I spent every spare moment of the past month working on my side project. I can’t wait to share more about it with you. Every time I think I’m close to a release, I find more work to do. It feels exhausting at this point, but I’m still not losing passion for the thing I’m building.
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I spent every spare moment of the past month working on my side project. I can’t wait to share more about it with you. Every time I think I’m close to a release, I find more work to do. It feels exhausting at this point, but I’m still not losing passion for the thing I’m building.
While I was busy building stuff, the web didn’t slow down! I’m not talking about the number of data breaches and major service outages that happened in the past weeks. This is scary! I’m talking about real people posting real things that they are passionate about. As always, I have a full list of these bits for you all and, as always, some music recommendations from my record shelf. Let’s go!
Album of the month
I was listening to a lot of incredible music this past month, and it was really hard to pick a single record to recommend. Just look how much
my collection
expanded in recent weeks! Some time ago, I discovered
Karate Boogaloo from Australia
. One of their members also plays with Surprise Chef, and I’ve been listening to them a lot recently. They just released
“Frogs In A Pond”
, which is really good, but my favourite album by these guys is
“Daylight Savings”
from 2020, and this is my recommendation this month for all you funky heads! The title track is a top banger!
This news was a little bit sad to me at first. I invested a big chunk of my life using and trusting Deno’s vision, but over the years I noticed the stagnation of this runtime and all the projects surrounding it. I’m not surprised at all by this news. Now I’m happy that good people with the right vision for building good primitives for the web are joining a bigger organisation, where they can focus their efforts on building good things and not worry about money.
I love writing, I love blogging, but it doesn’t mean I’m good at it. Posts like this one help me a lot. I feel super guilty of an over-reliance on links. What I find most annoying in technical blog posts scattered across the web are boring intros and unnecessary formality. All these concepts are nicely described in this post.
A stream of Nolan’s thoughts about the platform features, the benefits of using primitives provided by the web, dated, overcomplicated solutions and a few good speculations about why web developers nowadays still mess it up.
Have you ever wondered why it is port 3000, 8080 or maybe even 5173 that your local project is most likely running on? Why are these particular ones so popular in a world where you have tens of thousands to choose from? I found the story of each of them interesting. Unfortunately, I don’t know the author’s surname, and I struggled to find any more resources about him.
This is future-level, hard-core SVG customisation. The new
CSS Linked Parameters Module Level 1
specification is a way of passing custom values down to SVG files embedded using an HTML image
src
or using a CSS
background-image
. Vadim’s post is a great intro to this super experimental feature. Keep in mind that, at the time of writing this, the browser support for this one is questionable, but it is still worth learning as it is superbly powerful.
Kilian explains when the classic lazy CSS reset
*, *::before, *::after { box-sizing: border-box; }
may bite you and waste a moment of your life. I don’t hate his proposed universal pseudo-selector. Also a good reminder about
::details-content
. This one on its own is amazing. Did you know you can animate native HTML accordions using pure CSS, and you no longer need 600 MB of JavaScript to do it?
Scott is on a journey to improve native HTML elements, and this time his focus is on the 20-year-old poster attribute of the video element. He proposes that it be a fully customisable element that will give us no less power than a regular picture element has. I love every effort that makes the internet more performant and accessible to others, and Scott is always smashing it.
This is a quick intro to the concept of API field masks, which are present in some big enterprise APIs or in the Protobuf specification. Redowan recalls a real-life example from one of the Reddit threads and gives a solution. Not the simplest, but a solution that I learned from. I always learn a lot from Redowan’s posts: good blogger he is!
Safari added partial support for JPEG XL a few years ago in version 17. Firefox added it recently in version 158, and Chrome just announced that
JPEG XL is coming in version 155
. You may be wondering what the deal is. We have a bunch of modern image formats available in the engines already, mainly WebP and AVIF, which offer tons of advantages over the usual suspects like JPG and PNG formats. This post by Jake Archibald is an incredible resource to understand the pros and cons of each. If you’re really short on time, here is all you need to know.
For web use-cases, I’d currently default to AVIF 4:4:4, with the highest effort level I can be bothered with. If I felt AVIF was producing an unusually large file, I’d take a look at JPEG XL via jixel, and see if it did better.
The
iframe
on your page can dynamically adjust its size based on the content in it. There is no need to send and receive messages between both ends to make that happen any more. Now I’m tempted more than ever to make all the demos on my blog using just simple
iframe
embeds.
Really neat little tool that does one job and does it really well. You pass the colours you use across your project, and it shows you the contrast ratio and whether the combination of colours on top of each other passes AA or AAA standards. It also suggests little adjustments to the colours when applicable. The only limitation of this tool is the hex colour format, which is the only option for passing an input to it. I sent my feedback to the author of the tool. Not the first tool that does this job, but for sure the simplest and most intuitive to use.
Ignore the fact that this article comes from the official Go blog, as this is more about the new LSP features that the Go team proposed and implemented. Developers using LSP (you may not realise, but you are probably one of them), regardless of the programming language, will take advantage of these multi-step refactoring capabilities that are coming to the Language Server Protocol.
I don’t find anything exciting about this article. It is just another one that makes you rethink the current space of software engineering. Every single day, we hear about new LLM-generated forks of something popular: Adobe applications, Microsoft’s set of office tools,
brew
CLI, or now also TypeScript. In theory, all these forks perform a lot better according to the graphs that the authors decided to put on the Claude Code-generated README page on GitHub.
For the past few years, no one has decided to invest in the rewrite of the TypeScript compiler due to its complexity, but all of a sudden, in the past month, I heard about three new initiatives to do so. It makes headline after headline for a week or two, and in the end the idea dies and the original tool wins. It wins for a simple reason: the original authors do care about it. Even if this is not true, let me live in this naive world where people who care win.
Really nice selection of Interop 2027 features by Joshua Comeau. This one is a lot cooler than the one I shared because of the examples attached to every item. Josh is one of my favourite CSS bloggers. You can always find top explainers on his blog. Must follow!
Since Chris Coyier sold CSS-Tricks to DigitalOcean in 2022, things around this website have become a little strange. The DigitalOcean sponsorship sometimes felt subtle, but the next day it felt super salesy. The content was mostly good because it was still curated by the right web people, but occasionally some really bad pieces managed to slip in. Recently, it went quiet all of a sudden, and it was the first time in almost two decades that the page felt dead. Geoff now takes it over and has tons of plans for how to keep it alive under private ownership. I’m glad that DigitalOcean is out of the picture and the project is again with the right people.
This one is going to be a good finisher. Firefox people are not only good at making incredible browser engines, they also made the funniest ad for their product! These are classic internet memes from the early 2000s. This is so so so funny!
Most of this month we spent at the Polish seaside, with family and friends, chilling at the Baltic Sea, playing cards, grilling fresh fish and enjoying a poor internet connection. The rest of the month I spent trying to understand the madness that happened at work during my absence. But I managed to read some of the interesting bits on the web and also got addicted to a new album by Bonobo. A really successful edition of the NN1 Dev Club meetup was a nice way to enter the autumn season. So here you are, a music recommendation straight from my records shelf and a few resources that I found interesting this past month. Enjoy!
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Most of this month we spent at the Polish seaside, with family and friends, chilling at the Baltic Sea, playing cards, grilling fresh fish and enjoying a poor internet connection. The rest of the month I spent trying to understand the madness that happened at work during my absence. But I managed to read some of the interesting bits on the web and also got addicted to a new album by Bonobo. A really successful edition of the
NN1 Dev Club meetup
was a nice way to enter the autumn season. So here you are, a music recommendation straight from my records shelf and a few resources that I found interesting this past month. Enjoy!
Album of the month
Yes, you guessed it, it is
a new Bonobo album, “Distance in Static”
. I love it and this is the one that was spinning on my turntable the most this past month. Lucky me, I managed to get a signed copy from Juno.
Go 1.18 added generics, but only for standalone functions. Just released Go 1.27 added generics to the methods, so the generics story feels more complete. There is still one missing bit to add generics across the language, as they are not yet supported in the interfaces. This blog post gives a few useful cases for generic methods and also explains the technical limitations of adding them to the interfaces.
Declan is one of my favourite bloggers. His deep research into web-related subjects is always super interesting. This one is a huge list of web relics, snippets of HTML that were once popular but are now no longer needed. Again, he must have put a silly amount of effort into this research. I also love some personal annotations on some of the elements, like the Twitter-related meta tags.
A natural follow-up, also by Vale, also about the relics of a web programming language. This time about the dated parts of the CSS. I will just stop recommending blog posts by Vale; you should just follow him and read everything he writes. He is one of my favourite bloggers these days and an awesome web folk!
What’s interesting about this blog post by Bramus is not the web component he announces, but the set of technologies used to build it. I heard tons about the
CSS Custom Highlights API
in the past and I’m well excited about its capabilities, but the OpaqueRange API is totally new to me, and it is awesome! This combination of these two modern APIs will totally change the way we build complex UI elements. Coincidentally, not long ago I have been researching the market to see what options third-party solutions offer, and seeing a truly native solution to do exactly what I need it to do makes me super happy. The
“Highlighting a range of text inside an input or textarea” by Ollie Williams
is a good follow up on the subject.
Have you ever encountered missing types for the modern web APIs in your TypeScript projects? This project by Philip Walton fills this gap. No more
ts-ignore
s for you, all modern web tinkers.
I don’t use React as often as I used to, but this release is pretty cool and comes with a solution to two problems I frequently faced in the past. The Fragment’s references and the native way of detecting the browser environment specifically. The addition of the View Transitions, which are built on top of the
View Transition API
, is a nice addition to the library for sure. Other than that, there is a bunch of news around server-side rendering that I don’t really know that much about. Overall, a solid release.
A new feature by Cloudflare to make tunnelling super duper easy. I have been using ngrok for things like that in the past, but this one has become complicated over time and also requires an account. The new Cloudflare CLI makes it seamless and takes only 3 seconds to make your localhost instances remotely available. Handy!
Microsoft did multiple amazing things for software engineering, but TypeScript and Visual Studio Code are two of my favourites amongst them all. I really enjoyed watching this documentary. It is not a dry, boring, technical story, quite the opposite. It is a story of amazing people who met at the Zurich office and built Monaco, which then became the most popular IDE ever used. It goes a lot about the community and the open-source aspect. I really liked the part where they explained the motivation to create an LSP protocol, of which I’m a huge fan. Good background watch and a lovely story about people.
A new proposal by the Microsoft Edge team to introduce the
previewsrc
attribute to the native
img
HTML element. It’s proposed to solve the popular use case of serving a preview image before the full resource is loaded. There are plenty of third-party solutions and also many framework-dependent solutions. It is interesting, but it missed a few considerations about the
alt
text rendering and also the progressive rendering of formats that support it. Reading the discussion under some of
the issues raised against this proposal
is equally interesting as
the proposal itself
.
This is an incredible post by Kilian Valkhof from Polypane that goes in depth about the scrollable elements and all the special properties of the root scroller. I learned a lot from this post and I’m sure you will too. Kilian is an incredible educator and every single article he writes is worth your time.
A common things in Node.js, like project reloading and basic stdout styling, no longer needs a third-party package. Here, Flavio Copes gives us 12 alternatives to very popular things that some time ago were only possible using third-party packages, but now can be achieved using built-ins. Good short summary. I published a post about most of these in the past individually, but it is good to see them all together on a concise list.
It is hard to beat this way of presenting new features in the recently released Go 1.27. Ainsley Clark and Jesús Espino did a fantastic job hosting it and interviewing no one else but the implementers responsible for all the new parts of the language.
This article presents a problem that I didn’t even know I had, but secondly, it also gives a one-liner solution for it. I also had no clue that this CSS property and value existed. Andy and his Piccalilli blog are one of the very few incredible CSS resources that are still going on the web, and I’m very thankful for it. Top quality as always.
It was a good month for me. Very productive, slower than usual. When the rest of the world races, folks go faster, produce more than ever with all these modern tools, I find more joy in doing precisely the opposite.
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It was a good month for me. Very productive, slower than usual. When the rest of the world races, folks go faster, produce more than ever with all these modern tools, I find more joy in doing precisely the opposite.
My friend inspired me to re-watch a decades-old conference talk about programming, and surprisingly I found it more relevant than ever before. That inspired me to re-watch some classic old talks about our craft, and below you will find a few of them. The past month was also full of good resources and discussions around the web that I found super insightful. I hope you will like the collection I put together for you this month. As usual, the album of the month for you first, and a stack of links later. Go!
Album of the month
Let me tell you a story. I was listening to some music while cooking a breakie for the family the other day. My 3-year-old daughter came down from her bedroom, paused for a moment next to the speaker and asked.
“Dada, Nina Simone?”
My heart melted and the pride I felt that exact second is hard to describe. My little angel who can barely count to five knows who Nina Simone is. All these music listening sessions and dancing every evening were worth it. The exact song that was playing at that moment was a beautiful song called “Baltimore” (listen to
“Baltimore” by Nina Simone on YouTube
). Even though Nina’s version of this song is by far the most popular, the original was made by Randy Newman in 1977. Beautiful song! Probably no surprise that the album from my collection that I would like to recommend you this month is
“Baltimore” by Nina Simone
.
PS. If you cook without music, you live your life wrong. A good speaker in the kitchen is essential. And in the bathroom. And the living room. Every room. The garage too!
I’m glad to see more folks being excited about this, in my opinion super underappreciated, CSS units. The
lh
and
rlh
map to the size of the line height in relation to the current element and the root respectively. This is by far the best way to achieve balanced typography in CSS but as you can see in Ahmad’s post, there are plenty of other use cases for it. I also published a piece about three years ago.
“Vertical rhythm using CSS lh and rlh units”
give it a go if vertical rhythm on the web is something you care about.
Anton Zhiyanov published a bunch of classic blog posts that covered all the new Go releases. It was my favourite way of exploring new things in the language for the past few years. Unfortunately,
Anton decided to stop
, as it started to feel more like a chore rather than a fan project. Luckily, the folks from VictoriaMetrics decided to continue the tradition, and they just published a post about the upcoming Go 1.27 release. It is full of great additions to the language: generics on methods, JSON v2 enabled by default, a built-in UUID package, and plenty more. Thank you for this write-up.
This one is my favourite kind of posts. Lea Verou dives deeply into the user psychology behind the two and three states theme switches. She advocates for the smarter way of programming two-state appearance mode toggles and gives plenty of good reasons against the popular solutions that add third explicit options for adopting system preferences. I’m not fully convinced by her methodology, but nonetheless this is a really good read.
What a brilliant idea. It is shocking that this thing is becoming a reality only now, in 2026. If you want to sell a domain name, just add a
_for_sale
DNS record. Brilliant!
Fonts contribute a lot to the overall weight of your web project. In this post, Chris reminds us about the system font that often may be more than enough. The default macOS San Francisco font is actually a variable font, and you can go pretty crazy using only this one and nothing else.
One of these talks that I keep coming back to every few years, and every time I watch it I have a feeling that it becomes increasingly more relevant. In the age of AI tools that generate code for programmers, it is so easy for an additional complexity to slip into our project, and the thing is not always immediate to spot. This talk is a good reminder about the correlation of “simple” and “reliable”. If you have never watched this talk, today is the day you should hit the play button.
On a similar vein, this is a classic blog post that is over a decade old. A little reminder that goes so well with the “Simple Made Easy” talk. The more I’m a part of this industry, the more I appreciate boring tech. At the same time, I care less and less about shiny new things, and I apply a lot more aggressive filters to the industry news I dedicate any time to. Again, if you have never read this one, brew a coffee now and give it a go.
This is the counterargument to Lea’s post by Bramus. Both posts are very good, and they present two very different points of view, but the prioritisation of explicit user control advocated by Bramus is closer to my preference. I really like this blog post response to another blog post that went viral in the industry.
A great presentation of the results that Scott collected on the effect of AI-assisted coding on mental health. Not only dry facts, but also practical advice from psychology experts and some snippets from the interviews with burnt-out developers. If you use any level of AI coding in your day-to-day, this can serve as a good warning. The production quality is, as always, second to none, but at this point, I would expect nothing else from the Syntax folks.
I recently had a discussion with some of my tech friends on the
NN1 Dev Club
Discord server about the tech talks that aged well. The one mentioned above by Rich Kickey was, of course, my recommendation, but my friend Rob recommended this one by Paul Adams presented at UX London 8 years ago. This talk aged very well, and other than some obsolete tools at this point, this talk is probably more relevant now than it was back then. If you can think of some old tech talks that aged well, please send them my way!
Now when you install Buf CLI, it comes with an LSP server that you can hook into your favourite editor and enjoy a much nicer experience while working with protobufs. That was the missing piece from the official bundle. Protobufs are my favourite way of communication between backend services, and this not only simplifies my tooling to work with it but also makes it more powerful than ever.
A little AI slop warning before you click this one, because it feels like something mostly AI-generated and I think authors should make it a little bit more personal. It is still a very useful collection of explainers related to profiling the performance of your web project. It is a miles-long page and probably reading it from top to bottom is not the way, but skim through the headings and explore the subjects that you don’t fully grasp. I learned a ton using it.
This is a relatively small release compared to some past Go releases, but version 1.27 of my favourite programming language adds quite a few things that I’m really excited about. Generics on methods, more strict JSON encoding, and finally UUID built-in in the standard library. The
“Go 1.27 Release Notes”
go more in depth about every new feature.
End of July? Seriously? Feels like yesterday when I celebrated New Year’s Eve, and all of a sudden it is the end of July. Can we all slow down a little, please? Not a little. Slow down! You, time, the world. Pretty please! I’m in a good mood today, but not in a good one to write interesting intros, so let’s go straight to the album of the month (it is a good one), and of course links. I have plenty of good resources for you that I liked over the past month. Enjoy!
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End of July? Seriously? Feels like yesterday when I celebrated New Year’s Eve, and all of a sudden it is the end of July. Can we all slow down a little, please? Not a little. Slow down! You, time, the world. Pretty please! I’m in a good mood today, but not in a good one to write interesting intros, so let’s go straight to the album of the month (it is a good one), and of course links. I have plenty of good resources for you that I liked over the past month. Enjoy!
Album of the month
Time for a classic! I have two reasons why
“The Score” by Fugees
was spinning quite a lot on our turntable in the past month. Firstly, this is an incredible album full of bangers, one after the other. Another reason is that my wife and I are going to see Lauryn Hill and Wyclef Jean live in a few weeks’ time at the
Diaspora Calling
festival and we are expecting to hear quite a few songs by refugees. I’m well pumped about it. If you don’t know this album, you have homework to do, because this is one of the greatest pieces of music ever released.
I like posts about modern parts of CSS, but posts like this one are even better. Jake presents a tonnes of modern CSS to solve a particular UI challenge — adding margins and restricting block size of customizable selects. Along the way he also bumps into number of browsers incompatibilities. Again, it is packed with modern CSS like
position-try-fallbacks: flip-block
and other nuggets you probably never heard of. This is the best kind of blog posts!
Really good primer to the
go fix
CLI and the concept of modernizers in the Go language. The command line tool has been totally revamped in the recent major version 1.26 and it is an incredibly useful tool for projects managed by a team of multiple devs. Surprisingly, it is also very useful for codebases written using AI, even though modern LLMs are pretty good at writing Go.
I was so excited when the Microsoft team announced the TypeScript rewrite to Go over a year ago. For many months, I have been using
tsgo
, and the difference in the experience of working with this language is night and day. The part that I’m most excited about, other than the speed, of course, is the native LSP integration that fully follows the protocol spec. If you have ever complained about the TS compilation speed, today is the day when the wait is over. Update your projects and your IDEs to take full advantage of it.
I know that there are plenty of other resources that explain the new possibilities of fully customisable HTML select elements, but there is something different about this Apple production. This presentation is not too long, not too short, follows a nice pace and the constructs are layered on top of each other, so we are not bombarded with the complexity of new values and features all at once.
This is a good guide on creating a web browser extension. The chapter closer to the end of this presentation is the most exciting to me, as it presents how you can package and distribute a Safari extension without ever downloading Xcode. This is exciting news and probably will unblock a lot of authors from distributing their plugins to Safari as well.
Really inspiring talk by Daniel about building successful products with people. It is backed by the origin story of npmx, which is one of the most successful open source stories in recent times. I love the way Daniel always puts people first in the way he works.
OpenTelemetry is an open-source framework to enable key observability elements in your application. It is a single framework that gives you logs, metrics, and traces, and it supports a lot of modern programming languages. Adding it to a Go application has never been simple, though. It required a lot of boilerplate code to propagate logs, hook into the transport layer events, and orchestrate spans for database calls, etc. Now this whole thing can go away, and we no longer need to write it all, as the new
otelc
CLI is a tool that can auto-instrument our application at compile time. The best code is the one that doesn’t exist, right?
I had absolutely no clue about the CSS
progress()
function. This article presents one great use case for the new function, but I can think of plenty more good ones. Isn’t modern CSS just too good?!
Good post about the goals of Gin, the most popular HTTP Go language framework. The author elaborates on the importance of backward compatibility, how the radix tree-based router made it a lot more efficient compared to other regex-based projects of its kind, and some other decisions that made it as popular as it is. Really good, short write-up with an interactive radix tree explainer.
What a good write-up. Learning new things is probably your bread and butter if you work in the software engineering sector, but some people may need this reminder. It is really useful for people who claim not to have time for anything, and even more applicable to those who didn’t train their self-improvement muscle since their school years.
I really like Cloudflare’s intuitive, headers-controlled advanced caching. This is the thing that I always wanted to be available in Cloudflare Workers, and the wait is over. This blog post starts from the basics and goes into depth about the reasoning why this implementation took so long. It is such an interesting story how the web changed and the core Worker methodology flipped the order of resources (moved the cache in front of the origin).
Just read it. It is not about a specific tool, and Bill’s point is not to compare one to the other. It is about core principles of building a product that people want to use. The whole post, line by line, is a masterpiece and I would highly recommend reading it regardless of what the output of your creation is: a website, CLI tool or programming language. It applies to all those.
Maximal configurability shouldn’t be a tool’s goal, it should be an option for when it’s actually necessary. Designing an ergonomic tool is fundamentally about having good defaults, while still allowing escape hatches where they’re possible/needed.
“Highly configurable” is often just an excuse for shipping no opinion at all and calling the resulting work your problem. Good defaults are a form of respect for the user’s time: the toolmaker does the thinking once so a thousand users don’t each have to.
Documentaries by CultRepo are incredible, and another one has joined their collection recently, this time about the Java programming language. A language that I have absolutely no clue about, but that actually makes this a more interesting documentary for me. As always, top production quality and a superbly interesting story. Hey, modern Java doesn’t really look as verbose as it looked a decade ago when I looked into it for the first time.
Do I really need to highlight every single post by Josh in my top picks? Yes, I do, because they are great explainers of modern CSS concepts. His demos and very practical examples are always on point to convey just enough without exhausting my brain capacity.
Super simple to follow intro to the interactive rebasing. I’m not scared of
git rebase -i
but I use it so infrequently that every time I use it, I need to remind myself where to put “s” to squash one commit onto the other. I really like this refresher.
This episode of Syntax.fm answered so many questions I had about AT Protocol and a little bit about how it compares to something like the Fediverse (the concept behind Mastodon). Dan is a great educator and some of the concepts he explained finally clicked in my brain. After chatting about it on social media, Dan shared with me
“There Are No Instances in atproto”
that goes much deeper into the comparison of AT Protocol and the Fediverse. I think I’m becoming a fan, but there is still one knowledge gap in my understanding, and I have a blog post coming precisely about that. There is no better way to learn something than writing about it. Right?
There is no other web service that I have been using more throughout my career other than my email. Second is CodePen. This is a huge milestone that the whole team spent years to achieve and the whole, super small team deserves huge kudos. The new CodePen 2.0 is a lot more powerful, comes with all you would expect from a very modern service of its kind, but in a typical fashion for these folks, they kept it simple. To use its basic features it is as simple as it always has been, but now you can do serious development work with it including a whole deployment of your website, which is absolutely sick. I also enjoyed two episodes of the CodePen Radio podcast, that I would highly recommend you checking if you are curious about some internals:
“Why are we building CodePen v2”
and
“CodePen 2.0 Launch Party! Find out what everyone’s favorite features of CodePen 2.0 are”
. Huge congrats team!
