I was thinking this morning about how once you understand that your technology choices have security, performance, and accessibility considerations you become a much more boring developer. Acknowledging those obligations can sort of strips the fun out of programming, but we’re better for it. I decided to pull on that thread a little more and come up with a list of all the concerns you might have as an engineer/developer that ultimately compound to make you a boring, wet blanket of a person ...| daverupert.com
I saw this summer’s Marvel movie in the theater on Sunday. A bit of a last minute idea so we ended up going to the “legacy” movie theater across the highway. Before I continue, It’s important to understand my local cinema dynamics. We have two theaters here in Austin: The Alamo Drafthouse and All Other Cinemas. The best place to see movies in Austin is at the Alamo Drafthouse. If you’ve never been to an Alamo, I’m sorry. It’s a movie theater for people who love movies by people ...| daverupert.com
The cost of being online is getting too damn high and I’m tired of pretending it’s possible to fit these tasks into a normal life. That’s why I’d like to share a modest proposal for a new set of holidays to manage our digital lives: (Ahem.) A day to clear out your inboxes A day to reset your passwords and delete old accounts A day to fix your calendars A day to cancel online service subscriptions A day to manage the tags on your website A day to switch out any critical apps A day to b...| daverupert.com
After all our summer trips I buckled down last weekend and did some budgetting and I’ve realized I have to update the spreadsheet in my head. Here’s how much things cost in my outdated DaveBrain 2000 operating system: Fast food -$5/person = $20/family Snacks - $2.50/person = $10/family That –as my bank account is telling me– is super incorrect. The real numbers are much more like: Fast food - $12.50~$15/person = $50~$60/family Snacks - $5~$7.50/person = $20~$30/family And groceries ha...| daverupert.com
In Chromium 139, CSS gets a new corner-shape property which unlocks some cool new CSS tricks. Most notably it gives us “squircles”, the mathematical superellipse shape introduced by Apple in iOS 7. Designers have been in love with them ever since and include them in every design comp using Figma’s “corner-smoothing” slider even tho CSS has no similar correlation… until now! Frontend Masters has a beautiful writeup on corner-shape and superellipses showing that it goes way beyond s...| daverupert.com
I don’t have much life advice but I do know one thing: Always buy the $200 Yamaha guitar. If you’re thinking about it, do it. Talk to any guitarist you know who has been playing awhile and they’ll have a story about a $200 Yamaha and how good it sounds relative to the price. It’s with uncanny regularity I encounter fellow travelers with a similar story about this particular cheap guitar. My $200 Yamaha story growing up was my step-dad’s acoustic. He had two acoustic guitars actually...| daverupert.com
I’m trying to come up with an ethos of how I want to use social media. What rules and constraints do I put around it. This is a living document. Rules for posting/reposting content: Repost/Share cool links from the internet Repost/Share cool art (and credit whenever possible) Repost/Share people looking for work Doubly-so if the people above are in tech and from an underrepresented group Repost/Share job listing from reputable companies Then… if you’ve done all that, promote your own th...| daverupert.com
The personal blog of Dave Rupert, web developer and podcaster from Austin, TX.| daverupert.com
I hold a conspiracy theory the global economy died five years ago during Covid. It’s been on life support through stimulus checks and flash tech hype cycles ever since trying to keep the dormant heart beating. You sense it too. There’s no beating heart. There’s no thumping energy. No vein of excitement. Tech and knowledge work seems to be suffering the most.| daverupert.com
There’s some productivity traps I fall into on a regular basis. They all tie into my personal flavor of ADHD but it’s not totally fair to blame the ol’ meat-wad brain when I know when, where, and why it happens. There’s a Big Thing to do, so I can’t do anything else Boredom in meetings leads internet wanderings I should blog this real quick turns into work avoidance The Big Thing… One of my ADHD quirks is that if there’s a Big Thing to do that day (doctor’s appointment, packag...| daverupert.com
Text reflow on the web has an interesting relationship with Responsive Web Design. As a column gets smaller text wraps and becomes taller1. But for large format display text, that’s not always what you want2. What I’ve wanted for awhile now is a way to inversely size text based on the text length (where the font-size gets smaller as the heading gets longer). I’ve been chasing the white whale of responsive text-sizing for over a decade and I think I’ve got my best attempt to-date with ...| daverupert.com
We had Peter Pistorius on ShopTalk to talk about RedwoodJS and the project’s pivot to an almost entirely different project called RedwoodSDK. I am a complete outsider but I liked what RedwoodJS (the old project) was trying to do and didn’t fully understand why they felt the need to reboot. I even have a dusty old post in my drafts folder about what I liked about RedwoodJS. But after talking, it seems the winds of the JavaScript zeitgeist has changed and technology picks from 2020 aren’t...| daverupert.com
Chekuskin dreamed he was in a factory sidling up the walkspace, besides some immense machine. But when he put his hand on it to steady himself, instead of cold metal the surface he felt was lively and warm. Little tremors ran through it, but not mechanical ones. The machine he saw was viley alive. Beneath a membrane of purpleish black, fluids were pulsing thickly from chamber to chamber. He stepped back, but his hand would not come free. It had stuck to the machine and now he realized there w...| daverupert.com
Careless People is a tell-all book that walks through Facebook’s rampant (and criminally?) inept responses to it’s growing role in global policy, from it’s role in the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar to the election of Donald J. Trump. The book, written by Facebook’s former director of foreign policy Sarah Wynn-Williams, explains that Zuckerberg initially denied the notion that Facebook could ever impact an election but over time starts to see Facebook and social media as a powerful “D...| daverupert.com
Take My Hand, Precious Lord (also known as the inverse Precious Lord, Take My Hand) is an old gospel hymn with a unique and special tie-in to the American Civil Rights story. Written in 1932 by Thomas Dorsey after he co-founded National Convention of Gospel Choirs and Choruses (NCGCC), the tune borrowed from a 1844 hymn called “Maitland” (George N. Allan) and took inspiration from a performance of the song by Blind Connie Williams. The song was written after the death of Dorsey’s wife N...| daverupert.com