Simon 📎🌸

You can equally be enthusiastic about generative AI, and find it unsufferable that this is all everyone talks about and thinks about.

@jessfraz As a non-native speaker, the nuance between honesty and realness is lost on me

#1 rule of selling to developers: - be honest, like overly pedantically honest like a real engineer - be real that's it. that's all you have to do.

contrast-color() is landing in Chrome 147, making it Baseline Newly Available in all modern browsers. This feature takes any color value and returns either black or white—whichever provides the highest contrast against the input color. i.e. color: contrast-color(purple) returns white ⬇️

Likely one of {OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor} will go bankrupt and the rugpullfest will commence.

So even assuming that we're able to cut compute costs in half every year (not happening), it would take five years of cash burning for them to be profitable. Better enjoy AI-assisted coding while it lasts because soon enough it will be reserved to an elite.

@merlindru I'll insist. Thanks again!

@merlindru Thanks a lot for the complete answer. I tried the book a few years ago (it was good!) but I let it fall into limbo after a few chapters. And I tried your suggestion literally this weekend but when I saw the gap between how hard it was vs how easy it would be with JS I ran awaylol

Rust in easy mode

@merlindru They know something that we don't

how come light theme devs are usually insane at their craft

Actually what I was told often is "but so few of _our users_ are concerned" which in retrospect is even funnier

It's going to be interesting looking at how many people who insisted caring for a11y was unnecessary because "so few people are concerned" go all out in this

@yamaheru @RyanCarniato That's why 99% of websites are Wordpress

@RyanCarniato Bigger problem with frontend is frontend developers believe they need big frameworks for everything. 99% of websites don't need react.

Of course frontend has a concept of architecture. The short version is we learned what you are suggesting doesn't work well in this space. The history of web development answers your question. There is a category of data, we refer to as "state", that is ephemeral. Now we can define ephemeral in different ways since everything persists somewhere but the key is that the ownership of this state is very much tied to the User Interface. Focus, selection state, as so on are shallow examples of this, but you can also think of this in terms of projections of those too. This category only gets larger as things become more interactive. Early web development did not exactly understand this. And when our life began on the server we'd lose this information between actions. POST a form, bye bye state. Now we wised up to that and started serializing it back and forth. ASP.NET had it's ViewState and so on. But we hit a fork in the road in mid 2000s because keeping ephemeral UI state on the server didn't scale great. We wanted RESTful backends, so we could spin up microservices. MVC became king. Its simple model fit: Model (persistent data), View (projection of that data), Controller (singleton that wires it up). What is missing is this non-persisted state. This worked pretty well for simple things. But sort of ignored the problem. Which was ok because people wanted quicker interactivity so more and more started moving to the client. Dawn of SPAs recognized that a more structured approach needed to be taken on the client. So what did we do? We tried to bring our MVC there. Angular, Backbone, Ember, these frameworks followed it. But a pattern started emerging.. we had this thing that had no place. Singleton controllers didn't cut it. `$scope` in angular is the most obvious. And as any early Angular dev will attest became a huge mess, but Ember also started adding all these new concepts, It was more like MVC(insert 12 more letters here). But this was the problem. In fact the misery that was Angular.js => Angular 2 was IMO motivated almost entirely because of this unreconcilable gap in design. React wasn't the first to realize this though. MVVM frameworks like Knockout.js replaced Controller singletons with per View (or per Model) instance wrappers as a natural place to hold this ephemeral state. The VM standing for View Models. But I'd say React was the first to consolidate on a pattern that was already happening in the wild. For better or for worse VMs did much more tightly couple things. Pretending these things weren't coupled just made traceability very difficult. React owned it and was like there is a natural split between the Model and the VM but the VM and the V are not benefiting from the seperation. And thus Components were born. But people early days still really liked their separation. So we built really complicated stores. So we could model all but the most ephemeral state as a sort of hoisted Client model. Early attempts were really awkward because synchronization became really buggy. So work went into making this predictable, singular so that state couldn't get out of sync. Redux comes to mind. But there was this tension. Lifecycles were clearly tied to the UI, so there was this constant issue around either holding too much state that was unnecessary or needing to like register/unregister. Obviously things like Angular had services and DI as their approach. But the problems were the same. Around the mid 2010s... thanks largely to GraphQL it became better understood that except for where the user was the source we could basically view state as derived from the server. When people started using it, the need for Client side stores shrunk considerably. This evolved eventually into things like React Query. Now even though the sources no longer needed management, we still have this derived state graph running through our components. It might not be as obvious because of say the way React re-runs components. But by 2018 with the introduction of Hooks you could start seeing it right in front of you. An irony not lost on me because it was like looking at 2010 Knockout.js code. The result while not realized completely mechanically is an acknowledgement that State and UI are not easily separable, they overlap. Modeling Component === state like early React might have oversimplified things, but something like MVC categorically misses. A lot of the progress in the last 5 years around Signals is based on preserving these 2 graphs(UI, State) ability to co-exist in a way that is natural. As projects get larger it is the only sane approach to modularity. It's arguable that patterns around strict contracts/regions should be solidified into concepts, and to be fair boundaries around errors and loading(Suspense) do contain these things. We have natural boundaries around nested route sections (tied to URL subpaths). But each graph has their own mostly homogenous primitives so those coordination points are extra concepts, and because of the fluidity of this relationship being too strict here will cause you great pain later. So architecture is very much at the top of mind of those designing these systems and tools. However, frontend web is also the most accessible platform. So I don't expect every bootcamp dev to know, understand, or appreciate these things. The structure we have created to allow this modularity and co-location can also be greatly abused. Partially because new devs can be "productive" within their small slice. Which is by design and generally beneficial. But doesn't bestow the same sort of architectural purity and rigor one might expect to find in such large complex systems. To me this is more cultural than an engineering. The information is out there. We're living in it, but who needs to know? It's hard because people who know a bit more keep respinning on the same expectations of what doesn't work and take few steps in before they realize it. And I think a lot of engineers outside of frontend have no appreciation for it.

@wesbos Because it's goated

every reply is tailscale 😆

Been using cloudflare tunnels to expose local servers to the internet, gated with access (GitHub login) Today i setup the opposite, vpn access into my home network with zero trust. Certainly use cases for both, but I’m curious what your default would be for a single app?

@steveruizok @Tailscale It's my favorite piece of software

wow. @Tailscale must be studied. Making this look easy

Web dev is never beating the allegations

May I ask why the fuck

Anyone with half a brain would look at this and immediately feel concern for how it's going to be misused. This is a video of an old dude impersonating CHILDREN for fucks sake, why are we talking about the "implications for Hollywood"?

@simonswiss Sunk cost fallacy. Just do whatever brings you joy 😉

At the same time, I invested 1000s and 1000s of $$ and hours building a killer recording space at home. Would be a shame not using it extensively. Perhaps I should just go back to design engineering for work, and resurrect my YouTube channel with some fun content. Options! 😃

Another thing I've noticed is that levels of stress are always higher when doing videos. Neighbours mowing the lawn, kids at home, feeling tired/sick... everything is a "threat" to making stellar videos. With engineering, I can just get in the zooooone.

War is back in vogue and a zeal for war is spreading. The principle established after the Second World War, which prohibited nations from using force to violate the borders of others, has been completely undermined. #Peace is no longer sought as a gift and a desirable good in itself. Instead, peace is sought through weapons as a condition for asserting one’s own dominion. This gravely threatens the rule of law, which is the foundation of all peaceful civil coexistence. vatican.va/content/leo-xi…

@Mattias_G Wish you and your partner an easier 2026

This past year has, without a doubt, been the toughest year ever for both my wife and me. I do feel hopeful about the year to come, and we do believe the worst is behind us. I hope all of you will get a great 2026.