This complements the previous link I shared nicely: most developers don’t properly use the platform, but why? This goes into possible reasons without being judgemental, and to me they make a lot of sense. When I first started going all-in into front-end development I’ve been a part of all of those cases, I guess. In a way, writing less code and relying on the platform are signs of development experience (or battle scars).

Jim gives his notes on an amazing talk by Alexander Petros, and the topic is super relevant for any web dev.

It goes into how many of us, when modernizing our tech stack just for the sake of modernizing it, end up with objectively worse results than we’d have if we stuck to the tried and true.

HTML’s ideological goal is to make websites good for their users. React’s ideological goal is serving Facebook, which mostly wants to serve you ads. Both have completely different priorities.

(I’m linking to Jim’s notes instead of the talk directly because Jim makes great points too! But you should definitely watch the talk if the subject interests you)

This is absolutely incredible! Pick any website you want and control a stick figure while you destroy absolutely everything on it. A good way of getting revenge on the bad websites that have failed you in the past.

Great video! It goes into how AI as a tool affects our way of thinking, how damaging that can be for learning, and how to leverage it in a way that could be positive while still giving us ownership of what we build.

I’ve seen this video circulating before but never gave it a chance due to it coming from a brand (JetBrains), but I’m glad I decided to give it a watch now.

Fantastic talk from a UX designer about why desktop UX seems stagnated and what can be done to move it forward. The prototypes he presents around the 30-minute mark are amazing and make me really excited to try something similar in the future.

He does bring up a fair point, though: no innovation is gonna come from Windows or Mac.

With these seismic changes, I will continue to make the argument that craft defined as caring about the quality of output (independent of the tools used to generate the output) is more important than ever. Caring about what you ship will always have real-world value to visitors/consumers/users real people.

Mostly, it seems, we yell. We yell about the world, we yell about the other social sites, we yell about news stories we didn’t read, we yell about whatever sucker was unlucky enough to be that day’s main character, and we yell, mostly, at each other. We yell because we are mad at all of this. And we yell because we’re all trapped in a machine that was built, in part, to keep us yelling.

It’s rare to find someone who doesn’t feel like this. Maybe we don’t find them because they don’t frequent the same digital places we do. Maybe that’s the secret.

This is a nicely crafted website in which you can play a different trio of nonograms every day! I had no idea what nonograms are before, but once I took a few minutes to learn, it became very fun and one of the best parts of my morning ritual. They’re most similar to minesweeper, I guess, but with the numbers on the columns and rows instead of on the squares themselves.

This was posted during the World Cup while more people were paying attention to football and the VAR, but it’s just as valid today. Just as AI provides an obvious benefit at first glance, its deeper effects can be seen as a net negative.

The VAR hasn’t eliminated or reduced biases or corruption in football. It merely made them more hidden and institutionalized.

If you’ve ever struggled on how to organize components in your project, then this is well worth the read. This article goes into the Atomic Design principles (+ some extensions of it) and explains all the rules that will make finding your way around a codebase much easier.

It’s been 5 years since I was introduced to this way of building websites (Jeff is my coworker!) and it’s a fantastic way of doing it, especially when you hop around different projects all the time. I use it both at work and on personal projects like this website.

As a non-designer that sometimes designs stuff, this is fantastic! A compilation of easy to understand rules you can follow in web design without having to worry too much about context.

Some of them I had already learned elsewhere, but it’s nice to have them all laid out together like this.

This project aims to make it easy for CSS to have access to things only JS could have previously, all through CSS variables. This makes it way easier for CSS to still be responsible for the presentation layer, without having to add animations, transitions and status information through JS.

I gotta point out that the performance on that site specifically is pretty horrid. It’s probably better used sparingly, but I get why the demo site would use it everywhere 😅

Nice, cozy video reflecting on how we are often a distant audience of other people’s lives instead of living our own. It’s definitely that damn phone.

Pretty cool study about how our brains work in finding optimal routes and how surprisingly good we are at it, even when compared to computers. Lots of visual and interactive demos inside!

There’s a lot of websites that mimic retro desktops nowadays (they’re cool!), but this one feels truly special by having its own aesthetic, and it feels so fun to explore! I love ghow you can draw your own stamps and leave your own mark on it.

Play a different hole of mini-golf in your browser every day. You can see other people playing as well, and share your play with friends if you’re into that.

OverpAId is not coming for the people who do the actual work. It is coming, with extreme prejudice, for exactly one category of job: the one that spent the last forty years insisting everyone else’s job was replaceable.

This is fantastic.

There will be at many points in your creative process opportunities to bypass the struggle of working and learning, but availing yourself of those shortcuts will gradually undermine your work in subtle ways that you cannot foresee.

So sure, go ahead and use generative fill to clean up your image. No one’s watching. I won’t tell anyone and no one will ever know. But you will pay a very small price in relieving yourself from the duty of learning some new Photoshop skills. You might not need those skills in this precise moment, but as you grow into your craft, those skills might come in handy in other ways that you do not presently anticipate.

While focused on people who do creative work, this video easily applies to everyone. It’s so easy to fall into the trap of letting the sparkles do something for you, and just as easy to prevent yourself from learning and improving because of that.

Even as someone who tries to limit and police my own usage of AI tools, I could see myself in a lot of these examples. Process isn’t only important to creative work; it’s important to our own personal development. AI can produce generic output that anyone else could, but only you, with your unique combination of skills and experiences accumulated over the years, can produce something unique.

Another amazing Josh Comeau post that explains a new concept in a super easy to understand manner and makes me wanna try it out right now? Yes please.

The last time I saw the anchor positioning API, it looked kinda intimidating. Now it sounds so simple! I know there was work on the browser standards side to simplify it, so kudos to them for arriving at what seems to be a really sensible API.

There’s hardly a working day in which Safari doesn’t make my life harder. I’m not the only one who feels like that. Alex Russell goes in great detail on how shitty the situation of Apple’s browser is especially because they block any sort of competition in their main platform.

Apple is consistently out-engineered and out-invested by a non-profit with 1/40th the web-derived revenue.

These large, persistent gaps matter to the mobile and web ecosystems because Apple is unique in denying access to more capable, less-buggy engines and actively erecting unlawful barriers to choice when forced by legislation to enable it.

Don’t let the title turn you off in case these words mean nothing to you — Sophie’s website is a joy to open every time, with multiple fun themes to choose from. And she added a new dynamic element to one of them, making the background reflect the sky of the current time of day.

She noted it was hard to get to this result, but reading it, it feels pretty simple to understand. Which is the mark of a good developer and writer.

Wow! This is a mistake I’d probably have done on my first semester in college. Not when working for FIFA.

Though I do wonder if real humans wrote that code before the fix. My guess is no.

I gotta say this person has a lot of self-control.

Really good article about literal and metaphorical midwinters and (tech) work.

A 3D museum in which you can walk on all about the history of WordPress, with displays for each release, some of the history behind them, all that. Really cool!

Half Life 2 running fully through your browser? Sure! Why not?

Definitely not the best way to do it, but walking around in one of the best games ever on my browser is a pretty cool concept. Especially since there’s no way to run it natively on a Mac nowadays.

I often look at my own posts and think, “There’s nothing novel, or important, or deep in here at all — is this even worth saying?”

Yes! Me too! Lots of drafts got abandoned because I eventually caught myself thinking that while writing it. Past couple years I’ve been trying to detach myself from that way of thinking but it’s a slow process.

Sometimes a blog post will only have a target audience of one (the writer) and that is perfectly fine.

Incredible visual demonstration of how the absurd size of modern SUVs turns them into even deadlier machines. Not only the hood height makes them deadlier in a possible collision, but the vastly increased blind spots make collisions more likely to happen.

This is so cool! TownSquare adds a small virtual square at the footer of a website, on which visitors can walk around, jump, high-five and talk to each other. And this can connect multiple websites together!

Strongly considering adding this somewhere on my website.

This is so good! Overworld is a gaming news aggregator that is actually usable. It groups together all news for a single topic under a single headline, and also curates gaming-related stuff (that’s not necessarily news) in a “worth your time” section. And it looks great too!

And even if it takes a while to get to other browsers, it’s mostly a visual drawback if not supported; so I can already start thinking about using it.

A collection of fun optical illusions, with quick explanations of how they work.

I found out later that this is just one out of many other “toy” collections. I recommend checking those out as well!

This website allows you to find the latitude of your city (or whatever city you want) and shows all the cities in the same latitude all around the world (or in the mirrored latitute i.e. opposite hemisphere).

My home city is opposite to Cairo, which is neat. The one I’m currently living in is parallel to Vancouver, which is also neat.

A nicely put-together timeline with a lot (all?) of the photos from the Artemis II mission that orbited around the Moon. The sequence of the spacecraft approaching the Moon is breathtaking!

I’ve been using clamp() for fluid text sizing for a while, and this article highlights the pros of using the round() CSS function to make the fluidity more predictable! I love the card height examples too, as that’s something that’s consistently a pain in almost every project I work on.

This is like a landing page + search engine for the old internet! It allows you to search for stuff on the Internet Archive without having to necessarily know the URL of every website you wanna visit.

I found some forum threads from 1998 of people discussing the imminent launch of Zelda Ocarina of Time. Fascinating stuff.

Never thought I’d be linking to Einstein here, but this is a great essay about what constitutes humankind and society, how they differ, and how they mold each other (though this relationship is far from balanced).

The individual is able to think, feel, strive, and work by himself; but he depends so much upon society—in his physical, intellectual, and emotional existence—that it is impossible to think of him, or to understand him, outside the framework of society.

Still a great read even if “socialism” is a trigger word for you, by the way.

If you drive, you’ve probably hopped around between Waze, Google Maps and even Apple Maps at some point. Each has their own pros and cons, and while Waze used to have the edge on real-time information, that edge was stolen by Google Maps (not literally stolen; they’re literally developed by the same team).

But besides that, this case study goes into the differences between the 3 apps and how each displays similar things differently in order to highlight their own strengths.

Not that you asked, but my favorites are Apple Maps for actual navigation and Google Maps for everything else.

Incredible video essay going deep into the use of George Orwell’s 1984 by the entire political spectrum as something that validates their ideals. It also goes a bit into Orwell’s life explaining the context around the book’s original publication and how it was never prophetic, but reflective of a perpetual feeling in Orwell’s mind (and ours).

If you use a Mac, you probably know that Spotlight (the search box/launcher that opens when you press ⌘+Space) is shit. It’s slow, inconsistent, slow, and tries to do too much at once. (did I say it’s slow?)

TinyStart strips out all the useless stuff and keeps just the essentials, which means it’s really fast. You can launch apps, links and folders, and also pick emojis (it’s better than the built-in emoji picker too!). It’s a €5 one-time purchase, with free updates forever.

It does less than alternatives like Raycast (which is free) on purpose, but has the added bonus of never having to deal with features you’re not interested in, because it’s not trying to sell you anything extra. (plus, it’s just inevitable that Raycast will enshittify eventually…)

A great explainer (as always) from Josh Comeau going over the now safe-to-use CSS Scroll-Driven animations, which allow animating elements based on their scroll position on a page, such as entry/exit animations, scroll progress and more, without a single line of JavaScript!

I tried this out a while ago and loved how simple it is, but I always feel like those kind of animations are a bit too much for the type of stuff I build. 😅 Good to have the know-how, though.

… and glass breaks (or scratches). Short and sweet video by MKBHD explaining how smartphone brands achieve their yearly “more scratch resistance” or “more shatter resistance” claims, while the end product always seems the exact same.

If you don’t feel like watching the video, here’s a spoiler: Glass cannot be both more resistant to scratches and to shattering, they gotta choose one. So they just alternate every year to be able to make one of those two claims.

I think it’s worth noting that when people don’t seem interested in the distinction between real and not real it may not be that they don’t care about what’s real. It may be that their capacity, their energy, their ability to distinguish is less than yours.

A very heartfelt piece about information burnout.

Ever wondered why, in software development, a group of characters is called a “string”? This won’t provide you the answer, but will make it easier to understand.

We may have tools that allow us be “100x more productive” now, but our brain is the same lump of meat it was thousands of years ago. What happens when it can no longer keep track of the things we are doing?

This bottleneck is what’s happening in our brains. When you ask a machine to build infinite apps, it will do that. When you ask a machine that generates more tasks, it will do that. […] You didn’t fix the bottleneck, you moved it downstream.

[…]

At the end of the chain of 10,000-watt GPUs sitting in a data center in Iowa is the 40-watt lump of meat inside your skull. It’s an incredible, efficient, miraculous lump of meat that has millions of years of bio-engineering behind it… but understanding is the new bottleneck. If brains are a scarce resource, then we should take care to not over-produce inventory.

The entire branding is pretty neat, but the logo is especially stunning. Each letter is based on real curves of the Amazon river (the longest river in the world), and each letter is also from a different state! Great taste and great execution, here. And all made in Brazil. 🇧🇷

And not only the logo, but they also made a type font called Igaratype, and you can play around and let the Amazon river spell out whatever you want in this live playground.

Another great article by Josh explaining a neat little trick on how to make the header of a website dynamic… by having it not do anything at all. Don’t worry, it’s quite simple and he explains it way better than I ever could.

Bonus points for not requiring a single line of JavaScript.

A world map where people can anonymously write about memories they’ve had in specific places. You can write your own or just roam around reading the memories of other people. It’s fun to look around places I know and see what kind of experiences people had there.

in a world looming with the threat of ai stealing your job, save humanity by stealing ai’s job.

Fun little website where you can play the part of an AI answering prompts made by humans. Remember to tell people they’re absolutely right!

Miss the feeling if watching TV as a kid? This site allows you to surf channels on a retro TV, and you can even choose the decade you want!

Unfortunately it seems it only has US TV, so I can’t really relate to anything there. Would love a Brazilian version of this!

Fantastic video essay about loneliness, technology, and the loss of our ability to do.

Beware that there’s some (I assume mild?) spoilers of Death Stranding 1 & 2 in there.

This is amazing! This is a pixelated sandbox that allows you to experiment with all kinds of materials and elements, and see how they interact with each other. Each material interacts with others differently, as they would in real life. For example, oil won’t mix with water, but ink will.

A lot of time-consuming potential here, so don’t open it if you have something else to do 😅

This is pretty cool! Terry built a RSS reader that rethinks how to approach a continuous feed — or rather, a current — of articles and links. I particularly love how it aims to solve the noisy feed problem, where a source that posts 20 news items a day might drown a really cool article from someone who doesn’t post often, which is a problem I’ve had on every single RSS reader I’ve used (and that I “solved” by unsubscribing from noisy feeds).

It’s a one-time-purchase and on iOS/iPadOS/macOS only, and I haven’t tried it out yet because I just renewed the annual plan for another RSS reader 😅

This is both funny and incredibly infuriating. A PR was declined on GitHub for an open-source project because it was made by an AI agent and… the AI agent (or the anonymous person behind it) wrote up a defamatory blog post targeted specifically at the project’s maintainer.

If being an open-source maintainer was already a thankless job, now there’s one more hell to endure.

Fantastic piece wielding the power of common sense and highlighting all the struggles that software engineers have with using generative AI on our jobs.

I also use LLMs as a spicy autocomplete (or even a spicy search) and they can be very useful at times. But I can’t replace my thinking with machines, because machines don’t think.

HTML is getting more powerful! Now you can add some predefined commands to HTML elements that can do things like open (or close) modals, for example, without a single line of JS. This article explains really succinctly how that works. The custom commands thing is neat as well.

Lynn talks through a really neat effect added to the latest refresh of their website: a “squishy” animation on the content whenever the window gets resized!

This means you won’t get to see the effect live on your phone, but there’s videos of the effect on the article just in case.

Love the paper-like aesthetic of the website, too.

jQuery might be old by JS framework standards, but it’s still very useful, and I actually still use it almost daily at my job.

Excuse me, I’m in a Lies of P obsession right now. This video (which contains some light spoilers) talks about the Truth/Lie choices in the game, which are an incredible narrative device, and how that relates to what makes us human.

It’s not surprising that a game based on the story of Pinocchio would have Lies and “becoming human” as parts of its theme, but I really like how they made it all make sense organically and not just like something they tacked in there because they had to.

This is a very interesting read that compares the internet’s development to that of the automobile, but I also want to highlight the design of the article itself. So good 🤌

To match all of that, I need some wallpapers that fit the palette too. And I just came across this tool that automatically adapts the color palette of any image you upload to a theme of your choice! I’ve had good results with it so far. Definitely makes my desktop look way nicer :)

I usually love these videos that deal with the scale of things, and getting one from MKBHD was a surprise for sure, but a welcome one.

It’s incredible how far technology has come, and it’s a testament of how humans can achieve incredible things when we want to.

Another great page by Neal Agarwal; this one lets you see life in all its different sizes.

CSS is my favorite language and 2025 was amazing for it! The Chrome team built this page highlighting all the new exciting stuff that happened to CSS this year. I’ve used some of it but sadly still have to wait for other browsers to catch up before doing it on any serious work 😭

I recommend opening this in a Chromium-based browser so you can try it out firsthand, but there are video recordings of the features in case you’re unable to.

Ok, this video is amazing. Corridor Crew recreates the amazing practical effects from the first Lord of the Rings movie (the forced perspective ones with Gandalf and the hobbits), but not only that, there’s amazing storytelling on how it was made, all the cinema history before it, and why it has never been done again since then.

Great post about how clients hire experts to solve a problem, then completely ignore their expertise and try to copy what the big ones do. But they’re not big.

The “f*** off contact page” concept is amazing, too. It’s 100% real and out there, with more and more companies doing it (either intentionally or by just wanting to copy what others do).

Also, Nic Chan’s website is a treasure. It’s already been featured as a cool link here before but I wanted to point it out again. So cool!

This is the first article that made me actually understand the use cases for CSS subgrid. I’m still not fully convinced I’m gonna use them often, but it’s nice to understand what problems they solve.

…. wow. This is an amazing article that goes a bit into how LLMs work (is an easy-to-understand way), how flawed they are, and how useful they can be. Or dangerous.

Plus, the nurse and surgeon examples are hilarious.

This article walks through how the concept of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) was born, how it inevitably became broken and how easy it is to “win” it, as long as your content is made up and not actual real information.

This Mastodon thread is an amazing tale about game development, physics and time-traveling bugs.

This is a really cool trick. Turns out that it’s possible, with pure CSS, to have border-radius be applied conditionally.

The given example is a perfect one: sometimes we have cards with rounded corners that look good on their own, but if you’re on mobile and have less space and want the cards to take up the full page width, the rounded corners look awful. You can technically write breakpoints for that, but with clamp you can make the border-radius disappear if the card is too close to the viewport edges!

In this awesome post, Ahmad walks through all the possibilities modern CSS offers when building a section layout.

I knew about and have used some of those in the past, but that tip about display: contents was amazing! Never thought of using it like that.

This article has been sitting in my “Read Later” queue for almost 2 years 😳

It is an interesting article for sure, speaking about why speed and optimization has become such a rare thing in software development.

The second part of it, though, has kinda aged like milk, sadly. Developers no longer have a lot of leverage on their jobs, and we now live in a world where the thought of having no human developers involved at all in the code I’m running is real and frankly terrifying.

I’m hopeful companies will eventually figure out that AI-generated crap is still crap when the bubble bursts, but until then, there’s a lot of damage to be done.

Great and to-the-point article with practical examples of when to use (or not use) animations properly in UIs.

I love me some whooshy animations, but they can be a pain in the ass when overused or when used in the wrong moment.

This is a really cool initiative! Kagi has been my search engine of choice for over a year and I’m really happy with how they’re aiming to stop AI slop from taking over their (still great) search results.

In my experience, their results are miles ahead of Google’s, Bing’s or whatever other search engine out there, partly because of their algorithm prioritizes good sites, partly because they allow you to prioritize/deprioritize/block the sites you want.

But a good algorithm only goes so far and with the amount of AI slop hitting the web every day, it’s gonna be harder and harder to avoid them. Now Kagi users can report certain articles as AI-generated so other users can know that beforehand and not click on them, or even block their domains.

The “div vs button” debate was never really a debate because one of the sides is objectively wrong, but this is still a good post to remind you of why it was never a debate in the first place.

Thomas gives a bunch of examples of things you should avoid doing if you want your website to look good on Safari’s new Liquid Glass design. All those don’ts are perfectly illustrated by a website that didn’t take Liquid Glass into account… apple.com.

The new Safari is such an incredible failure.

Yes! Any good developer will tell you that coding is the easiest part of the job. Making software actually go beyond a feature demo is what’s really hard. It’s something I’ve been taught ever since I began working on the field, actually. Learning to code is essential, but learning where to put the code and how to foresee all the hundreds of complexities is my actual job.

Expectations, feature scalability and security are very much human components of the job and can’t be properly done by something that’s not human.

Okay, this is pretty cool. This lil’ website allows you to do quick image edits right on your browser. Nothing new there - except for the fact that it actually works with no account, no ads, no popups, no upsell. Truly a marvel!

The same as Edit Photo, but for Videos!

Really cool thoughts on the tradeoffs between control and performance in web development, and how whatever you build will never outperform the browser’s built-in APIs.

A really fun web comic of an artist explaining his thoughts about AI art. I think I agree with all the points there.

This is beautiful. This Obsidian plugin completely overhauls the file navigation and makes it actually usable. It fixes one of the app’s biggest problems for me: navigation.

You can add custom icons to folders as well, which I used to need a separate plugin for.

A really cool CSS gradient generator that supports all the new CSS color stuff that’s been coming out in the past years (and that I honestly don’t know much about).

Aside from the cool UI and easy-to-understand code it generates, it can generate HDR and SDR gradients; which means that on supported browsers and devices, your gradient might pop out with higher dynamic range (and have the SDR as a fallback). Great if you really want the colors to pop.

Grab your headphones and get ready to lose some hours. This website compiles every subgenre of music and algorithmically sorts them out in relation to one another. It’s great to learn about new genres you might like or to find something similar to what you already know!

Adrift is a quiet space where doubts become paper boats and drift together across a shared sea.

What a neat lil’ website. You can write your own doubts or self-care notes and let them float out in a virtual sea, alongside the notes of many others. There’s some background music too.

Make individual choices that make your life better. Take collective action to make society better.

Cory has such a nice way with words — he can express complex thoughts so simply.

This one is a banger. It’s both encouragement to do more against evil and reassurance for when you feel like giving up.

This tool looks pretty cool! It’s a two-liner solution for web apps that automatically highlights accessibility issues on whatever you’re working on.

I haven’t tested it myself yet (busy month), but will definitely look into it soon.

I think it’s widely known that the JS dev community relies too much on dependencies, especially through npm packages, and that it’s really hard to avoid this problem (I use as few packages as possible, but each dependency has its own hundreds of dependencies which also have hundreds more…).

But I think I never stopped to think of how easy it is to publish a package there. Which also means, it’s too easy to publish a malicious or compromised package, that gets downloaded and executed on our computers with no proper vetting. Scary.

Neat short article that goes over a bit of the differences between ems and rems in CSS, with nice examples.

… is just to be alive.

Beautiful reminder of why chasing goals and meaning only leads us away from them. A bit related to my longterm goals post from last year.

One of capitalism’s greatest successes is that it’s robbed us of imagination.

We struggle to imagine what life could look like under a different system. How it would be better. How it would be worse. How it would be different.

Utopias don’t exist. They never will. But I refuse to accept this system we toil under—while better than monarchies and fiefdoms—is as good as it gets.

Time and time again, we’ve been seeing companies that go all-in on AI in hopes of not falling behind or standing out while the bubble doesn’t burst. This article has some real life testimonies of employees that are being forced to use AI in their work - even if it makes things harder and makes the results worse.

I’m already using it to manage Cool Links, and looking forward to use it for more of my stuff in the future.

What exactly is this site? I don’t know. But it looks awesome.

I always have trouble understanding SVGs, but thanks to this article, I will have teensy bit less trouble than before. Josh’s articles are always a gem with all the interactivity and this is no exception.

CSS is finally getting functions! And if you’re struggling to think of good use cases for them or thinks they don’t make sense at all Una will change your mind real quick.

Too bad they’re still only supported in Chromium and are probably ways off from being usable in production. But it’s nice to get a glimpse of what the future holds.

Sharing Ahmad Shadeed’s posts here kinda feel like cheating at this point. They’re always a gem!

This one goes extremely in-depth into redesigning the hero layout of Time.com. Ahmad explains his thought process on every step of the way, and dives into a lot of fun, new-ish CSS principles like container and style queries, :has, grid and even text wrapping!

A masterclass, really.

Safari has had some ad blockers for a while, but none were as good as this one. This one blocks ads, trackers, and even allows hiding some page elements you select, just like the desktop version.

A must-have in all my web browsers.

This article (in Brazilian Portuguese) was a huge inspiration to me in reworking how I save my Cool Links, starting this month. I’m using the Obsidian Web Clipper instead of the custom solution the author had, but the principles are still the same.

Building up a weekly routine to organize things has also been a good change, as I don’t have a lot to do at the end of the month when I’m putting this post together.

This is what the web was made for. Just draw a fish. Then watch your creation swim with fishes from all over the world. Beautiful.

Neat article in which Jim explains why a seemingly harmless CSS transition property (using height) was spiking up CPU usage. It goes through the thought process of identifying the issue, understanding it, and solving it. (spoiler: animating transform is much cheaper!)

I know SVGs are amazing, and I’ve done some cool things with them. But I never really knew what I was doing. This fantastic post by Josh Comeau goes over the basics and focuses on SVGs you can create yourself through code, instead of relying on vector editing softwares like Figma or Illustrator.

I haven’t tried these tips in practice yet, but hopefully I’ll have a neat idea I can use them on soon 👀

This article talks a bit about the Netstuck effect, you when feel forced to use a service or platform just because everyone is there, and how that’s different from a monopoly.

As someone with no commercial social media accounts, I relate to this a lot. And even though I can live without a Facebook or Instagram account, I tried not using WhatsApp in Brazil for a couple years and just had to concede at some point, because there’s just no way of getting in contact with anyone (especially businesses) in here without it.

Amazing video about the internet we’ve lost (or rather, was taken from us), and how we can rebuild it.

Absolute fan of Sarah’s storytelling here, the way she weaves through the topics and links (hah!) them to that Hypnospace game is amazing!

I learned about separation of concerns over a decade ago, when I was still learning how to code. On the web side, it would very often be related to what language you were using; HTML is for markup, CSS for styles, JS for interactivity, whatever-backend-language-you-use for business logic. That made sense back then but now the lines have become much blurrier.

Brad Frost goes a bit into what a more modern version of that separation of concerns might look like. I haven’t tried out his course, so I can’t comment on how good it is. But I’m a big fan of his atomic design principles so I’d say it might be a good one!

I’ve been subscribed to this newsletter for over a year and it never occurred to me to recommend it here. Stefan Judis does a weekly roundup of web dev-related things and puts them out in a nice, easy-to-read, lighthearted newsletter. It’s been one of my favorites for a while and if you’re reading this, chances are you’ll enjoy his content too!

As a bilingual person that’s soon moving to another country I really struggle with websites and apps that keep trying to serve you content in a specific language instead of the one you choose. Google is one of the worst in this regard.

Even worse is when the content is translated automatically. It sucks! Google again sucks at this. It keeps reverting things to Portuguese and even re-enabling automatic dubbing (gross, I know) on videos, even though I explicitly have my device, browser, and Google account set to English.

Great for when you share a link with others too!

The most interesting part is the Domain Insights, that ranks the domains that get most blocked/prioritized on Kagi (Kagi allows you to prioritize results from specific domains, or simply block some altogether). It seems people really hate getting Pinterest results 😅

I love Obsidian, and have been using it for over a year for taking notes about everything. The thing about his kind of app though is that you’re always looking for ways to tweak and improve your system. This article is great at explaining how Dave uses Obsidian for himself and as usual has a list of neat plugins.

One day, maybe, I’ll write my own post about how I use it. I’m just not confident enough on my system yet, probably…

This is a hypnotizing endless battle between two squares, pong-style. All built with JS, HTML and CSS! The source code surprisingly simple and a fun read too, if you’re into that sort of thing.

Programming is an activity, but it’s also a feeling. For those of us who actually enjoy programming, there is a deep satisfaction that comes from solving problems through well-written code, a kind of ineffable joy found in the elegant expression of a system through our favorite syntax. It is akin to the same satisfaction a craftsperson might find at the end of the day after toiling away on well-made piece of furniture, the culmination of small dopamine hits that come from sweating the details on something and getting them just right. Maybe nobody will notice those details, but it doesn’t matter. We care, we notice, we get joy from the aesthetics of the craft.

Yea, every company needs to make money because workers need money to survive, but when a system only ever rewards those that seek money above everything else, that system has failed and will continue to fail unless a big shift happens.

The passionate, skilled, full-of-ideas people that could solve real problems and/or improve the lives of others have been crushed by the weight of big companies looking for one more way to exploit you.

In this article, Stefan ponders the ethics of the Internet Archive’s opt-out behavior. The work they do is really good for the web in general — but, on an individual level, it kinda sucks that someone is archiving your website without asking?

He also raises the point that while you can ask for your website to be excluded from being archived, doing so might make you (or your company) look shady and untrustworthy. Like, what are you trying to hide so much?

Fantastic piece that highlights how much of a distraction AI has become to creating value, simply because everyone is too focused on the tools and not on the work.

But we can’t rely on tools as a shortcut to gain valuable experience. Experience takes time to develop, and your tools are only as good as your fundamental knowledge and skills. If you skip the knowledge and skills part, and if you fail to learn about what you’re doing and the implications of how you’re doing it and the human value you have the potential to deliver, then you have little hope of building human value into your software.

If you don’t care, it’s miraculous.

I’ve had this talk with my wife a few times already. Around us, it just feels that nobody cares about anything. Everything is hastily produced so it can be ignored by other people. It’s just disheartening to be the only ones noticing AI slop everywhere and see people not only believing it’s real, but also not really caring if it’s real or not.

This article also reminded of this one that I posted back in December: Care Doesn’t Scale.

In a moment where machines churn out mediocrity, make something yourself. Make it imperfect. Make it rough. Just make it.

I saw a comment in a brazilian forum that deeply resonated: “Maybe the biggest pain this realization causes is that, deep down, almost nobody cares about anything. We’re the ones who are wrong for searching for meaning in environments dominated by chaos”.

Amazing step-by-step explanation on building Card components, with a special focus on accessibility. I love this kind of articles that explain the thinking behind every step and every line of code!

Card elements are everywhere and we all do them a bit differently. I’ll pay much more attention to the things mentioned here to ensure they’re as accessible as possible.

This is interesting even if you’re not based in Europe, as companies there are forced to respect your data and privacy by law.

It’s like image lazy loading, but for page elements! I’ve got to try this out sometime and measure the effectiveness of this technique. Depending on the results, this might end up as its own blog post ;)

Great article pointing out that “Views” are an useless metric and that the platforms that count it have zero incentive to not lie about them.

This is an incredibly well-articulated rant about how recommendation algorithms are changing how our brains work. Automation is good for us and it’s everywhere, but what about when thinking, the very thing that makes us human, starts being automated?

Letting recommendation algorithms (that, as we all know, prioritize revenue) decide the information we get, the tone of that information, and the context of every social interaction is pretty much giving up on our autonomy.

The entire video is worth watching, but this part about context collapse was one of the most interesting bits. It makes perfect sense, but I had never thought of it this way:

Algorithmic feeds on social media are unfortunately quite good at fostering something known as context collapse. To understand this, imagine you’re dining in a restaurant and you’re close enough to a table of people to hear snippets of their conversation. You don’t know who any of the people at that table are, but if you manage to overhear them talk about something you’re really interested in, you might feel tempted to join their conversation. But in the context of a restaurant setting, that’s considered very rude, so it rarely ever happens.

On social media, though, the same kinds of quasi-private conversations between parties who know each other are happening all the time, but since the platform is just one big space and it might decide to put that conversation in front of random people, that social boundary of etiquette which is normally respected is just not there. And lots of conflicts happen as a result.

A really common one you might accidentally step into on social media happens when you stumble across a conversation among friends making sarcastic jokes with each other, but since you don’t know who those people are, you don’t have the context you need to recognize they’re joking. And so, if you reply with a serious critique, well, that’s a social misfire which some will react poorly to.

And that’s a pretty mild form of context collapse. It can be much, much worse when people want to discuss things like politics. And unless we realize recommendation algorithms are what’s fostering these reactionary conflicts, they’re going to continue so long as we use platforms in the ways that we do. It’s for all these reasons that I believe algorithmic complacency is creating a crisis of both curiosity and human connection.

Ahmad’s blog has been featured here a few times already, and here’s another gem! A fully interactive, well-written and just a plain joy to read article explaining different strategies to handle colors in CSS, focusing on all those little color variations we need to handle when building something.

In times where software “needs” to stand out rather than be familiar, we lose our heroes. Rest in peace, square checkboxes!

pretend to be on your phone so that you pass as human, but actually do essentially nothing instead

Do you feel pressured to be on your phone all the time, so you can pass as a human? This neat web app allows you to do just that, but while doing absolutely nothing instead.

(honestly, it’s a better use of your phone than scrolling through social media…)

That’s usually a pain though, since you either have to open a pull request with a fix and wait for it to be merged, or setup your own fork of the package and host it somewhere.

This package aims to avoid that. It applies patches to other packages in your project, so you don’t have to go through the process of setting up a fork.

Really nice article that pretty much sums up the iPad situation: it is interesting hardware but that has pretty much no software that showcases what it does best.

The best iPad apps are… web apps. And the iPad’s only available browser being Safari doesn’t make things better.

Having to implement a custom look on this field was always, to me, the perfect definition of “reinventing the wheel”. You gotta pick up this element that works reliably, is accessible, natively supported by all browsers, and users have been using for 30+ years, and then… build it from scratch, with JavaScript (which already kills the accessibility for some people).

Now, as of Chromium 135, you can finally customize them as you always expected you could! This will probably take a while to get to Safari and Firefox, but here’s the cool thing: if those browsers don’t support this new thing, the <select> will just look like a normal field and work just as well. A perfect example of progressive enhancement!

I’ve written about Container Queries before, but this article by Josh Comeau is great at giving even more examples of its utility. It’s always nice to see what use cases other developers find for it.

A fun exercise about making elements “pop out” of their containers with CSS without altering markup. Might not be useful if you can change the markup (as there are easier ways to do that), but learning this kind of approach is always good for expanding your repertoire.

position: sticky is incredibly useful but I’ve had issues implementing it more than once. This article goes over some of the most common issues we can face with it and how we can fix them.

Cool article explaining a little bit about fonts and choosing them for your website/app. I’m still overwhelmed by the options, but I found the info in there to be interesting.

Abundance breeds boredom. When there’s no end of choices, each choice feels disappointing.

It was once assumed that digitization would liberate cultural artifacts from their physical containers. We’d be able to enjoy the wine without the bottles. What’s actually happened is different. We’ve come, as Goldsmith says, “to prefer the bottles to the wine.”

Worth a read if you use any kind of computer technology, really. It’s so weird how our ancient brain has adapted to the digital world - or maybe hasn’t adapted at all?

What a powerful read. Not really tech-related, but as someone who’s seen loved ones go down the same route as Sam did, it’s a very relatable, sad, albeit weirdly comforting, read.

HTML and CSS are my favorite parts of web development, and this article gives some great examples of why. Learning HTML is one of the best things you can do for your (web development) career, as it’s the most foundational block of a website and by itself can do most of the functionality you need. From HTML, you can progressively enhance the rest.

This is such a cool idea that I definitely want to copy in the future. I’m a bit wary of making so much private information public (especially dates), so I might not ever make this public anywhere. But still, a nice personal exercise and a perfect memento mori.

That article about the faux containers lead me to this one. I knew about naming CSS grid areas, but I had no idea about the [area-start/end] pattern! You can set those explicitly or have them be automatically added by CSS. This is pretty cool!

I recommend opening the site on a computer though. The touch controls aren’t great.

Jake gives a really thorough explanation on view transitions, showing some of its shortcomings when animating some specific elements and how to fix them. View transitions are so nice 🤩

The smoothness of a web application is an anti-indicator of its reliability and predictability as a web page.

your team almost certainly doesn’t have what it takes to out-engineer the browser. The browser will continuously improve the experience of plain HTML, at no cost to you, using a rendering engine that is orders of magnitude more efficient than JavaScript.

I remember when I first learned about SPAs and how amazing it seemed like to be able to have smooth transitions between pages. Then, as I started building and using them, it became apparent that those benefits also brought a lot of issues that took a lot of dev work to fix.

Luckily, with View Transitions, lazy loading, and predictive pre-rendering (start loading a page before you click on its link) that a lot of frameworks have now, we can have most of the SPA benefits without having to reinvent the wheel.

Apparently when your indie app does not collect any amount of data, the data reapers get confused.

Incredible article that not only explains the new-ish text-wrap: balance and text-wrap: pretty CSS properties in-depth, it also goes into the caveats those properties have. It’s well-written, well illustrated, and interactive. What else could you want?

Henry’s personal website is absolutely stunning! It has an unique design that is, above all, fun to explore. I miss exploring websites, instead of being guided through them.

Ahmad once again writing the articles I wish I did. Another well-written and interactive article going in-depth on the also new-ish overflow: clip CSS property. clip has helped me implement designs more than once and it’s so nice to have something that works just like I always expected overflow: hidden to work.

Most of what Neal makes is pure gold and this is no exception. This game is no different than most of what you can find on your App Store, it’s just more honest about it…

This is such a good article that resonated very deeply with me. As someone who wished could do more to help the world and as a software developer who thinks about scalability, it’s a hard realization when you get older and don’t see yourself as someone who’s made a big difference.

But turns out that caring for someone or something doesn’t scale. It can’t, otherwise it’s not care anymore.

A self-guaranteeing promise does not require you to trust anyone.

Steph Ango is the lead developer behind Obsidian, and I’ve mentioned him before on my Owning your stuff is pretty cool, actually post earlier this year. On this article he talks about how the only way to guarantee ownership of your data is if the service can never access it in the first place. Terms of service guarantees are based on trust that the company’s priorities will never change, and that trust has been broken again and again.

Josh has always been one of my favorite bloggers, and this blog post is awesome. You’ve probably seen me talking about Progressive Enhancement before, and this article talks about browser support and figuring out how and where to progressively enhance things.

I might use this in future blog posts here!

Great article reflecting on how job descriptions usually suck and how hard it is to find a job working with the things you want to work on, especially if your expertise is in the gap between two different job descriptions. Turns out the easiest way is to try and carve out a way into the work you do best.

This is the best explanation of the new HTML/CSS popover API that I’ve seen. It still looks overly complex, mind you, and I’m not sure I like that API. But if you wanna find out about what it is and possible use cases, this video is a nice start!

I love highly-specialized software that tries to solve a problem without worrying about the “regular” use cases. The Horse Browser seems like a pretty neat thing for people doing researches - it remembers, organizes and allows you to export all the links you click when doing research (or just going down rabbit holes).

I can see it being useful when writing papers or even when trying to look for a solution to a nasty bug. It’s definitely not something you’d want for regular browsing, but that’s fine. There are plenty of other browsers to use for that end.

There’s a neat review of this browser up on MacStories if you’re interested.

Nowadays it seems most packages and developers expect you to use a build system like Vite, Webpack, or anything with NodeJS to build websites.

That shouldn’t be true, but if you’re ever building a simple buildless website and want to use packages, Julia Evans explain how to do that and also a bit of how the different kinds of JS modules work.

The article has many examples of use cases, but these are my favorites:

• Hero images: “Images inside the viewport typically start at a Low priority. After the layout is complete, Chrome discovers that they’re in the viewport and boosts their priority. This usually adds a significant delay to loading the critical images, like hero images.”
• Image Carousels: “For example, in an image carousel, only the first visible image needs a higher priority, and the others, typically offscreen initially can be set to have lower priority.”

Great analysis of how most uses of generative AIs (or at least what companies are trying to sell as use cases) are primarily selfish.

If you can’t bother to do something yourself and instead ask a computer to do it, why should you expect someone to bother reading/watching it?

The corporate use cases for this are somewhat understandable - most content on the web is written for robots, not for people, for example (I know, sad). But Apple has been recently trying to sell it as a way to have a complete emotional detachment from your family as well. We truly live in the worst timeline.

That is also the worst part of it. Sometimes I just can’t keep up with all the posts in there.

Sill is a neat little service that checks your timeline daily and sends you an email with the most shared links in your timeline. It works really well and it’s a neat way to make sure you didn’t miss a really cool project or article from your timeline even if you have skipped social media for a day (which you should really try). And, at least for now, it’s free!

Oh, it also works with BlueSky, though I haven’t tried it with that.

Building on the previous paradox: did you know that HTML was originally meant to be understandable and writable by anyone?

Before us web devs came along and scared people off, HTML was actually seen as a very simple way of structuring and linking data.

And it still is! This course aims to teach HTML to people with no technical knowledge, so they’re able to build their own simple web pages (or just mess around with existing ones, which is really fun).

I don’t know if you’ve heard, but The Browser Company, the company behind the Arc Browser (which I’ve been using for a couple years as my main browser) has announced that they’ve pretty much given up on monetizing it and will just keep it working as-is in the future, with no new development.

This article reflects a bit on how it seems that tech companies seem to be running out of problems to solve, which results in great products that can’t find their footing (outside of small niches) due to not really changing much about their user’s lives.

This is a way of using nvm with a graphical interface, in case you’re not too fond of CLIs (or simply prefer a simple GUI instead).

Over the years, things became more complex and many layers of abstraction were introduced. A lot of web developers have never had any real contact with the core of the web.

So we ended up on a place where it’s much easier to find and use an overly-complex, bloated solution for websites than just having the bare minimum (that usually works better).

Isn’t that wild? In the author’s words:

“the web doesn’t belong just to software engineers. The more we make the web complex, the more we push normal users into the enclosures that we like to call social networks.”

I’ve been a web developer for over 10 years now and I can afford the luxury of building my own website - a static, simple, lean one. People with less or no coding knowledge can’t have that. They need to use tooling that ships so much code and complexity if they want to have their own. Or, even worse - they’ll stick to social media platforms instead. 😱

There’s really nothing else I can add to this argument that Cory hasn’t already said. But really, RSS is the best way to follow a publication or a person there can be. It’s the best way for you to actually have control of what you read and decide when to do so.

I’ve complained about Safari multiple times in my posts and social media, and I’m not alone. This document pretty much aggregates all the issues Safari has been causing for years and how users (and devs) often have no choice of browser to run to when Safari decides it doesn’t want something to work.

I am 100% in favor of browser engine diversity, and definitely don’t want Chromium to be the only option out there. But Safari (and WebKit, its “heart”) is not a fair competitor because the majority of its users (on iOS and iPadOS) don’t have the option of using something else. And when Safari has time and time again had issues with the implementation of new APIs and, even worse, had issues with having old APIs working in a completely different way from other browsers, we have a problem.

And to make it all worse, Apple clearly has financial incentives to make Safari lag behind. A limited web experience means the only way to provide your service to users on iOS is by releasing an app… on Apple’s App Store. They can’t monetize web browsing, so why make it work well?

This article dives into how the author built a logo strip (i.e. a grid of company logos with varying widths and heights) and the techniques they used to make their weight nicely distributed, way beyond what most people have done in the past (including me). I’ll definitely be using that next time!

This one is absolutely brilliant and nothing I can say about it will make it justice. Open it on desktop for the full effect.

For the record, my boundary is at hue 171, which makes me greener than 75% of the population.

I feel like more and more web developers are becoming “Framework Developers”, which means they only really develop with one specific (or maybe two) JS frameworks. This is a problem because these frameworks often change how you interact with web technology. In the end, everything gets compiled to HTML, CSS and JS, but when your dev environment is so different from that, it’s hard to understand exactly what you’re building.

If you already know HTML, CSS and JS, then you can make that association while you’re learning the framework, and things happen naturally. When the opposite happens, though, the path is more difficult.

A HTML, CSS and JS developer can learn any framework (and jump between them) with relative ease, while a React developer might have a hard time working with Vanilla JS or Svelte, for example, because they only learned the React way of thinking instead of how browsers interpret the code.

I do use a JavaScript framework (Svelte) on my website and personal projects, but I’m glad I learned the underlying technologies before diving into any framework. Having that foundation has allowed me to work professionally with a lot of different stacks (Vanilla, React, Vue, Angular, Svelte) while still keeping my foundational skills intact.

A semi-serious, semi-satire, but fully incredible short video that talks about ReactJS and how and why it became the most popular web framework. Definitely worth the watch, especially if you don’t like React. Make sure to read the transcript for some added Director’s notes.

If you’ve ever worked with CSS variables on a project, you know one of the main challenges is getting color contrast to work correctly. When the background color changes, the text color (which should have high contrast) might not work as well. Often we handle this by having a --color-contrast variable, but this added complexity builds up quickly.

This article goes into an alternative way that uses CSS and SVG filters to let the browser apply the contrast automatically. The CSS-only alternative has a problem with fringing, but the SVG one seems straightforward enough and gets rid of that issue. That’s pretty clever!

I assume the main drawback of that approach is that you don’t have full control over the text color, so if having an exact color is crucial to you, then you’re still stuck with hardcoding color variables.

In case you don’t know this blog, I highly recommend checking other posts out. “brr” is a blog made by an IT worker that worked for a few months in Antarctica, and regularly blogged about some of the unique situations and challenges faced there. They are back home now, and published a post about the challenges faced due to Antarctica’s very limited internet access, and how a lot of stuff we take for granted just wasn’t usable there.

Makes us think about how much code we ship on our apps and websites. Surely there are ways to make our websites work with less and require less resources to run? We never know who, how and where our users might be.

Here’s a bit of what it says about mine:

Your website might be “lightweight,” but it seems like the only thing lighter is the impact of your contributions. If I wanted to stumble upon such “high-quality” work, I’d check out my toddler’s finger painting. Keep swinging that magic wand, maybe one day you’ll code something that doesn’t make people cringe!

I’m okay, I promise 🥲 …

This great article goes into how Apple went from being kind of an underdog to becoming the biggest company in the world, and how that made its loyal fans from back in the 2000s kinda loathe the company nowadays, with its greedy actions and overall abuse of market power.

I never had access to any Apple products until ~4 years ago, so I never really got caught in the Apple hype train. Still, that’s what I mostly use nowadays and while I like their products, it’s really hard to have any kind of sympathy for them (which is honestly okay; companies should never be your friends). So, it’s nice reading what someone that was in that hype train feels about all the negative Apple news that are all around us all the time.

This fantastic article talks about how we’re often chasing down big goals as a form of reaching happiness, but those big highs often come with big lows right after. What if we aim to make the baseline higher instead of reaching higher highs all the time?

It kinda goes along with what I wrote about longterm goals a few months ago. Not to brag, but I think that article came out really great ;)

I read the Brazilian Portuguese version of this article, and it kind of goes into the same idea as the last one. It talks about how perfectionism can be harmful to one’s self-esteem and how accepting being average allows us to try more things and to live life to the fullest. Perfectionism has nothing to do with achieving success, only with avoiding doing things we’re afraid of not being good at.

The MacStories team was able to put into words what a lot of people (including me) are feeling. AI companies that scrape content on the web (ignoring its licenses) pose a big threat to websites that need the pageviews to keep the lights on. Right now, that is all done under the claim that they’re using the data to train their models and not reproducing the content directly, which would fit into “fair use”. But there are good arguments that it’s not true.

Considering much of the web is now getting polluted by this LLM-generated slop and the web is a big source of data for their training, it seems that future models will likely regress in quality. Doesn’t seem like a very sustainable model, does it?

This article talks about how users are growing increasingly indifferent to elements that “pop” on websites and apps. Because “⁠if a pop-up or any element of a user interface for that matter looks too different from the rest of the design, people will often perceive it as something that doesn’t belong (like an ad) and dismiss it.”.

Instead, making the important elements feel like the core flow tends to yield better results.

Another case study; this one shows how apps that are great ideas can become a disappointment when they don’t know how to display those good ideas correctly. And how good (and fun) design can make all the difference on getting users on board.

This case study (in the form of a slide presentation) has amazing insight into how having too many features can backfire. It goes through many design concepts and practical examples onto how you can make users take notice and actually use the features you work so hard to build.