Hacker News Hug of Deaf
About three years ago, I set up a tiny netcat loop on one of my Debian servers to accept arbitrary connections from the Hacker News (HN) community. The loop ran for 24 hours and did exactly three things whenever a client connected:
An interactive guide to SVG paths
SVG gives us many different primitives to work with, but by far the most powerful is the element. Unfortunately, it’s also the most inscrutable, with its compact Regex-style syntax. In this tutorial, we’ll demystify this infamous element and see some of the cool things we can do with it!
The web does not need gatekeepers: Cloudflare’s new “signed agents” pitch
Do you register with Google, Amazon or Microsoft to use the web?
Aspects of modern HTML/CSS you may not be familiar with
An overview of what makes modern CSS so awesome.
Tags to make HTML work like you expect
I was watching Alex Petros’ talk and he has a slide in there titled “Incantations that make HTML work correctly”. This got me thinking about the basic snippets…
Google de-indexed Bear Blog and I don't know why
Preamble: The whole affair is Google’s fault and not Bear Blog’s. Huge thanks to Herman—Bear Blog’s founder and dev—for his patience and help. A month afte...
Don't Download Apps
The personal blog of Caleb Jay Rogers, Software Engineer
The Future Is Niri
The worst "street-cred" I have is that I've been using tiling window managers for thirty-five percent of my life: five years with Sway and two...
Figma Slides Is a Beautiful Disaster
Some highlights and lowlights.
Rendering Crispy Text on the GPU
Rubén Osorio’s blog
You might not need WebSockets
Websockets are powerful tools that have become a fan-favorite for building realtime applications, but you might be using them for all the wrong reasons. Let's explore the pitfalls of websockets and how we can use plain old HTTP to get the same job done.
Where it's at://
From handles to hosting.
Improving recommendation systems and search in the age of LLMs
Model architectures, data generation, training paradigms, and unified frameworks inspired by LLMs.
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.
Web Browsers have stopped blocking pop-ups
If you were an Internet user for a few years on either side of the turn of the millennium, you will remember pop-up advertisements.
FediMeteo: A €4 FreeBSD VPS Became a Global Weather Service
How a simple idea turned into an international weather service on the Fediverse.
Overengineered Anchor Links
Learn about the overengineered anchoring pattern, a technique to improve the user experience of scrollable content.
Github scam investigation: Thousands of “mods” and “cracks” stealing data
While looking through the articles on a "social engineering" themed forum I discovered a relatively new scam scheme that shocked me. People create thousands of GitHub repositories with all sorts of things - from Roblox and Fortnite mods to "cracked" FL Studio and Photoshop. As soon as you download and
Building Bluesky comments for my blog
I hate disqus too much.
Django: what’s new in 6.0
Django 6.0 was released today, starting another release cycle for the loved and long-lived Python web framework (now 20 years old!). It comes with a mosaic of new features, contributed to by many, some of which I am happy to have helped with. Below is my pick of highlights from the release notes.
Homomorphic encryption in iOS 18
A mathematical miracle enables Apple's servers to process your photos while never knowing anything about them
Doing Rails Wrong
What is a Banana Curving Machine? Well it's a fantastic apparatus that does what it says. Curves Bananas.
Okta's NextJS-0auth troubles
When AI engineering fails: Dealing with hallucinations, misattribution, and broken code in an Okta/Auth0 pull request maintained by AI.
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.
Google unkills JPEG XL?
A quick summary of the format's road to stardom
My failed attempt to shrink all NPM packages by 5%
It seemed like a great idea at first.
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