They killed Google Reader and then gave us…this.

Learning about Suspense and React Query and lol we’re really doing cartwheels to get around React’s render-all-the-things design. wtaf.

I check the little screen, I check the big screen, I check the watch screen, I check the tablet screen. I check the screen that reminds me of the good times, I check the screen that reminds me of the better times.

I think about this one often as well

1: layoffs are happening because companies want them, whether AI is involved or not. 2: 966 is a flex for the grindset-pilled. We slept under our desks in 2003 too! It didn't matter. When you're done fixing AI's mistakes, maybe you can use AI to fix the mistakes you made when you're exhausted.

Realizing that it’s been a long time since I’ve used anything other than “font-family: sans-serif” and let the browser take the wheel.

“Give up and use breakpoints” is the new “give up and use tables.”

Feed readers need starter packs. They’re a huge success on BlueSky. Folks might try and stick with a feed reader if it were easily seeded with a bunch of feeds that fit their interests. Probably as easy as publishing an OPML file!

Chatbots should have warning labels, required by law. And we should teach folks how to block and restrict chatbot sites with parental controls.

I need a name for the thing where you fantasize about joining a company just long enough to fix some suboptimal thing that’s been driving you nuts as a user and then immediately quitting.

let’s watch as folks ask why the non-deterministic tools don’t return deterministic outputs over and over again — this is fun — we’re having fun and being productive

It’s difficult to believe that we’re just scant years away from artificial superintelligence when even dogs are better at sensing when humans are distressed. futurism.com/commitment-j...

🎵 I was walking through your code I said pleeeeease please don’t commit 🎵

omg YES. A coworker and I went looking for an electric guitar to noodle on in the break room. We chose a $150 used Yamaha Pacifica which absolutely smoked everything else, including a $500 MIM Strat.

🎯🎯🎯

no it wasn’t and no it didn’t

Starting to suspect one reason for Big Tech’s insistence that employees use AI on the job (and tied to performance reviews) is not about productivity but the hope one will stumble upon a novel application that can be productized.

✨✨✨✨

Aside: it irks me to no end how these things explain themselves with their bullet-point retrospectives. “I panicked and ignored the instruction to…” No. *Humans* ignore things. *Humans* panic. The indeterminate decision tree left important stuff out the context and returned bad result. That’s it.

My current take is I don’t love URL shorteners. It’s another hop that can break, you gotta maintain it forever, and it obfuscates the URL. It’s probably better to just grit your teeth and redesign your routes and query params. A short URL isn’t necessarily good UX.

% hearts --fix

What’s funny to me about the X quote below is PMs dropped like flies throughout most of my career. Having a dedicated PM was a luxury, and to ask “who’s the PM on this?” meant you just volunteered. So yeah, let’s give ‘em *fewer* dev resources, great idea.

Popped into LinkedIn for a second and had to restrain myself from replying “okay buddy” to every post.

Blood Meridian ((1985) C. McCarthy, Random House)

Started a new gig on a private web app and I’d forgotten how nice it is not to have to think about SEO or scaling to support a kabillion DAU.

I was recently reminded that browser dev tools didn’t exist until 2006 (Firebug). We had YouTube, MySpace, and Ajax *before* we had dev tools.

lament.config

Ah, my soon-to-be-ex-insurance provider has done the bare minimum to improve this shoddy piece of UX. A little contrast would be nice tho. Bad UX burns trust. If you can’t do this right, users may wonder what else are you not doing right.

A reminder that I do comics now. 🎨 Some silly, some spooky, all by me. The newsletter crew gets them weeks in advance, but you can catch up with all the back issues in the archive, along with long-form stories, animation, and a *secret* blog. buttondown.com/neathobby

40 years after he started it, @scottandrew.com finished a text adventure game he began working on at age 14, a collaboration with his teenage self. I just beat "The Plot of the Phantom," and it was charming with several surprising moments. scottandrew.com/blog/2025/06...

It sounds bonkers, but maybe we should start recommending RSS readers as “like a podcast player, but for websites.”

Fantastic tribute to Slack/Glitch/Flickr co-founder Eric Costello, now retired, raising farm animals and probably teaching them the DOM Level 1 API. buildingslack.com/eric/

I’m not gonna share any webdev articles that use AI-generated art, and you shouldn’t either.

I’m almost ready to post the BASIC text adventure game I started in 1985, rewritten with Inform 7 over the past three years. But not before I make box art!

🧵!

Live laugh layoffs

Rediscovering how nice it is to have just a lil’ bit of backend available. No lambdas. No app server. Just a dash of server-side when you need it.

A reminder that I do comics now. 🎨 Some silly, some spooky, all by me. The newsletter crew gets them weeks in advance, but you can catch up with all the back issues in the archive, along with long-form stories, animation, and a *secret* blog. buttondown.com/neathobby

🔟 521 ❤️ Pure #CSS #3D toggle with a single `input[type=checkbox]` and its `label` - check it out on @codepen.io codepen.io/thebabydino/...

Seeing Veo3 demos and consoling myself by thinking of how much better the Grand Moff Tarkin scenes in Rogue One would have been.

Working on the final edit of my "Just Fucking Use Image Maps" rant. You're all on notice.

Take 439

If you load this page it contacts 82 IP addresses executing 256 separate HTTP transactions to download 18MB of data writing 64 cookies to your device to tell you “no”

What’s hilarious to me is I have an unfinished project that is a simple bookmarking Pocket replacement that anyone could run themselves…on Glitch. 😭

Sigh.

The Everything App is made by a Very Serious Company run by Professionals we can definitely trust.

Nothing cools my interest in your webdev article or tutorial more than seeing a big AI-generated image. (Rocket emoji is a close second.)

Just had a flashback to reprovisioning hosts in an auto-scaling group. It’s okay, I’m okay. Are the 2xlarge instances in the room with me now? No. They are not.

In retrospect I believe jQuery was the gold standard if you cared at all about progressive enhancement and…the people actually using your app to get things done. www.jqueryreunion.com