Cool Links

Last month I shared that the State of Devs survey was going on, and now the results are out! I always love this type of surveys and the results are really interesting, even if somewhat expected. Lots of uncertainty in the industry, you might be able to guess why.

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.

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.

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.

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 😅

This is a survey for developers about everything but coding, that is accepting answers up to September 5. If you’re a developer, it’s worth participating! It doesn’t take long to fill and can help understanding the current environment of the dev industry in such chaotic times.

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.

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!

Yesss! I’ve waited for this for so long! One of the worst parts of my job is trying to implement those kind of separators (really common in designs) without this functionality being an actual thing yet. So many hacks, complex calculations, for something so visually trivial.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I definitely didn’t expect seeing a new major jQuery release in 2026, but here it is! This is the first major release in 10 years and it doesn’t bring a lot of new things on the surface, but seems to have been a major overhaul behind the scenes. Looks like a future v5 will bring in bigger changes.

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.

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.