Tags: ft

Piccia Neri’s post on LinkedIn

What a slap in the face of every tech conference that claims it is simply not possible to have a truly representative line-up: multiple perspectives, multiple faces, multiple experiences, rather than the same default one we’ve all been staring at for decades (that’s a white middle aged man in case you’re wondering. I do love you, white middle aged man, but we’ve heard from you, and keep hearing from you. Time to hear from others, too).

Yes, my friend. It is possible. UX London has done it. The Clearleft team has done it. Go look for yourself.

The value is in the difficulty - Annotations

We’ve seen this arc before, and music is the richest analogy.

Like Bruce Sterling always says:

Whatever happens to musicians happens to everybody.

When I told you about the schedule for UX London 2026, I said:

After your afternoon workshop there’ll be one final closing talk at the end of each day before we head to the bar.

These closing talks are a way of bringing everyone back into the same space after spending the afternoon in different workshops. It feels right to start the day and end the day with a shared experience.

On day one, discovery day, the closing talk will be delivered by Michael Kibedi. It’s called Whose English gets to be default?

Ben Sauer will be giving the closing talk on day two, design day. His talk is called Story before screens.

Finally, on day three, delivery day, the closing talk will be from Lou Downe. It’s called Bad services, which also happens to be the title of their brand new book!

As you can see, each day at UX London is crafted to be a distinct one-day event, but all three days also flow together nicely.

If you haven’t got a ticket yet, grab one now before the standard pricing ends at midnight. And don’t forget that you can use the discount code JOIN_JEREMY to get a tasty 20% off.

There’s just under a month to go until UX London 2026—exciting!

You can peruse the full schedule if you need to decide wether you’re coming for just one day or for all three. The event is designed to flow together, from discovery day to design day to delivery day, but each individual day is also designed to be a standalone experience by itself.

Day one on Tuesday, June 2nd has a focus on research:

1. Maria Isachenko will talk about how You don’t need more research time: You need a system that keeps research in product decisions.
2. Melin Edomwonyi covers Validation as a UX superpower.
3. Marley Dizney Swanson will present From insight to impact: A hypothesis-driven framework for product teams.
4. Luisa Berta will be talking about Turning failure into opportunity.

Day two on Wednesday, June 3rd is all about the nitty-gritty details of design:

1. Julia Petretta kicks things off with From onboarding to “a-ha!”: Designing the moments that really matter.
2. Andrea Grigsby has a case study called Why must things be this way? Designing with intention.
3. Piccia Neri puts a positive spin on accessibility with her talk, The best creative brief.
4. Hidde de Vries will explain why The future of UX is green: On the Web Sustainability Guidelines.

Day three on Thursday, June 4th will cover collaboration and design systems:

1. Ben Callahan will impart Wisdom from the trees.
2. Lucy Blackwell and Alex Edwards will give a case study on Putting the user at the centre of your design system.
3. Rachel Ilan Simpson will take us From 0 to scale: Building and transforming design at startups & scale-ups.
4. Matt LeMay will cover why The communication of the thing IS the thing

And those are just the morning talks!

On each day you’ll have your choice of workshop for the afternoon.

1. Feyikemi Akinwolemiwa will cover Future friction: Horizon scanning for UX.
2. Natasha den Dekker will help you answer the question How well do you know your users? Exploring assumptions through play
3. Chris How’s workshop is Yippee IA: Information architecture for digital designers
4. Oore Babatunde will help you put together UX practitioner’s code of ethics.
5. Lucrezia Ponzano will take you From chaos to clarity: A tactical workshop for real alignment.
6. Ben Callahan will guide you through Assessing organisational culture.

After your afternoon workshop there’ll be one final closing talk at the end of each day before we head to the bar. I haven’t announced those speakers yet, but believe me when I say they’re going to be quite special!

UX London 2026 is shaping up to be an excellent three days of design. Get your ticket now if you haven’t already got one.

(And just between you and me, you can use the discount code JOIN_JEREMY to get a whopping 20% off any ticket price!)

It’s Not AI. It’s FOMOnetization.

FOMO is a feeling. But it’s also a business model—and increasingly, one of the more successful ones. Fear, in general, makes people much easier to separate from their money. It’s perfectly suited to this moment of ubiquitous grift, where everything feels like a lottery ticket or a multi-level marketing scheme.

It’s even more perfectly suited for “the age of AI,” which squeezes economic FOMO from both sides. AI could make you wildly rich (the first person to start a billion-dollar company with zero employees!) or leave you hopelessly destitute (part of the looming “permanent underclass”). Which one do you want to be? Smash that like button, sign up for my online course, and use my new AI-powered business platform!

Times are tough out there. I know that a lot of people are looking for work, which can be a very stressful experience.

One of the things that can make the job search stressful is uncertainty. There’s a real taboo around talking about salaries. This taboo ends up benefiting employers and punishing potential employees. There’s an information gap that can be exploited (see also: job postings that don’t list salary ranges).

That’s why I’m always pleased when people voluntarily share their income. Here are some of the people who have done this over the years:

• Dan Mall (US)
• Alistair Hey (UK)
• Jamie Tanna (UK)
• Tom Withers (UK)
• Matt Brunt (UK)
• Carolina Gilabert (UK)
• Xe Iaso (Canada)
• Kristófer Reykjalín (Canada/US/Iceland)

Because the jobs are generally in software or design, you can sort of make apples-to-apples comparisons. You can definitely get the general gist of what kind of salary to expect for certain roles.

In the interest of full transparency, I figured I’d share my own income numbers, though as you’ll see, they’re not very representative of a normal career:

• 2003: £15,434 (freelance)
• 2004: £15,900 (freelance)
• 2005: £14,125 (freelance)
• 2006: £43,009 (freelance/Clearleft)
• 2007: £34,900 (Clearleft)
• 2008: £33,833 (Clearleft)
• 2009: £35,549 (Clearleft)
• 2010: £37,174 (Clearleft)
• 2011: £40,666 (Clearleft)
• 2012: £39,750 (Clearleft)
• 2013: £39,500 (Clearleft)
• 2014: £48,655 (Clearleft)
• 2015: £46,499 (Clearleft)
• 2016: £52,106 (Clearleft)
• 2017: £56,492 (Clearleft)
• 2018: £59,498 (Clearleft)
• 2019: £59,670 (Clearleft)
• 2020: £43,807 (Clearleft)
• 2021: £48,344 (Clearleft)
• 2022: £60,446 (Clearleft)
• 2023: £55,721 (Clearleft)
• 2024: £47,104 (Clearleft)
• 2025: £42,133 (Clearleft)

The first thing you’ll notice is that agency work isn’t nearly as well paid as in-house work at a technology company. So don’t embrace agency life for the money. Speaking personally, the benefits are in autonomy and variety. Those are things I value highly.

Also, I haven’t put any job titles or levels on there because they’ve never really been codified for me. I just made up my own job titles as I went along. Again, this is not very helpful to you if you’re looking for a job at a typical company.

You’ll see that things got weird in 2020, which is to be expected because things did get weird in 2020. I was furloughed, and I also took some more time off. I got a taste for it, which is why I went down to a four-day week and later a three-day week, which is what I’m doing now. So those last five years of numbers are loopy—I’m making less than before, but if you were to adjust it for a five-day week, I’m still getting paid more than before …if that makes sense.

Perhaps the most unusual thing about my career trajectory is that I’ve been at the same place for twenty years now. That’s pretty much unheard of in tech. It’s far more usual to see people switch companies—and get a salary bump—every couple of years.

So I’m not sure if there’s any value in me sharing my numbers like this. But like I said, I admire when other people do it so I figured I’d throw mine out there.

Perhaps you’d like to share your numbers too.

Sometimes I look back through my blogging archives and notice what’s changed over time.

For example, I used to write quite enthusiastically about the arrival of a new operating system from Apple. That is no longer the case, to put it mildly. I’m currently holed up on Sequioa, trying to resist all the nudgings to “upgrade” to the tacky design nightmare that is Tahoe. I feel like the protagonist of Pluribus.

I used to write about software I really liked. Sometimes it was software made by Apple. More often it was from some independent developer.

Like, I remember how much I loved a little application called Quicksilver. It just did one thing. You pressed control and space and then started typing the name of any programme installed on your computer. After a few characters Quicksilver would show you the match, you hit enter and the programme launched.

If that process sounds familiar, it’s because Apple ended up incorporating it into their own Spotlight feature. Quicksilver got sherlocked (ask your parents).

Recently though, Spotlight got worse and worse at doing its one job. It’s been laggy and inaccurate, even though I set my Spotlight indexing options to only index the Applications folder.

Then I found TinyStart. It’s like Quicksilver reborn!

A tiny launcher for macOS, fast and focused on the essentials.

Actually, it does double duty. As well as being an application launcher, it’s also an emoji picker. 👍

Best of all, not only is TinyStart a return to the focus and quality of software of yore, it’s also a return to the pricing model. You buy the software—for a measly €5—and that’s it. You own it now. There’s no subscription you have to pay every month.

I love everything about this.

AI Might Be Our Best Shot At Taking Back The Open Web | Techdirt

Not sure I buy the argument here, though I do very much look forward to local language models getting better so we can ditch the predatory peddlars of today’s slop. But this trip down memory lane to the early web of the 1990s could’ve been describing my own experience:

But the thing I do remember was the first time I came across Derek Powazek’s Fray online magazine. It was the first time I had seen a website look beautiful. This was without CSS and without Javascript. I still remember quite clearly an “issue” of Fray that used frames to create some kind of “doors” you could slide open to reveal an article inside.

Fray was what made me want to make websites:

I distinctly remember sites like prehensile tales, 0sil8 and the inimitable Fray triggering something in my brain that made me realise what it was I wanted to do with my life.

Web Day Out - 12 March 2026 — Polytechnic

This was another fantastic conference from the Clearleft team, and one that I hope is repeated next year. It is absolutely incredible what you can do in the browser these days, and even though I thought I was keeping up with the latest developments, it astounded me how far things have come.

You should come to UX London in the first week of June. Why? Because it’s going to be awesome, that’s why!

You probably knew that already. You probably already decided to get a ticket because you’re smart like that.

But don’t dilly-dally! Early-bird tickets are available now but in just over one week, they won’t be.

So get your ticket by Friday, March 27th. If you get your ticket now, it’s a win for everyone. You get a cheaper ticket. We know for sure that you’re coming.

Every time someone buys a conference ticket in plenty of time, the conference organiser sleeps a little better at night.

If you need to convince your boss, you can give them these reasons to attend. I even made an email template you can use a starting point for making the case.

You could come for all three days of UX London, or you can pick just one day.

Tuesday, June 2nd is discovery day with a focus on user research. You’ll hear from great speakers like Melin Edomwonyi and Maria Isachenko as well as getting workshops from Natasha den Dekker and Feyikemi Akinwolemiwa.

Wednesday, June 3rd is design day where it’s all about the nitty-gritty details. Not only will there be great talks from Andrea Grigsby, Julia Petretta, and Hidde de Vries, there’s going to be the best-named workshop ever from my colleague Chris How: Yippee IA!

Thursday, June 4th is delivery with a focus on design systems and collaboration. Alex Edwards, Lucy Blackwell, Rachel Ilan Simpson and Ben Callahan will all be giving talks (and Ben’s doing a workshop too).

That’s not even close to the final line-up. I’m confirming more speakers right now and getting very, very excited about how it’s all shaping up.

You know you don’t want to miss this one. So get your early-bird ticket now while you still can.

Web of State of the Browser Day Out

A lovely post from Remy about State Of The Browser and Web Day Out.

On March 12th, 1989, Tim Berners-Lee submitted Information Management: A Proposal. This would form the basis of what became the World Wide Web.

On March 12th, 2026, Web Day Out happened in Brighton.

Coincidence?

Yes. Yes, it is a coincidence. But it’s a pretty nice coincidence, you must admit.

It was a day dedicated to the World Wide Web. Not just the foundational languages of the web—HTML, CSS, and JavaScript—but also the foundational ideas of the web.

“Share what you know!” That was the original motto of the World Wide Web project. That was the motto of Web Day Out too.

Look, I’m biased because I put the line-up together but honestly, all of the speakers were superb! So much knowledge delivered in such entertaining fashion.

I had a blast. And I’ll give myself a little pat on the back for how I grouped the talks into rhyming couplets:

Browsers: Jemima talked about what you can do with just HTML and CSS these days, and Rachel followed up with how to come up with your own browser support strategy.

Performance: Aleth made the case for multi-page progressive web apps that work under any network conditions, and Harry followed up with an impassioned rant about how much time and energy has been wasted on over-engineered single-page apps that ignore what browsers can do.

Styling: Manuel walked us through a whole new approach to writing modern CSS, and Rich followed up with a whirlwind tour of all the great typographic possibilities in CSS.

Standards Jake took us on the standards journey to customisable select elements, including anchor positioning and popovers, and then Lola showed us exactly what it takes to add a new feature to a web browser.

Everything flowed together really nicely.

I was a little apprehensive going into Web Day Out that it would just be preaching to the converted. And sure, there were plenty of veteran devs there who already knew the value of progressive enhancement and making the most of web standards. But I was gratified to also see lots of younger faces in the crowd.

I was talking to one young developer afterwards and she told me what an eye-opening experience it was. Whereas before she would have defaulted to a framework-driven single-page app for everything, now she’s got the knowledge to make an appropriate architectural choice.

Mission accomplished!

If you couldn’t make it to Web Day Out and you want to experience some RAMO, here’s the chatter on Bluesky and Mastodon, lovely photos by Marc, a post by Dave, and a lovely post by Amber.

Thank you so much to everyone who came. I think you’ll agree it was a most excellent day out.

The Artisanal Web | Another Rodeo

I feel very seen here. This describes how I built The Session:

There are still people building the web by hand, very much like we did it in the early days. They know all about what’s possible using modern tooling, yet they choose to expend their time and attention to the craft of doing it by hand. They care about the craft, and they care about what they’re making. They believe in their unique skill and vision over engagement strategies and analytics and content algorithms. They don’t need a platform, or they’ll build their own.

Nobody Gets Promoted for Simplicity – Terrible Software

You can’t write a compelling narrative about the thing you didn’t build. Nobody gets promoted for the complexity they avoided.

Complexity looks smart. Not because it is, but because our systems are set up to reward it.

Anyone can add complexity. It takes experience and confidence to leave it out.

I went to State Of The Browser in London on the weekend. It was great!

I mean, it’s always great but this year the standard felt really high. All the talks were top quality. I’ve been at events with ticket prices a literal order of magnitude greater but with quality nowhere near this level.

Bramus got the ball rolling with an excellent presentation on CSS anchor positioning. Cassie closed the day with a great fun talk, making a game in the browser. In between we had accessibility, progressive enhancement, and other favourite topics of mine.

State Of The Browser isn’t just about the talks though. It’s very much a community event. For me, it’s like an annual get-together with some lovely people that I only get to see once a year.

But it’s not just a bunch of people who already know each other. Dave got a show of hands from people attending for the first time and it looked to me like around half the audience. That’s what you want at an event—a mix of the old and the new, the familiar and the exciting.

A personal highlight for me was spending lunchtime talking in Irish with my friend Paul from Ti.to. Bhain mé an-taitneamh as an deis Gaeilge a labhairt!

Dave handed over MC duties to Jake this year but he did do the opening and closing remarks. He’s always really, really supportive of other community events and encouraged everyone to go to Web Day Out.

He also pleads with people to buy their conference tickets early (it really does help us conference organisers sleep better) but if you’ve left it this late, you’re lucky that tickets are still available.

If you liked State Of The Browser, you’re going to like Web Day Out. And if you missed State Of The Browser and you wished you could’ve been there, you can make up for it by coming to Web Day Out.

The two events have a lot in common. Great talks, great people, and no mention of large language models.

I don’t know if it was a deliberate policy by Dave, but it felt so good to spend a day at a technology conference that wasn’t dominated by The Hype.

There were a few bits of slop in the slides of the first two talks (which always makes me cringe and wince—I crince) and Cassie threw some subtly hilarious shade during her presentation, but apart from that, the day was gloriously free of the A and the I.

No doubt some people will think that’s little more than sticking our collective head in the sand, but when the sand is this lovely, I’m okay with it.

Tickets for State Of The Browser 2027 are already on sale. Do what Uncle Dave says and get your ticket nice and early.

blakewatson.com - I used Claude Code and GSD to build the accessibility tool I’ve always wanted

You know my thoughts on generative tools based on large language models, but this example of personal empowerment is undeniably liberating.

Training your replacement | Go Make Things

I’ve had a lot of people recently tell me AI is “inevitable.” That this is “the future” and “we all better get used to it.”

For the last decade, I’ve had a lot of people tell me the same thing about React.

And over that decade of React being “the future” and “inevitable,” I worked on many, many projects without it. I’ve built a thriving career.

AI feels like that in many ways. It also feels different in that non-technical people also won’t shut the fuck about it.

A considered approach to generative AI in front-end… | Clearleft

A thoughtful approach from Sam:

1. Use AI only for tasks you already know how to do, on occasions when the time that would be spent completing the task can be better spent on other problems.
2. When using AI, provide the chosen tool with something you’ve made as an input along with a specific prompt.
3. Always comprehensively review the output from an AI tool for quality.

A programmer’s loss of identity - ratfactor

We value learning. We value the merits of language design, type systems, software maintenance, levels of abstraction, and yeah, if I’m honest, minute syntactical differences, the color of the bike shed, and the best way to get that perfectly smooth shave on a yak. I’m not sure what we’re called now, “heirloom programmers”?

Do I sound like a machine code programmer in the 1950s refusing to learn structured programming and compiled languages? I reject that comparison. I love a beautiful abstraction just as much as I love a good low-level trick.

If the problem is that we’ve painted our development environments into a corner that requires tons of boilerplate, then that is the problem. We should have been chopping the cruft away and replacing it with deterministic abstractions like we’ve always done. That’s what that Larry Wall quote about good programmers being lazy was about. It did not mean that we would be okay with pulling a damn slot machine lever a couple times to generate the boilerplate.

Deep Blue

My social networks are currently awash with Deep Blue:

…the sense of psychological ennui leading into existential dread that many software developers are feeling thanks to the encroachment of generative AI into their field of work.