The personal blog of Dave Rupert, web developer and podcaster from Austin, TX.| daverupert.com
We all know the current US President is one hell of an orator and often assures us that he has “the best words”:| daverupert.com
This week I decided to go nuclear on my bad YouTube habit. I installed a plugin called Tab Limiter that lets me limit youtube.com to one tab at a time. Clicking links that open in new tabs will now auto-close the tab. Why do this? I talked about it before but when I’m bored I open tabs. Adding friction here prevents me from CMD+clicking videos during moments of boredom and creating a month’s-worth unclose-able tabs of videos to watch. It encourages me to stay focused and nudges me towards...| daverupert.com
I’ve been playing around with Midjourney for work and the one thing that makes Stable Diffusion cool and useful to me is the --sref flag to summon results in a specific visual style or “style reference” (e.g. Celestial Swirlscape is --sref 2566192150). They differ a bit from traditional or “artist” styles (e.g. “In the style of Picasso” or “Rip off Studio Ghibli”) but can be that or they can be more generic or compositional like “Pink Retronetic Dreamscape”. I’ve read ...| daverupert.com
In the middle of the night on the morning of July 4th, a storm parked over the Texas Hill Country and caused the Guadalupe river to rise more than 25 feet in two hours. 135 dead, including dozens of children from summer camps along the river. As a parent, this is the greatest tragedy you could imagine. My heart goes out to the families and friends who lost a little one that week.| daverupert.com
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
The personal blog of Dave Rupert, web developer and podcaster from Austin, TX.| 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
The personal blog of Dave Rupert, web developer and podcaster from Austin, TX.| 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
It’s been an eventful three months since my last update. I nearly burnt myself out powering through a big internal release at work in February, a season of back-to-back family activities March and April, I turned 45 at the end of April and school lets out next week. Summer has begun. And let’s be honest, we could blame the tardiness of this post on a lot of issues: the rise of fascist authoritarianism in America, busy home life, busy career, nights at the ball field… But we all know the...| daverupert.com
As the world turns, so doth productivity apps churn. Readers of this blog will know I’ve been a user of Notion for the last seven-plus years. The block-based editor, the database features, and general “webbiness” of Notion suited me and let my inner productivity- and systems-wonk flourish.| daverupert.com
I’m finishing up my move from Notion to Obsidian and one complexity I encountered was all my saved links. In the almost seven years of using Notion, I amassed a ~1.2 GB database of links. This is because of how the Notion Web Clipper creates a backup of the article and its assets. While this is gold to an internet archivist… I really only use this feature to sneak around paywalls. Moving to Obsidian gave me a chance to rethink my link collection process and along the way I figured out how...| daverupert.com
I want you to have a blog. Despite this being nearly my entire online ethos, one situation I struggle with are design systems and UX blogs on Medium. A lot of them exist. Yet. I have difficulty understanding UX and design professionals in this space who yield their UX and design decisions over to the “everyone looks the same” content silo.| daverupert.com
“Enshittification” is a termed coined by Cory Doctorow in 2023 to describe a pattern of decreasing quality observed in online services and products. Since Doctorow’s post, there’s been no shortage of think pieces on enshittification and its role in our society and to a large extent I agree with them all. I think it’s an inevitable problem that shows the splitting seams of Capitalism. If you will allow, I’d like to add a tangential thought – one slight embellishment – to this t...| daverupert.com
For last year’s check-in, I foreshadowed a year of changes for ol’ Dave Rupert and boy was I not kidding. New job, new car, new pets. But before we get into all that – for accountability’s sake – let’s check in on my resolutions from last year and see how I did…| daverupert.com
I saw a tweet awhile back that sent my brain to a far off galaxy…| daverupert.com
Brian LeRoux posted a few thoughts about forms and the idea of a “good form” resonated with me so I dogpiled some of my own thoughts and experiences on it. Here’s a compilation of those ideas. I’m sure this is incomplete and would love to see your list.| daverupert.com
Weeks ago I was looking in to a performance issue for our animated spinner component and stumbled across a tool in DevTools I hadn’t used before: The Performance Monitor Panel. In you open Dev Tools > More Tools > Performance Monitor you’ll see some helpful high-level charts and graphs of the realtime performance data of your UI.| daverupert.com
I’ve become a bit obsessed with how much it costs to fuel my body during the working hours.| daverupert.com
4:05am The windows are open, hoping to capture the faint winds and convert them into a mythical cooling cross-breeze. A gust passes through vacuuming all the doors shut, cancelling hope for a miracle. I’m awake. It’s cool but I’m on top of the covers and not cool enough. The plastic thump-thump-thump of the oscillating fan reaching the end of its arc is rhythmic yet not. After three-to-six attempts, it yields to the resistance and heads the other way. It will be back soon. Another fan i...| daverupert.com
The algorithm sucked me into another model craft hobby: Mini 4WD racing (ミニ四駆). A Mini 4WD is a 1:32 scale model that is a mix between slot cars and RC cars. You don’t control these cars with a remote control nor do they drive in an electrified slot, rather you place your racecar in a plastic track with high walls and send them speeding down the track at ~40km/h.| daverupert.com
I’ve always abided in the idea that “HTML is accessible by default and then we come along and mess it up.” In a lot places this is very true and by just using a suitable HTML element instead of a generic div or span we can have a big Accessibility impact.| daverupert.com
A fine post by Ethan Marcotte called The negotiation cycle led me to an incredible essay by Alan Jacobs called From Tech Critique to Ways of Living. It references an old idea called “The SCT1” which is new to me but based on thinking by the likes of Ursula Franklin and Neil Postman who I am familiar with. Neil Postman’s Technopoly2 –which I read in March– was one of the best books on technology I’ve ever read, so this is relevant for me. The Standard Critique of Technology: “We ...| daverupert.com
The personal blog of Dave Rupert, web developer and podcaster from Austin, TX.| daverupert.com
The personal blog of Dave Rupert, web developer and podcaster from Austin, TX.| daverupert.com
A couple weeks ago I joined a conversation about John Romero and prototypes. Tyler posted some thoughts about Romero’s autobiography, Matthias shared a quote from a Tim Ferris podcast where Romero chided prototypes, and Matthias looped me in because I love prototypes.| daverupert.com
I’ve been co-hosting a weekly podcast for nearly 12 years with over hundreds of guests and I want to tell you the secret to getting invited on a podcast. Are you ready? Here it goes.| daverupert.com
Duolingo does a great job capturing the novel delight of learning a new language. You hop on, take a short quiz, and a little green owl waves at you and hops towards a trophy. You can add friends, join group challenges, and there’s a weekly ranking system to compete with users all over the world where you have a chance to move up a league, stay stagnant, or potentially get demoted to a lower league.| daverupert.com
It’s been a couple years of working full-time on Luro and we’ve travelled through at least three (or four?) different distinct architectures. If that sounds like a lot, I’d agree. It’s been educational to say the least.| daverupert.com
AI. It’s the talk of the town (or at least this year, that is). I’ve been in dozens of conversations about AI in recent days. The likelihood that the next big feature or product I build involves AI seems to be going up. No idea where it’s all headed – and reserve the right to change my mind – but a dozen conversations leaves me with a dozen or so disparate thoughts about this new frontier of technology.| daverupert.com
“UI is a function of state” is a pretty popular saying in the front-end world. In context (pun intended), that’s typically referring to application or component state. I thought I’d pull that thread a little further and explore all the states that can effect the UI layer…| daverupert.com
One thing I love about the new’ish :focus-visible pseudo-state is that it allows me to create bigger, bolder, and more obvious focus states for my keyboard users than I normally would with a :focus pseudo-state that might flash or linger on a click. For example, my default :focus-visible is pretty chonky…| daverupert.com
The heart of Luro has always been a tool to enable deeper collaboration in a broader team context, so we architected it that way (a few times). It’s important that teams working on the same app are able to look at the product with the same lens of understanding, not just through their own silos. So teams were an early alpha feature of Luro.| daverupert.com
Last year, an investor we were talking to sent us a tweet that expressed her hesitancy about investing in products in the design systems space that went…| daverupert.com
Sarah Hendren’s What Can a Body Do? is a beautiful meditation on disability and the different ways bodies meet the physical world. In a word, there’s often a “mismatch” between how the world is designed and how people interact with it. There’s a chapter in the book where Hendren talks about a non-profit workshop that helps fabricate physical tools and accommodations for people with disabilities, when I read it I almost quit tech entirely.| daverupert.com
It’s so easy nowadays to get up and going on a project. I can burp some npm commands into my terminal, burp some more to setup a deployment pipeline and blam! Website. The time to product demo is so low. You can get far on your own… very quickly… but then… you’re on your own. And it’s possible you’ve built something way past your ability to maintain.| daverupert.com
I often feel overwhelmed deciding what to do with my spare time. It’s a problem with volume moreso than ambition. When the feeling hit the other weekend I scribbled down seven ideas rattling around in my head and stared at the list blankly. I’ve used different prioritization systems in the past like the Eisenhower matrix (Urgent vs. Important) and the Six Sigma matrix (Effort vs Impact); and while those are good for evaluating required tasks… none of those work well for voluntary activi...| daverupert.com
More than making money… more than that feeling of launching a new product, feature, website, or app… the idea I am coming to value most in my professional life is the feeling of “play”. Sometimes play is being on my own with high autonomy and low consequences, sometimes it’s getting to choose new and fun technologies, but where play is most valuable is when it involves other people.| daverupert.com
A post from Jason Velazquez called “Where have all the websites gone?” crossed my socials. It’s a good lament about the dearth of interesting content on the internet and how we’re stuck in the same boring content silos.| daverupert.com
The personal blog of Dave Rupert, web developer and podcaster from Austin, TX.| daverupert.com
2022 was a massive year for CSS. We got CSS Layers, more subgrid support, the impossible :has() selector, and WE GOT CONTAINER QUERIES! 🎉 Thank you to everyone who worked on those. A lot of the success for CSS this past year was due to an incredible cross-browser effort called Interop 2022, a loose agreement amongst browsers to try to work on some of the same features so feature support gaps between browsers are shorter.| daverupert.com
2023 has been a memorable year and –at times– downright existential. Looking at the scorecard, it’s pretty clear there’s been more downs than ups. Despite everything, I maintain a positive outlook and am forward-looking.| daverupert.com
I learned something this week and I thought I would share it. Earlier this year I read Adrian Roselli’s post “Details/Summary are not [insert control here]”. In this post Adrian says is not a tab set, it’s not a subnavigation menu, not a dialog, not an accordion, not a … wait, what? Not an accordion‽⁈| daverupert.com
Spurred by last week’s ShopTalk I rolled out View Transitions here on my static Jekyll site. I hadn’t realized View Transitions for multi-page apps (MPAs) and static sites are ready for testing behind a flag in Chrome 113+. View Transitions for MPAs are a feature that’s high on my CSS wishlist, so I got to it. It took less than an hour to do, requires zero JavaScript, and two lines of CSS. I’m pleased with the results.| daverupert.com
The personal blog of Dave Rupert, web developer and podcaster from Austin, TX.| daverupert.com
Your personal site is your playground. Overhearing some recent chatter about putting the personality back in personal websites, I thought it might be helpful to share how I’ve been approaching art direction on my blog. I have a bit of experience here, in fact years ago during the heyday of “blogazines”, I forked and maintained an art direction plug-in for WordPress. It adds a text field for either global and page level styles and scripts enqueues those in the appropriate places. It wasn...| daverupert.com
A lot of people on social media are talking about chips and as a professional who has a dual masters in both potato and corn chips, I thought I’d chime in with some facts about chips.| daverupert.com
I flew on a plane from my land locked metropolis to the beach in a different state. After a few taps on my phone, I am transfigured into an expert on local marine life and tide cycles. A work trip to a city I’ve never been to? Tip-tap, I have local knowledge of all the best cuisine within a three mile radius. Is something broken in my home? Air conditioner? Dry wall? Tip-tap, I’m now an expert tradesman. The power to access infinite knowledge is intoxicating.| daverupert.com
The personal blog of Dave Rupert, web developer and podcaster from Austin, TX.| daverupert.com
One day my friend Bryan told me to come look at something on his computer. I respected Bryan, he was a bit older, and his opinions always weighed heavily on me. This seemed urgent, so I shuffled in his office as quick as I could.| daverupert.com
