Links

This is a feed to links and quick notes on things I've found interesting lately.

# 11/12/2024 - ✅ Article,🛠️ Data Hoarding

All the data can be yours - I’ve built my fair share of scrapers, and this is a good set of things to try before resorting to web scraping.
# 11/10/2024 - 🤖 LLMs,✅ Article

Everything I’ve learned so far about running local LLMs - As my friends and family’s “what is AI?” person, this overview of running local LLMs is great.
# 11/8/2024 - 👨🏻‍💻 Developer Productivity

Designing DX - Having spent most (all I guess) of my career working on DevEx, a ton of great insight from Chris here.
# 11/2/2024 - 🤖 LLMs

Embeddings are underrated#
# 11/2/2024 - 🛠️ Personal Site

A Guide to Web Curation - Good advice to follow when making a page like this one.
# 11/2/2024 - 🛠️ Personal Site

Building an album releases calendar subscription - I was just about to look up how to build out my own calendar host. Just generating an ICS file seems like a great answer.
# 11/2/2024 - 🕸️ CSS

🔍 Going through the “State of CSS” results… - Always love good analysis of “state of…” surveys.
# 11/2/2024 - 🤖 LLMs

Creating a LLM-as-a-Judge That Drives Business Results - A more recent post about LLM evaluation, and a bit deeper into using experts to support development.
# 10/27/2024 - Holiday Lights

Create interactive shaders to use on desktop, mobile and in the browser. - Source for shaders that you can use for a light show.
# 10/19/2024 - Browser Internals

Upstream downstream relationships - Really awesome deep dive into the history of browser engines and how be a good “upstream” or “downstream”
# 10/19/2024 - JavaScript

setBigTimeout - ✨innovation✨
# 10/19/2024 - Browser Internals

How CSS Floats Work - This whole site is a fun dive into browser internals and behaviors.
# 9/14/2024 - 🛠️ Personal Site

How I Added Maps to my Travel Posts - I track my location a ton. Maps would be cool to add.
# 9/14/2024 - 🕸️ CSS

CSS @property and the New Style - I feel like I’ll never be competent with CSS.
# 9/13/2024 - ⏱️ Web Performance,✅ Product / Landing Page

How does it work? - Must-know technology for web performance IMO.
# 9/2/2024 - Tools

What would you like to create? - Pretty nice looking storefront site that lets you make your own merch and stuff. Recommended by @levelsio.
# 9/2/2024 - Design

Redesigning Piccalilli: the first part of the design process - First part of a view into how real thorough web design happens.
# 9/2/2024 - Design

Priority Guides: A Content-First Alternative to Wireframes - Referred to in the previous link, a good primer for how to think about starting a design without wireframes.
# 9/2/2024 - Web Performance

How to make your web page faster before it even loads - A bit of a sales pitch for Sentry, but a good FCP article nonetheless.
# 8/31/2024 - Developer Productivity

CodeViz - Understanding a codebase is a key problem for devs. This looks super interesting.
# 8/24/2024 - Data Analysis

– A Grammar of Interactive Graphics - Vega looks like a declarative way to create charts. Give it JSON of data and JSON to describe the visual, and it does the rest. Good to keep in mind.
# 8/19/2024 - Web Performance

Cache Grab: How Much Are You Leaving on the Table? - Beautiful overview of everything caching on the web.
# 8/18/2024 - Developer Productivity

Jason Gorman on speed and productivity - Good framing of developer efficiency
# 8/17/2024 - Personal Site

Automating my /now page - Realllyyyyyyy need to finish my now page automation.
# 8/17/2024 - LLMs

What is a Transformer? - I gave a presentation about AI basics a few weeks ago and wish I had this available at the time.
# 8/9/2024 - Web Performance

How to Read a RUM Histogram - SpeedCurve’s web performance documentation is really great for people new to the space.
# 8/9/2024 - Web Performance

Best Practices for Creating a Culture of Web Performance - Culture is one of the hardest problems in web performance, and this has some excellent tips for getting started.
# 8/3/2024 - Brain

📵 Going Phoneless - I really want to try going phoneless at some point. Super curious how I’d do and how it’d change my behaviors.
# 7/28/2024 - DIY

Let’s Design A Keyboard With Ergogen v4: Introduction - I’ve always wanted to build an actual custom keyboard, this seems like it’d make it way easier if I were to ever actually do it.
# 7/18/2024 - Web Performance

How we sped up Notion in the browser with WASM SQLite - WASM SQLite is interesting in theory, but hadn’t seen anything at this scale. Interesting to see they have issues with cross-origin isolation.
# 7/16/2024 - Developer Productivity

We need visual programming. No, not like that. - Visualizing the execution of code is one of the biggest gaps in developer tooling in my opinion. This is a solid overview of what’s available, and everything is woefully short of what we should have.
# 7/16/2024 - Leadership

All I Need to Know About Engineering Leadership I Learned From Leave No Trace - Beautiful analogies. Saving this for if I’m ever in a more influential leadership position.
# 7/12/2024 - Writing

Ship That Code • Publish That Post - I really need to start publishing my longer posts. So many things sitting half done 😭
# 7/7/2024 - Cool Stuff

Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions: Exploring the Emotion Wheel - This is a cool visual for emotions that I hadn’t seen before. I like the varied intensity that others I’ve seen lack.
# 7/4/2024 - LLMs

Compare PDFs - Simon has some of the best AI knowledge today, and I love that he’s sharing how he prompts and approaches some of the problems he’s solving.
# 7/4/2024 - Design

Design for the People: The US Web Design System and the Public Sans Typeface - Beautiful public data has some super interesting reads of large-scale problems that most people don’t even realize exist.
# 7/4/2024 - LLMs

AI’s $600B Question - The economics of the current AI boom are staggering.
# 7/4/2024 - Lasercutting

Step-by-Step Guide to the Color Fill Laser Cut Process - Pretty laser cutting technique. I’ve used a similar one for a few projects.
# 6/29/2024 - Developer Productivity

Readability: Google’s Temple to Engineering Excellence - I had never actually heard of “readability” as a concept like this, but it makes a lot of sense for organizations that can afford it. Spending the time upfront can pay dividends when adding stuff in the future, especially if there’s a time crunch to release a feature or fix.
# 6/29/2024 - Writing

Microfeatures I Love in Blogs and Personal Websites - Fun list of ideas for this blog.
# 6/26/2024 - LLMs

a whole bunch of clever tricks - Great practical little demo of LLMs in action and a basic VS Code extension.
# 6/26/2024 - Web Performance

CPUpro - A tool that offers a different view into DevTools traces than Edge/Chrome DevTools. A few interesting approaches like the list of functions that seem super helpful for starting investigations.
# 6/24/2024 - JavaScript

You might not need jQuery - I haven’t used jquery in a long time, but a really succinct guide for those who are used to it.
# 6/23/2024 - Cool Stuff

I can’t picture things in my mind. I didn’t realize that was unusual - I have aphantasia, and it still blows my mind that people can just see things in their heads. This article covers one person’s similar experience.
# 6/21/2024 - Design

9 rad tools in tabs I’m trackin - I love posts with links to other things, and this is no exception. A lot of nifty design-related tools.
# 6/19/2024 - Debugging

Made some notes on how @JinaAI_ Reader works - their… - This is a super cool concept. One of the biggest problems software developers face is understanding large coddebases and how things work. This kind of stuff can be game-changing.
# 6/19/2024 - Web Performance

A Complete Guide to Performance Budgets - A really basic but thorough intro to some of standard web performance metrics, and more importantly a dive into navigating some of the politics of setting budgets and goals.
# 6/19/2024 - Web Performance

Web Performance Regression Detection (Part 2 of 3) - I love seeing how other companies track and resolve performance issues. Pinterest has a really detailed write-up here.
# 6/19/2024 - Developer Productivity

No Best Tool For The Job - An interesting analogy for deciding what tech stack is right. The direction that I take these conversations might be more like buying a car. Take a few for a test drive, figure out if it feels right for you. Sometimes a “bake-off” - make a few MVPs using different approaches and see what feels will do best.
# 6/18/2024 - Web Performance

Latency numbers every frontend developer should know - Handy list of some basic performance-related numbers like latency, parsing, etc. for anyone thinking about the performance of their APIs or web apps.
# 6/18/2024 - LLMs

Clustering ideas with local ML/AI models - A solid intro to a good use-case for vector embeddings and LLMs using entirely local AI models.
# 6/18/2024 - Quantified Self

Automating My Now Page - I love the idea of a “now page” but suck at maintaining things. I really like the idea of automating it like this.
# 6/18/2024 - CSS

The Gap - Another beautiful, succinct overview of a relatively recent CSS feature - Gap. I definitely need to adjust some of my normal CSS patterns to use gap more.
# 6/18/2024 - CSS

CSS :has() Interactive Guide - :has() is another recent CSS selector that I want to make sure I thoroughly understand and use, and this is a fantastic overview.
# 4/14/2024 - 🕸️ CSS

An Interactive Guide to CSS Container Queries - An absolutely beautiful, descriptive, and easy to follow guide on everything CSS Container Queries, something everyone in front-end should start to learn soon.
# 4/4/2024 - 🤖 LLMs

Your AI Product Needs Evals - I keep coming back to this post when I play with AI. Such a great summary of what’s needed to work effectively.
# 1/6/2024 - 🕸️ Browser Internals

Weird things engineers believe about Web development - After working on Edge and web standards for a few years, this is a great read for anyone who thinks they know how the industry works 😂
# 2/27/2023 -

/uses - /uses is another page that I’d like to maintain myself but never do. I love learning about what makes other people productive, so these pages are awesome.