Immediately after every lecture, meeting, or any significant experience, take 30 seconds — no more, no less — to write down the most important points. If you always do just this, said his grandfather, and even if you only do this, with no other revision, you will be okay.

A great metaphor for maintaining a codebase over the life of the project.

A parable on the king’s requirements and invention of a toaster.

Something to compliment the rubber duck on a programmer’s desk.

Great insights on how to embrace the scarcity, and use it wisely.

A useful technique for leaning into CSS for practical presentation needs.

Eleventy doesn’t have any processing for styles or scripts out of the box. Which is kind of a feature when you’re looking for a non-prescriptive tool. This post was helpful in creating a very simple setup for compiling sass, and getting it into the page.

Well Known URLs are a new-to-me convention that I find interesting.

The spiritual successor of the CSS Zen Garden.

A web feed parser and normalizer. Supports Atom, RSS, & JSON Feed.

A ruby gem for parsing RSS feeds. Supports RSS and Atom feeds.

Whatever you’re doing, a sense of superiority will make you worse at it. Humility, on the other hand, will make you better.

The moment you think you’ve got it all figured out, your progress stops. Instead, continue to advance and improve by reminding yourself how much more there will always be to discover.

Confidence is positive and empowering, but arrogance is deadly. Be confident, but not at the expense of your respect for others.

Don’t burn up all your energy proving how great you are. Invest your time and energy being thoughtful and helpful.

See the victories not as proof of your supremacy, but as opportunities to offer more value to life. See the defeats not as personal affronts, but as chances to learn and grow stronger.

Take care not to waste your time in delusions of grandeur. Embrace the power of confident humility, and live well.

— Ralph Marston

A telepathic party game

The discipline of gathering links and posting them to a website, for example.

An article that delivers on its title. Really helpful to put some terms and definitions around the parts of a media query that are relied on every day.

A new, approachable way to create Web applications

This is an extremely interesting idea. Make your site editable in place with a backing data store, and some markup.

I’ve recently been jumping back into the world of CSS development. I’m so thankful for the invention of CSS variables, and this article is a great place to get familiarized with them.

From someone celebrating their 68th birthday. I’m a sucker for these kinds of lists.

The front-end heavy work I was entrenched in years ago would love the abilities that CSS provides out of the box these days.

This Background Jobs style guide is a list of best practices working with Ruby background jobs.

This guide arrived at many of the conclusions I’ve arrived at while leaning into ActiveJob, and I learned a thing or two along the way.

For those of us who like doing as much as possible in Ruby.

James Clear’s growing collection of the greatest species of all-time.

Notifications for Ruby on Rails applications.

Easy to grok, actionable advice about how to design forms that people will fill out reliably.

Macaroons, like cookies, are a form of bearer credential. Unlike opaque tokens, macaroons embed caveats that define specific authorization requirements for the target service, the service that issued the root macaroon and which is capable of verifying the integrity of macaroons it recieves.

If it means I can avoid JavaScript Web Tokens, I’m interested in exploring further.

Building command line applications using React.

A tiny library for adding keyboard shortcuts in JavaScript.

A great read on the promise and peril of leaning into tried and true semantic HTML.

Responsive HTML5 and CSS3 templates released under the The Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. If you wanna ditch the license, it’s only $19 at pixelarity.com.

For starters, I love the domain name boringrails.com. This tutorial delivers on the title of building some highly dynamic interaction with a few JavaScript sprinkles.

Self-billed as The Modern Monolith. My read is that it’s a protocol for how to structure your ajax interactions to have predictable re-rendering when receiving a response.

Record, Replay, and Stub HTTP Interactions in JavaScript. A project on GitHub by Netflix.

Jonathan’s Stark’s thesis is pretty easy to grok. This has been my intuition for a long time, but he’s got the goods on how to make it a reality.

Amy Hoy’s got a theory on how the web went south, and I am nodding in agreement with every argument.

Tom Critchlow has some thoughts on how to build a digital garden, and I’m digging them.

Free icons, music, stock photos, and vectors. Could be useful in a pinch.

A mechanism for quickly adding behavior to a Rails application. Like bin/rails generate scaffold… but in the cloud.

Some practical tips for desk-work ergonomics.

A collection of composable behaviors for your Stimulus Controllers. The spirit of this effort is to bring the reusability of React hooks to Stimulusjs. Time will tell if the idea can span the paradigm differences.

Self described as tools for better thinking. Strategies to get you off of the screen, and into thinking.

Illegibility comes from complexity without clarity.

The new methods were invented to manage a level of complexity that is completely foreign to me and my work. It was easy to back away from most of this new stuff when I realized I have alternate ways of managing complexity. Instead of changing my tools or workflow, I change my design. It’s like designing a house so it’s easy to build, instead of setting up cranes typically used for skyscrapers.

Nintendo Switch price tracking and wishlist notifications

I started building something like this on AWS when I wanted to wait for Celeste to go back on sale. I’m so happy somebody else did it and I can delete those stale resources.

If it sounds too abstract to be functional, it just may be.

A JavaScript utility for turning a human readable string into a slug suitable for URL.

A simple, multi-themed, responsive, dependency-free, and hackable color-picker library.

Generate unique color palettes.

Chase McCoy offers a minimal approach to begin supporting Dark Mode. I’d love to kick the tires on this and see how it handles in real life.

So when someone asks you for something, be it your time, thoughts, or effort, be skeptical and be French. Ask “why” and (mostly) say “no”. It’s good for you.

Thinking as a railway conductor serves as an interesting approach for making fault tolerant systems.

The most useful form of patience is persistence. Patience implies waiting for things to improve on their own. Persistence implies keeping your head down and continuing to work when things take longer than you expect.

A long read, but fun to understand the humble URL that we depend on all day every day.

A nice playground for diagonal website layouts. Interact-able and everything!

CSS Tricks is at it again with a focused article on an API we take for granted every day. Data Attributes are still the best-in-class solution for laying behavior onto Plain Old HTML.

Conventions for laying out PDF printable content. Could prove useful when you get around to writing that book.

A very compelling idea for serving a Rack application on AWS Lambda. As long as the Ruby footprint is small enough, I think this could be a really nice deployment story!

The number behind the clickbait title is 3. 3 hours out of 8. If you focus for even half the time, you can stand out.

I’ve long had this idea in the back of my mind. It’s nice to see it executed elsewhere, and establish a baseline for the usefulness of automated test on even “simple” projects.

I haven’t had a chance to dig in on CSS Grid. A quick glance suggests that it’s the tool I’ve wanted many times in the past.

A really fun investigation into how much damage you can do with one person’s typo.

“An API mocking library for frontend developers”. Seems powerful for stubbing out all kinds of data that will eventually have a real source.

James Clear of Atomic Habits fame offers up this nice little insight on the power of looking at things from the opposite angle

A skate video. Released in 2020. Feels strait out of the 1990s. Nostalgia weighs heavy.

An interesting idea for building on top of Stimulus, ActionController, and ActionCable to coordinate patterns of server-client communication. HTML-over-the-wire sounds good to me.

This is my kind of performance art. Mega Man 2 holds a special place in my heart, and I fully endorse this message.

not a single oscar nomination for Carly Rae Jepsen’s EMOTION… just because it “isn’t a film” and “came out in 2015”…disgusting

This will be an evergreen tweet in my book. Emotion is the album of the millennium.

A Ruby strftime generator. Type in the desired human readable format, get back the strftime formatting string.

A brief introduction to making yourself a more valuable code reviewer.

Today I learned that vaporwave is a genre of music, and I am into it.

Seems like a good place to start a basic study of philosophy.

I’ve heard this parable in a variety of contexts, and no one seems to know the origin. At least this link provides a place where it’s written down succinctly.

A great explanation of how we got to where we’re at as an industry.

def internal_request(path, params={})
  request_env = Rack::MockRequest.env_for(path, params: params.to_query).merge({
    'rack.session' => session  # remove if session is unavailable/undesired in request
  })

  # Returns: [ status, headers, body ]
  Rails.application.routes.call(request_env)
end

This is the method I built on top of for building a static site generator in Rails.