Better Browser Caching with No-Vary-Search – CSS Wizardry
Handy! I’ve added this header to The Session.
Link tags: ring
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The Boring Internet | Terry Godier
You cannot kill a federated thing by killing one node, the way you can kill a platform by changing one company.
Design and Engineering, As One · Matthias Ott
A thoughtful piece by Matthias that’s a must-read for both designers and developers.
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.
Smaller and dumber - daverupert.com
The principle of least power expressed nicely:
Smaller, dumber things have more applications, go more places, and require less maintenance.
Coding Is When We’re Least Productive – Codemanship’s Blog
I’ve seen so many times how 10 lines of code can end up being worth £millions, and 10,000 ends up being worthless.
The Incredible Overcomplexity of the Shadcn Radio Button
Well, this is horrifying.
A Website To End All Websites | Henry From Online
Hand-coded, syndicated, and above all personal websites are exemplary: They let users of the internet to be autonomous, experiment, have ownership, learn, share, find god, find love, find purpose. Bespoke, endlessly tweaked, eternally redesigned, built-in-public, surprising UI and delightful UX. The personal website is a staunch undying answer to everything the corporate and industrial web has taken from us.
The Case for Blogging in the Ruins
Start a blog. Start one because the practice of writing at length, for an audience you respect, about things that matter to you, is itself valuable. Start one because owning your own platform is a form of independence that becomes more important as centralized platforms become less trustworthy. Start one because the format shapes the thought, and this format is good for thinking.
Blog Alarm Clock | Brad Frost
See, I’ve always compared that building pressure of need-to-blog to being constipated (which makes the resultant blog post like having a very satisfying bowel movement), but maybe Brad’s analogy is better. Maybe.
CSS-in-JS: The Great Betrayal of Frontend Sanity - The New Stack
This is a spot-on analysis of how CSS-in-JS failed to deliver on any of its promises:
CSS-in-JS was born out of good intentions — modularity, predictability and componentization. But what we got was complexity disguised as progress.
Resonance | James’ Coffee Blog
Ah, the circle of life!
Your URL Is Your State
How often do we, as frontend engineers, overlook the URL as a state management tool? We reach for all sorts of abstractions to manage state such as global stores, contexts, and caches while ignoring one of the web’s most elegant and oldest features: the humble URL.
Dithering - Part 1
A clear explanation of how image dithering works, illustrated along the way.
Most of What We Call Progress - Yusuf Aytas
Every engineer eventually overbuilds something. You think you’re being smart. You’re thinking ahead, building for growth and before you know it, you’ve created a system ten times heavier than your actual problem. That’s the trap. We keep designing for imaginary futures for scale that may never come and call it engineering. But it’s not engineering. It’s over-engineering.
The industry rewards it too. Nobody gets promoted for keeping things small and sane. You get promoted for complexity.
The present and potential future of progressive image rendering - JakeArchibald.com
When I set about writing this article, I intended it to be a strong argument for progressive rendering. But after digging into it, my feelings are less certain.
We Are Still the Web - The History of the Web
The web is just people. Lots of people, connected across global networks. In 2005, it was the audience that made the web. In 2025, it will be the audience again.
Curate your own newspaper with RSS
I’m almost certainly preaching to the choir here because I bet you’re reading these very words in a feed reader, but what Molly White has written here is too good not to share:
RSS offers readers and writers a path away from unreliable, manipulative, and hostile platforms and intermediaries. In a media landscape dominated by algorithmic feeds that aim to manipulate and extract, sometimes the most radical thing you can do is choose to read what you want, when you want, without anyone watching over your shoulder.
Why Silicon Valley CTOs Are Secretly Moving Away from React | by Coders Stop | in JavaScript in Plain English - Freedium
“We’ve stripped React out of our highest-traffic user flows and replaced it with vanilla JavaScript using small, focused libraries for specific needs,” said the CTO of a streaming service. “Our page load times dropped by 60% and our conversion rates improved by 14%.”
Keeping up appearances | deadSimpleTech
Looking at LLM usage and promotion as a cultural phenomenon, it has all of the markings of a status game. The material gains from the LLM (which are usually quite marginal) really aren’t why people are doing it: they’re doing it because in many spaces, using ChatGPT and being very optimistic about AI being the “future” raises their social status. It’s important not only to be using it, but to be seen using it and be seen supporting it and telling people who don’t use it that they’re stupid luddites who’ll inevitably be left behind by technology.