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Default Isn’t Design. Why familiar feels right but often…
October 15, 2025
Framework monoculture is a psychology problem as much as a tech problem. When one approach becomes “how things are done,” we unconsciously defend it even when standards would give us a healthier, ...
Read MoreAnnotating designs using common language – TetraLogical
October 14, 2025
In most organisations, design documentation often includes annotations, but accessibility-specific ones are still rare. That’s a missed opportunity. Annotating designs for accessibility helps everyo...
Read MoreAustralia’s AI choice: Standards setter or technology taker? | Lowy Institute
October 14, 2025
AI is not born neutral. The rules that govern how it behaves are set by its authors: corporations and governments embedding their own assumptions, priorities, and cultural defaults into code. Those ru...
Read MoreCSS :is() :where() the Magic Happens
October 13, 2025
For Blogtober, I dug up a draft about the two CSS pseudo-class functions :is() and :where() that I’d had lying around in my drafts folder for quite some time. Actually, when I originally started wri...
Read MoreBig O
October 13, 2025
Big O notation is a way of describing the performance of a function without using time. Rather than timing a function from start to finish, big O describes how the time grows as the input size increas...
Read MoreThe History of Core Web Vitals
October 13, 2025
Core Web Vitals measure user experience by assessing a website’s performance. This write-up is a history of how Core Web Vitals came to be based on my recollections from our work on it at Google fro...
Read MoreHTML—the Most Difficult Programming Language in the World
October 13, 2025
Years ago, the web development community discussed and declared on Twitter that HTML was not just a document language, but a programming language.Meanwhile, virtually no HTML page is error-free. In HT...
Read MoreSimplify
October 11, 2025
Honestly, I feel like web developers are constantly being gaslit into thinking that complex over-engineered solutions are the only option. When the discourse is being dominated by people invested in f...
Read MoreA pragmatic guide to modern CSS colours – part one
October 10, 2025
For most developers, the only time they touch colour values is when they copy them from a design file and paste them into their editor. We are developers and not designers, after all.However, there ha...
Read MoreThe Programmer Identity Crisis ❈ Simon Højberg ❈ Principal Frontend Engineer
October 10, 2025
In fact, if we are to trust the billion-dollar AI industry, the denizens of Hacker News (and its overlords), and the LinkedIn legions of LLM lunatics, the future of software development has little res...
Read Moreinessential: Why NetNewsWire Is Not a Web App
October 9, 2025
But what if I wanted to do a web app, in addition to or instead of a native app? I can picture a future, as I bet you can, where RSS readers aren’t allowed on any app store, and we’re essentially ...
Read MoreWhy I gave the world wide web away for free
October 8, 2025
was 34 years old when I first had the idea for the world wide web. I took every opportunity to talk about it: pitching it in meetings, sketching it out on a whiteboard for anyone who was interested, e...
Read MoreVibe engineering
October 8, 2025
I feel like vibe coding is pretty well established now as covering the fast, loose and irresponsible way of building software with AI—entirely prompt-driven, and with no attention paid to how the co...
Read MoreOpen Social — overreacted
October 6, 2025
I believe we are at a similar juncture with social apps as we have been with open source thirty five years ago. There’s a new movement on the block. I like to call it “open social”. There are co...
Read Moreeverywhere.tools
October 6, 2025
Everywhere.tools is a living collection of open-source design resources. It gathers the experiments, utilities, and side-projects that usually stay hidden in personal repos – and gives them a stage....
Read MoreAgainst the protection of stocking frames
October 6, 2025
I think it’s long past time I start discussing “artificial intelligence” (“AI”) as a failed technology. Specifically, that large language models (LLMs) have repeatedly and consistently faile...
Read MoreAbout this project · Quiet UI
October 6, 2025
Quiet is a source-available user interface library for the modern Web. It features 88 accessible, performant, localized, and interoperable components along with an optional CSS reset to streamline dev...
Read MoreTim Berners-Lee Invented the World Wide Web. Now He Wants to Save It
October 6, 2025
Tim Berners-Lee may have the smallest fame-to-impact ratio of anyone living. Strangers hardly ever recognize his face; on “Jeopardy!,” his name usually goes for at least sixteen hundred dollars. B...
Read MoreFrank Chimero · Selling Lemons
October 3, 2025
At this point, it should be obvious how the market for lemons applies to ill-considered AI-generated content. I’ll let you sketch out that argument yourself since it’s fairly straightforward, and ...
Read MoreThe 5 levels of AI agent autonomy: learning from self-driving cars
October 3, 2025
How autonomous can AI agents become? We’re keen to access their power, but afraid of their unpredictability. Fortunately, it’s not the first time we’ve faced this problem. Self-drivi...
Read MoreIn the economy of user effort, be a bargain, not a scam
October 3, 2025
A model with surprising predictive power is to treat user effort as a currency that users are spending to buy solutions to their problems. Nobody likes paying it; in an ideal world software would read...
Read More90%
October 3, 2025
Three months ago I said that AI changes everything. I came to that after plenty of skepticism. There are still good reasons to doubt that AI will write all code, but my current reality is close.For th...
Read MoreDesign Attractors
October 2, 2025
This is what I call a design attractor. In chaos theory, an attractor is the stable state toward which a system evolves over time. In design, for a button to be a button, it must also be interactive. ...
Read MoreJSON is not JSON Across Languages
October 2, 2025
JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) was designed as a simple, lightweight, and human-readable data interchange format, often positioned as a more accessible alternative to XML. It has become the de fact...
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