The problem with Web Components has and always will be that they were designed for the browser and not for the developer. As many features as they get, they’re still ergonomically odd and difficult to maintain.

We’re now nearly a month into the year 2023. I’ve started a new job and have been doing a lot of research for new projects and auditing old code. This process has given me time to reflect on what is and is not working – and what I’d like to see going forward this year.

I’m a bit of a stickler about meetings. If I can, I like to instill a healthy meeting culture in teams I work with. Not all meetings are bad, but I have some rules that I like to follow to ensure that they don’t become that way. This is my list of tips for keeping meetings healthy and useful.

I’ve been thinking back to my time as a core member of the original team that built the Twitter web app. I learned a great many lessons there and thinking through them: How would I rebuild something similar to the Twitter web app today, like a Mastodon or Activity Pub web client?

We all make mistakes in the technical planning process that bubble through to execution. Looking back over the past 10 years or so, these are the two biggest tech & development mistakes that I think I have made and the lessons that I’ve learned from them.

I originally wanted to avoid using any sort of server-side code for my site, getting around the FART completely is not currently possible when you have a statically generated site. In this post, I’ll walk through how I got rid of the flash of inaccurate color themes for Tailwindcss dark mode (with auto media query support!), building off of some others’ examples using Netlify Edge Functions.

I can’t think of any scenario when I do not want box-sizing: border-box; set on every element on my page by default. In fact, I can’t think of the last time that I wanted to use the default content-box method. However, I’ve just come across a major company’s design system that does not use border-box across all elements.

I built my website with Astro, without having intended to. I often use my own personal site as a test-bed for learning new frameworks and tech. In testing out Astro, it just sort of stuck. As I continued, it became clear why – but the reason isn’t what I thought it would be.

It is odd to feel this way, I admit. But with Twitter’s new management, I feel like I’m mourning the loss of something that was near and dear to me.

I created my own Photo Booth application with Electron, Node.js, React, and Tailwindcss and used a GoPro as a webcam for my wedding instead of renting a commercial booth. It was fun to build and even more fun to use.