Links

A Beginner’s Guide to Split Keyboards - A lot of cool options, but I love my Alice layout!

Why I’m Not Worried About My AI Dependency - This is a solid take on relying on AI for design or product needs.

One List To Rule Them All - Amazing reading list on learning modern CSS features.

Next.js Is Infuriating - WebPerf PSA: Abstraction layers aren’t always good.

You no longer need JavaScript - Another great list of examples to throw into the anti-JS pile. If you’re a web developer who hasn’t paid attention to CSS in a while, give this a read!

Links, Resources, and Humans of Note - Catching up on a backlog of RSS posts. If you missed Alex’s big list of links last month, there’s a ton of good stuff to bookmark here!

Enough AI copilots! We need AI HUDs - Some good food-for-thought and examples of non-chatbot AI UIs…

Building a web search engine from scratch in two months with 3 billion neural embeddings - This is a REALLY impressive deep dive into making your own search engine. Wow.

How I accidentally became PureGym’s unofficial Apple Wallet developer -

Making Sense of the Performance Extensibility API - If you have a JS library that might impact performance spend the time to read and implement this!

Building a Personal AI Factory (July 2025 snapshot) - Pretty elaborate workflow, but always interesting to see what’s working well for people with coding agents.

Make the Web a More a Colorful Place! - Super convenient color tool from OddBird!

Add Recent History Section to Popup by Copilot · Pull Request #2 · aluhrs13/JankExt · GitHub - Really impressed. I’ve been dabbling with GitHub Copilot a bit to just get a feel for it. This new “assign a task” feature is impressive. This is a PR where you can look at the whole prompt and the result. Not other interaction from me. I’ll give it more a detailed review, but it’s fully functional and seems to be what I want.

MSEdgeExplainers/AnimationSmoothness/explainer.md at main · MicrosoftEdge/MSEdgeExplainers · GitHub - Another performance area we’re looking at is giving devs the ability to measure smoothness of animations. Still early thinking and a lot of different directions - would love to hear if anyone has use-cases we should consider!

MSEdgeExplainers/CSSTooltipPseudo/explainer.md at main · MicrosoftEdge/MSEdgeExplainers · GitHub - Our team is taking a look at a long-standing gap in CSS to style browser tooltips! We aren’t sure when we’ll be able to do the work to implement this yet, but I’m going to be iterating on open issues and gaps in this explainer soon. Would love any feedback!

How to Convince People to Care and Invest in Accessibility - The most thorough view into how to convince people about a11y. Must-save for anyone who has struggled with that before!

aluhrs13/JankExt - I’ve been doing a bit of animation benchmarking and perf work, so I pulled together a quick extension to inject main thread tasks onto a page to help simulate jank.

Don’t Think of an Elephant - I’ve heard of the primary point here before, it a lot of good follow-up advice in the details.

The Height Enigma - More great in-depth CSS stuff. This one covers the nuances of setting height!

How to 3D Print Your Own Printing Press - Do I need a 3D printed printing press? No. Do I want to make one? Yes.

Plain Vanilla - Obviously I’m biased, but use 👏 the 👏 platform 👏

Related Ideas to How to Instantly Feel Better - Saw the title and laughed, but all these actually feel accurate and it’s a good reminder.

Design for 3D-Printing - Saving this for future me. I don’t have to do actual CAD myself much, but a lot of good guidance when designing for 3D printing.

Grid First, Flex Third - As someone who struggles with CSS, I’d love to see more prescriptive articles like this. Does anyone know of others who share their approaches like this?

I Randomly Decided To Pay Off A School’s Lunch Debt. Then Something Incredible Happened. -

Building TMT Mirror Visualization with LLM: A Step-by-Step Journey - Love seeing how other people approach prompting. A good step-by-step for anyone who wants to work on their skills.

Stretching Google’s prefetching - Huh. I know the basics of speculation rules, but this is an interesting take. Almost wonder if it’s a bug?

A cheat sheet for why using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment - Probably won’t blindly trust some of this, but seems like a reasonable counter to one of the more common anti-LLM arguments.

GitHub - leafeye/lunchmoney-mcp-server - I’ve been using LunchMoney for budgeting and it’s a great tool. Haven’t really had a chance to use MCP much, so I’ll definitely need to go play with this.

Understanding the recent criticism of the Chatbot Arena - Another day another LLM drama. Anyone using LLMs for serious purposes needs to make sure they have evals representative of their real use-cases when comparing new models. Benchmarks and leaderboards mean nothing.

GitHub - microsoft/markitdown: Python tool for converting files and office documents to Markdown. - Saving this become I’m sure I’ll want it at some point for LLM stuff.

The $20,000 American-made electric pickup with no paint, no stereo, and no touchscreen | The Verge - It’ll be interesting to see if this pans out. A minimal, hackable car would be a lot of fun.

Writing the onboarding experience - First run experiences can be frustrating and lose users instantly. Some great best practices here.

From Beta to Bedrock: Build Products that Stick. - There’s been a lot of talk about enshittification recently, and I like the concepts of this post as a baseline for fighting against it…

A fluid CSS methodology - Still working on my re-learning of more modern CSS and this is seems like a great approach to typography.

Working Through the Fear of Being Seen - This resonates with me a lot right now. I have a lot I want to write or half-written, but never finish. :(

You’re using GPT-4o image generation wrong -

The /llms.txt file -

React Reconciliation: The Hidden Engine Behind Your Components -

How to write error messages that actually help users rather than frustrate them -

How I, a non-developer, read the tutorial you, a developer, wrote for me, a beginner - A good, fun reality check for writing guides and tutorials. Try to assume your reader knows as little as possible!

Works on My Machine -

CSS Carousels -

15 rules for blogging, and my current streak -

The Best Programmers I Know -

Minimal CSS-only blurry image placeholders -

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.

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.

Designing DX - Having spent most (all I guess) of my career working on DevEx, a ton of great insight from Chris here.

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.

Embeddings are underrated# -

A Guide to Web Curation - Good advice to follow when making a page like this one.

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.

🔍 Going through the “State of CSS” results… - Always love good analysis of “state of…” surveys.

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.

Create interactive shaders to use on desktop, mobile and in the browser. - Source for shaders that you can use for a light show.

Thinking Like an AI - Great summary of how LLMs work from Ethan Mollick

Upstream downstream relationships - Really awesome deep dive into the history of browser engines and how be a good “upstream” or “downstream”

setBigTimeout - ✨innovation✨

How CSS Floats Work - This whole site is a fun dive into browser internals and behaviors.

Improving rendering performance with CSS content-visibility - Yet another wonderful deep dive into effective web perf analysis from Nolan.

How I Added Maps to my Travel Posts - I track my location a ton. Maps would be cool to add.

CSS @property and the New Style - I feel like I’ll never be competent with CSS.

How does it work? - Must-know technology for web performance IMO.

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

Redesigning Piccalilli: the first part of the design process - First part of a view into how real thorough web design happens.

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.

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.

CodeViz - Understanding a codebase is a key problem for devs. This looks super interesting.

Layers and Compositing - Web app memory is something I’ve been thinking about lately, and this is another masterpiece from Joe Liccini.

– 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.

Cache Grab: How Much Are You Leaving on the Table? - Beautiful overview of everything caching on the web.

Jason Gorman on speed and productivity - Good framing of developer efficiency

Automating my /now page - Realllyyyyyyy need to finish my now page automation.

What is a Transformer? - I gave a presentation about AI basics a few weeks ago and wish I had this available at the time.

How to Read a RUM Histogram - SpeedCurve’s web performance documentation is really great for people new to the space.

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.

📵 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 😂

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.

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.

AI’s $600B Question - The economics of the current AI boom are staggering.

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.

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.

Microfeatures I Love in Blogs and Personal Websites - Fun list of ideas for this blog.

picopilot - Great practical little demo of LLMs in action and a basic VS Code extension.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

/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.