Links
🔗 LMNT: I’ve Got Better Things To Do Than This, and Yet
It’s one thing for QuickTime UI to “get out of the way.” Please, do. I’m watching a video. I don’t need a big honkin’ pause button in the middle of the window, you know? But wait a minute, why is there a big honkin’ pause button in the middle of the window anyway? That’s not how it used to be.
I don’t always agree with Louie Mantia but he’s absolutely right here. When did hiding UI or moving it out of various bars become synonymous of “getting out of the way of content”? Slapping UI over the content is not getting out of the way. In fact it’s the exact opposite.
Pretty impressive to see what’s possible with CSS nowadays. Viewing the page source is quite illuminating.
🔗 Search Engine Land: What 1,000 food blog audits has taught me about SEO
I’m wary about posts on SEO but I found this one discussing the techniques attempted by recipe bloggers quite interesting. In short: cargo cult thinking around SEO myths is resulting in many bad food sites.
Via: Pixel Envy
🔗 Spyglass: Apple Lives Long Enough to Become the Ad Villain
People pay a lot of money for these devices from Apple. And part of the implicit bargain is that they won’t have adware or ads themselves shoved at them in every direction.
Now I’m no marketing expert, but I do know that understanding one’s customer base is important for success. And I understand that Apple’s is generally made up of people who pay a premium for a good user experience. I wonder if Apple understands this. I also know that generally pissing people off with stunts like this will not get them to come to your party.
🔗 Omer: you are what you launch: how software became a lifestyle brand
they don’t just ship features anymore, they ship vibes. onboarding becomes a performance. the ui is the brand. the founder’s blog post is the manifesto.
it’s not about what the software does.it’s about who it’s made for.
I guess this shouldn’t be surprising. Software construction is like any other human endeavour, where the person making it puts a bit of themselves into it. How can they not? But I enjoyed how this essay explored this phenomenon.
Via: Jim Nielsen’s Notes
🔗 Nicholas Bate: The Greatest Productivity Tips, 159
Simply because we do not affix a postage stamp to our e-mail does not mean it is free. That mail has a huge cost in productivity terms: for us, in did we craft it correctly first time? For others in lack of certainty perhaps of what is required of them. For others in being cc’d without need.
No, mail isn’t free. It’s extraordinarily expensive.
So true. I would add that Slack is just as expensive, only that you’re making micropayments over the course of the day instead of one lump sum.
🔗 82MHz: Blogs are still a thing
One more for the “blogging’s not dead yet” list everyone’s keeping.
Blogging is a small niche these days. There isn’t much hype around it, nor is there any money to be made because the VC firms are all busy chasing the next big thing […] But it is still here, and I like it exactly because it’s not the hype technology of the day anymore. It isn’t commercialised, algorithmically curated and set up to make some other person rich.
That’s why I like it too. It’s a slow, quiet, and comfortable form of online interaction.
Via: Mastodon boost by Brent Simmons
🔗 MOR10: Blogging is dead. Long live ephemerality.
This ended up being quite an insightful piece, particularly around how much better the authoring tools are in Instagram and other social media apps.
Via: Juha-Matti Santala
🔗 Robert Birming: Blog Inspiration
Very nice collection of links to blogging resources — from ideas and inspirations through to colour and icon packs — from @birming. This stuff is cat nip for me, so I’m sure to enjoy browsing these links.
🔗 You’re not a front-end developer until you’ve… - Nic Chan
Scored 17 in this little quiz. Not bad for a backend developer, although many of the questions universally apply.
Via: Jim Nielsen’s Notes
🔗 Science: Cockatoos have learned to operate drinking fountains in Australia
Each placed one or both of its feet on the fountain’s twist handle, then lowered its weight to twist the handle clockwise and prevent it from springing back up.
Amazing.
🔗 Dan Sinker: The Who Cares Era
This post has been doing the rounds in the online circles I travel in. I finally got around to reading it, and I think the author is right: caring about something in a world where others don’t is a radical idea. I know it’s an area where I could be better.
Oh, and I’m sorry, but I find the term “Instagram mini-essay” to be an oxymoron. The original poster’s quip of this Instagram essayist being another victim of the Who Cares Era are my feelings exactly. I mean, come on: don’t use frickin’ Instagram for your think pieces. Put a frickin’ URL on it next time.
I stopped working this day in 2025, almost 41 years later, as a senior engineer (which is surprisingly a lot like busing tables — lots of cleanup and setting the table just right for the customers to have a great time).
This line made me laugh. I’ve never waited tables, but as a senior dev myself, it often feels that my job has become less about coding and more about fixing problems and getting out of people’s way. So it goes.
Congratulations, Brent Simmons, on your retirement.
🔗 Jim Nielsen: Notes from Andreas Fredriksson’s “Context is Everything”
What really resonates in his step-by-step process is how, as problems present themselves, you see how much easier it is to deal with performance issues for stuff you wrote vs. stuff others wrote. Not only that, but you can debug way faster!
The understanding that comes from the code you wrote yourself is grossly underrated in my opinion. Choosing to use a library for something is not free. There’s an exchange involved: speed now for understanding later.
🔗 Flamed Fury: Monthly Recap: May 2025
I found the bookmarks from this monthly recap to be really interesting.
🔗 Simon Willison: No build frontend is so much more fun
If you’ve found web development frustrating over the past 5-10 years, here’s something that has worked worked great for me: give yourself permission to avoid any form of frontend build system. […] The joy came flooding back to me! It turns out browser APIs are really good now.
None of my frontend projects are used for “real” things, so I’m not speaking from authority here. But I don’t care: I still think the worst part of frontend development are all the crummy build tools. Remove them all and web development can be really fun.
🔗 Birchtree: Apple copies Samsung 😉
It has been fundamentally strange that Apple currently has OS’s with the same features that rarely share a number, so numbering them by year makes sense.
Wait, I was under the impression that Apple’s practice of trying to jam the same features into their OSes at the same time had a detrimental effect on quality. And they’re going to synchronise all their OS version numbers? Wouldn’t that just solidify user’s expectation on what’s in those OSes? Why not avoid that by keeping individual version numbers, and just ship features when they’re ready?
🔗 Inessential: My Wildly Incorrect Bias About Corporate Engineers
I was impressed, and grew more impressed as time went on, by my fellow engineers’ rigor, talent, professionalism, care, and, especially, ability to work with other people toward common goals.
As someone who has only worked in mid-sized businesses (and government) I appreciate Brent Simmons — a developer who I admire and whose software I use every day — candour here. Admitting your biases is not easy.
I know the indie life is romantic. Believe me, nary a day passes where I don’t romanticise about it. But speaking for myself, I think people’s reluctance to go that route is less to do with ability and more to do with the non-technical side, like security, confidence, thinking you have a good idea (not to mention being simply being in a position to take that opportunity). I wonder if some day the stars will align and I’d be in a position to take the plunge. Time will tell, I guess.
🔗 Pixel Envy: The Future of British Television in a U.S. Streaming World
The BBC has problems, but it matters to people. If a country values its domestic media — particularly public broadcasting — it should watch the future of British media closely and figure out what is worth emulating to stay relevant. The CBC is worth it, too.
I’d add that the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Cooperation) and SBS are worth it too. Culturally speaking, it’d be a sad day if those were to go away.
🔗 NY Mag: Rampant AI Cheating Is Ruining Education Alarmingly Fast
Two thoughts on this. The first is that I think these kids are doing a disservice to themselves. I’m not someone who’s going to say “don’t use AI ever,” but the only way I can really understanding something is working through it, either by writing it myself or spending lots of time on it. I find this even in my job: it’s hard for me to know of the existence of some feature in a library I haven’t touched myself, much less how to use it correctly. Offloading your thinking to AI may work when you’re plowing through boring coding tasks, but when it comes to designing something new, or working through a Sev-1, it helps to know the system your working on like the back of your hand.
Second thought: TikTok is like some sort of wraith, sucking the lifeblood of all who touches it, and needs to die in fire.
Via: Sharp Tech