. https://uppy.io/

🎁 Nuxt 4.1 + 3.19 are out! 🍫 chunk stability with import maps 🦀 experimental @rolldown.rs support 🧪 improved lazy hydration 🪾 module dependencies & lifecycle hooks ⚡️ performance optimizations 🛠️ better module DX happy upgrading ❤️ 👉 read more at nuxt.com/blog/v4-1

Absolutely love @stephango.com's stance on not rushing AI feature development and standing firm in their principles. Just another reason why @obsidian.md has remained my note-taking app for years and I don't see that changing any time soon.

Alright. Time to get back on the writing wagon. New blog post up: www.bencodezen.io/blog/hello-w...

Back to reading physical books and I’m stoked to start off with “tiny experiments”!

We just hit a milestone in our exploration of signal-based forms in Angular - our prototype is now merged into the main repository. This opens the door for some important next steps like compiler integration & interop w/ existing forms.

Obsidian 1.9.12 is now available to all for desktop and mobile. - Search is now lightning fast - New migration assistant for Sync, and minor security upgrade - Disabled old versions of Commander and Image Toolkit that were causing issues in 1.9

"Vibe coding is not the same as AI-assisted engineering." — @addyosmani.bsky.social While it's trendy to call any coding done with AI "vibe coding," it's critical to delineate between them because the human intentionality and ownership is what makes products reliable and great.

AI isn’t going to replace coding. It’s going to replace writing code with reading code. Hope you like spelunking through someone else’s logic—because that “someone else” will increasingly be an AI.

Now this is the kind of thing I'm happy to farm out to AI all day long. I just had it to help me figure out the regex I needed to search and replace text across thousands of markdown files.

Hey, as a librarian I need to tell you: Our funding depends on usage. So go ahead and check out that book even if you don't think you'll finish it. No one will know. Check out that DVD even though you might not like it. Get ambitious in your quest for knowledge.