I typically start new front-end prototypes with a single HTML file that I view using a file:// URL. I enjoy this practice of incrementally growing my projects, so I’ll keep working in that single file for as long as I can. Once it becomes unwieldy, I’ll split out the CSS and JavaScript into dedicated files. Then when…
A chatbot is the lazy user interface. It puts all the burden on the user to articulate good questions.
If we're building things that we want to work in five or ten or even 20 years, we need to avoid dependencies and use the web with no layers in between.
Programming, Coffee and Indie Hacking
Here’s an HDR QR Code . If you’re viewing this on an Apple device’s built-in display, it should work. If the big QR code is brighter than the smaller one, it works.
This is my opinionated list of four approaches to building websites and web applications. Publicly hosted on the internet, serving HTML, CSS, JavaScript, images, etc over HTTP.
I noticed a lot of people don't have a link to their RSS feeds on their sites or have the correct metadata for auto-discovery
A deep dive into the events of Saturday 8 July 2023, when user accounts started disappearing from the Vivaldi Social Mastodon instance.
wingolog: article: a world to win: webassembly for the rest of us
SVG Phone Home
Statistics and anecdotes about PHP at scale.
When you think of animating CSS properties, which ones come to mind? I recently started wondering about the ones that don’t come to mind — properties that aren’...
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
Rendering text, how hard could it be? As it turns out, incredibly hard! To my knowledge, literally no system renders text “perfectly”. It’s all best-effort, although some efforts are more important than others.
In October 2021, Ian, a fellow frontend developer at GDS posted a message in our support channel for the GOV.UK Design System on Slack:
Static site generators are in fashion for good reasons. The resulting pages are easy to host, fast and extremely low on maintenance while being sufficient for many use cases. As I learned when setting up my blog , writing a simple script myself is faster and more satisfying than learning one of the other site builders…
Mathematician and software engineer. Formalisation and AI
I’m a responsible web designer, and as such, since WordPress (finally) accepts media uploads of image/webp MIME type and since all web browsers newer than …
From time to time, someone shows that in JavaScript the .length of a string containing an emoji results in a number greater than 1 (typically 2) and then proceeds to the conclusion that haha JavaScript is so broken—and is rewarded with many likes. In this post, I will try to convince you that ridiculing JavaScript for…
React starter kits (Vite, Next, Astro, Remix, React Router) which help React developers to start a React project in 2025 ...
Today we seem to be living through a war on passwords. This is manifested in various ways; in its most passive form, it takes the form of people blogging about how passwords are bad. The more material changes are the general trend towards no longer treating passwords as a sufficient condition for access in favour of…
Web components can dramatically loosen the coupling of JavaScript frameworks. To prove it, we're going to do something kinda crazy: build an app where every single component is written in a different JavaScript framework.
I was running some benchmarks the other day. I usually have a lot of things running (Teams, Chrome, IDE, etc…) but I have to close everything to run some tight benchmarks. When I am done, one of th…
(I did a Twitter thread on this a while back, against my better judgment, and now moving to a proper blog.) The hanging-punctuation property in CSS is almost a no-brainer. The classic example is a …
This is a story about a security vulnerability in Google that allowed me to run arbitrary code on the computers of 50+ Google employees. Although Google initially considered my finding a serious security incident, later on, it changed its mind and stated that my finding is not, in fact, a vulnerability, but the…
TLDR: Demo is at , code is at . The Problem When building a website or app using HTML Canvas, it’s often a requirement to support a flood fill. That is, when the user chooses a colour and cli…
