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Figma Slides Is a Beautiful Disaster
Some highlights and lowlights.
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Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer
How to figure out what the user experience should be when you don’t have time, budget, or a design team.
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Gurus of 90s Web Design: Zeldman, Siegel, Nielsen
With the rise of Flash and CSS in 1997, three web design philosophies emerge. David Siegel advocates for 'hacks', Jakob Nielsen keeps it simple, while Jeffrey Zeldman combines flair with usability.
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What makes code hard to read: Visual patterns of complexity (2023)
Not long ago, I was auditing a codebase for work (looking for bugs) when I realized that despite the quality of the code, I was becoming mentally fatigued extremely quickly and had a hard time working on it for long stretches of time…
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Shaders: How to draw high fidelity graphics with just x and y coordinates
How to draw high fidelity graphics when all you have is an x and y coordinate.
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Users only care about 20% of your application
I often destroyed our home computer when I was a kid. Armed with only 2GB of storage, I'd constantly hunt for files to delete to save space. But I learned the hard way that .ini files are actually imp
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macOS 26 Tahoe's Dead Canary Utility App Icons
These are the not the work of carpenters who care about the backs of the cabinets they’re building. These icons are so bad, they look like the work of untrained “How hard can it be?” dilettante carpenters who only last a few days on the job before sawing off one of their own fingers.
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Iconography of the PuTTY tools
In March 2025 I received an email asking about PuTTY’s “logo” – the icon used by the Windows executable. The sender wanted to know where it had come from, and how it had evolved over time.
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Overengineered Anchor Links
Learn about the overengineered anchoring pattern, a technique to improve the user experience of scrollable content.
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Cosmos Keyboard: Scan your hand, build a keyboard
Cosmos is the easiest way to design a keyboard around your one-of-a-kind hands. Scan your hand using just your phone camera, then fit a keyboard to the scan. The key positions align to your fingers' lengths and movement.
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Our interfaces have lost their senses
We programmed them by punching cards, plugging in wires, and flipping switches. Programmers walked among banks of switches and cables, physically choreographing their logic. Being on a computer used to be a full-body experience.
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A Navajo weaving of an integrated circuit: the 555 timer
The noted Diné (Navajo) weaver Marilou Schultz recently completed an intricate weaving composed of thick white lines on a black background, ...
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The subtle art of designing physical controls for cars
Prototyping a concept for simpler, physical climate controls
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The iPhone 15 Pro’s Depth Maps
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...
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Apple has a private CSS property to add Liquid Glass effects to web content
I have an incredibly boring summer hobby: looking at the changelog for the WebKit Github repo. Why? Because I spend a chunk of my professional life working with webviews inside mobile apps and I like to get an early peek into what's coming in the next version of iOS. Since
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Planetfall
Gentle readers, I have just wrapped up a fun side project that will be of great interest to a very small number of you. The result of one of the most technically demanding efforts of my career, I a…
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Rules for creating good-looking user interfaces
Creating good-looking user interfaces has always been a struggle for me. If you’re in the same camp, this might help.
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An SVG is all you need
SVGs are pretty cool - vector graphics in a simple XML format. They are supported on just about every device and platform, are crisp on every display, and can have embedded scripts in to make them interactive. They're way more capable than many people realise, and I think we can capitalise on some of that unrealised…
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Syntax highlighting is a waste of an information channel (2020)
No newsletter next week Running the TLA+ workshop. No way I'm gonna have any brainpower after that. Syntax highlighting is a waste of an information channel...
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Craft software that makes people feel something
Recently, people have been asking me why I’m pausing Boo to work on a programming language. I think it would actually be cool to write down how I feel.
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What is “good taste” in software engineering?
Technical taste is different from technical skill. You can be technically strong but have bad taste, or technically weak with good taste. Like taste in general…
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Making a font of my handwriting
Recently I’ve been on a small campaign to try to make my personal website more… personal. Little ways to make it obvious it’s mine and personal , not just another piece of the boring corporate dystopia that is most of the web these days. I don’t quite want to fully regress to the Geocities era and fill the screen with…
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The High Heel Problem
This article looks at how different types of shoes can affect game development and examines how games deal with this in practice.
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Apple's Liquid Glass is prep work for AR interfaces, not just a design refresh
Why Apple Just Killed the iPhone Interface (And What Comes Next)
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3D Line Drawings
This is an experiment examining how to create a 3D line drawing of a scene. In this post, I will describe how this can be done by augmenting the process of generating 3D Gaussian Splats 3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering , by Kerbl et al. and leveraging a process to transform photographs into…
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The beauty of a text only webpage
There's something I love about opening a text-only webpage. They're a refuge from the GDPR cookie banners, the trashy ads, the email opt-ins, and the god...
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Making an intersection unsafe for pedestrians to save seconds for drivers
How the redesign of a street in a walkable college town reflects our broader values for cars over people.
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New layouts with CSS Subgrid
Subgrid allows us to extend a grid template down through the DOM tree, so that deeply-nested elements can participate in the same grid layout. At first glance, I thought this would be a helpful convenience, but it turns out that it’s so much more. Subgrid unlocks exciting new layout possibilities, stuff we couldn’t do…
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Simulating hand-drawn motion with SVG filters
A practical guide to implementing the boiling line animation effect using SVG filter primitives and JavaScript - Blog post by Camillo Visini