Writing
Notes
On design, code, and the space between them.
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On building personal sites
Why I keep rebuilding my personal site, and what I've learned from it.
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The physics of UI
How spring simulations and physical metaphors make interfaces feel alive.
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Color and control
Why I sample album art for ambient color and what I learned about CSS transitions.
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Nearly thirty years
What close to three decades of building for the web has taught me, and what I still don't know.
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AI and the texture of my work
A year into working with AI coding tools, here's what has changed and what hasn't.
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Against framework fatigue
The JavaScript ecosystem moves fast. Here's how I've stopped letting that be a source of anxiety.
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Why I delete code
The best code I've written this year is the code I removed. On the practice of subtraction.
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What the pandemic taught me about focus
Losing the office removed a lot of noise. It also removed a lot of signal.
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Design is not decoration
What three years of working with designers taught me about what design actually is.
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On feeling like a fraud
Imposter syndrome is real, but the story it tells you about yourself is wrong.
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The day JavaScript finally made sense
It took two years and one specific moment to understand what JavaScript was actually for.
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How I got into this
I built a Frankenstein computer from spare parts, got online for the first time, and right-clicked View Source. That was 1998. I never stopped.
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Learning to use the command line
I spent ten years building websites by clicking things. Then the build process made clicking obsolete.
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The year responsive design changed everything
Ethan Marcotte's 2010 article gave a name to something I'd been trying to do badly for years.
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Going freelance
After nearly a decade of building other people's things, I started building my own practice. Here's what surprised me.
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jQuery and the end of browser wars
One library made cross-browser JavaScript sane. Here's what that felt like before we took it for granted.
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When Flash was the future
For a few years in the mid-2000s, the most interesting things on the web were made in a tool that no longer exists.
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The CSS zen garden moment
In 2003, someone made the same HTML look like fifty different websites. It changed how I thought about the web.
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Tables all the way down
Building websites in 2001 meant nesting tables inside tables inside tables. We didn't know there was another way.
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The Frankenstein computer
I built my first computer from spare parts in 1998, got online, and right-clicked View Source. That one moment changed the direction of my life.