The personal blog of Dave Rupert, web developer and podcaster from Austin, TX.
During my last vibe check the kids were still in school. Time has flown by. Work-life balance disrupted. Camps attended. Vacations were had. Bank accounts drained. A normal summer routine. Inbound and outbound travels Since the last vibe check I’ve been on a handful of airplanes visiting both work and family. We also had family come to visit. And I logged some hours on Texas highways. May: Another…
I’ve had the pleasure in my career of sitting in tons of different board rooms talking with executives and getting a rundown on different charts and graphs they care most deeply about. As expected, “number chart go up” is always the desired outcome. Number chart go up is good because it makes other number charts go up, specifically stock ticker number. One common refrain I’d hear everywhere I went…
CodePen v2 is now released! Because I co-host a podcast with Chris I’ve had an up-close perspective at this monumental effort over the last five years. I know how much work has gone into this release and I applaud the team for hitting the finish line. At the crux of the new experience is the new and improved editor. When you first launch into the v2.0 editor, your first response will probably be…
Xavier de Maistre in an armchair, displaying his “book of discoveries” (Veyssier, 1860 ) Every so often I like to include a public domain image in a blog post. I’m fond of the woodblock and lithographic illustrations of the late 1800s. I try to avoid indiscriminately (un-)splashing every post but the real reason for the infrequency isn’t radical self-control, it’s because dumpster diving for…
Named slots are one of web components’ biggest superpowers ✨ . Imagine a Button component with an optional icon; in Web Components we don’t need a separate Button and IconButton, a single Button component with <slot name="icon"> will do. Or a card component with a handful of predefined slots for image, title, description, price, metadata, etc. Not 100 different cards… one card. Slots are a…
I play Clues by Sam nearly every single day. I wrote about it before , but solving a little crime puzzle adds a micro-thrill to my day. A little blast of logic, misdirection, and wordplay. It’s a frequent topic of conversation in the ShopTalkShow Discord where people share their solves like Wordle scores. L'anarchiste (1892) by Félix Vallotton. Public Domain. It might have been Josh who first…
Forgive me, Reader. It’s been five months since my last vibe check. That’s a lot of ground to cover and it’s not possible to get into everything that happened. Like in real life conversations, instead of telling you how I’m doing, I’ll tell you what I’ve been doing these past few months. A trip to Seattle An underwhelming, low-res photo I took on my Kodak Charmera In March I went to Redmond, WA…
I have complex feelings about Generative AI but one area I find myself weirdly bullish on is small language models (SLMs) in the browser which are available in Chrome and Edge behind an experimental flag. I know, I know. I know. AI in the browser reeks of a product manager trying to hit a KPI to shoehorn AI into everything. I understand if you read the phrase “AI in the browser” and involuntarily…
The use of AI is leading to burnout among its greatest advocates as they hit the limit of their meta-cognitive abilities: “I end each day exhausted—not from the work itself, but from the managing of the work. Six worktrees open, four half-written features, two ‘quick fixes’ that spawned rabbit holes, and a growing sense that I’m losing the plot entirely.” As someone with ADHD, this sounds…
The number of screenshots of Claude conversations is going up in my life and it’s beginning to have an impact on my general mood. Most of the time it’s well-intended; coworkers working through a problem with a chatbot before bothering me or someone exploring unconventional ideas before bringing it to a broader audience. Both of those situations seem considerate. A tool for thought, as it were.…
When you make speed and “moving fast” the biggest priority on a project or in an organization, the first thing to breakdown is talking to each other. Talking takes time. Consensus is expensive and slow. In a pressurized environment there’s no time to schedule calls, get input from subject matter experts, or resolve key differences of opinion. ASAP makes a big assumption that all relevant parties…
We rolled out adaptive light-dark() support on our design system themes and it’s been a delightful upgrade. Creating light and dark variable sets isn’t difficult, but delivery has trade-offs. Most apps that do this probably ship both sets of token values in a single stylesheet. That’s fine until you have multiple kilobytes of duplicate definitions. To get around the performance problems we built…
It’s a secret to everyone! This post is for RSS subscribers only. Read more about RSS Club . I’ve heard the term “Ozempic face” for awhile. People have opinions about that one, but I tend to feel like we should be comfortable with bodies changing. There’s also “Ozempic butt” and there’s even “Ozempic penis”. I’ll let you search those up on your own but they’re also related to physical changes from…
I’ve watched a billion hours of YouTube and I’ve noticed a common trend: Whether that’s a drawing, a video game, a song, a cake, or a whole-ass off-grid house; I’ve learned that it’s fun to watch people make something. Since the beginning of humanity, the act of slapping two rocks together to make an arrowhead or a fire will draw a crowd. I feel like mankind has an innate curiosity to pause and…
The Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect of AI is a pretty well documented phenomenon: The Gell-Mann amnesia effect is a cognitive bias describing the tendency of individuals to critically assess media reports in a domain they are knowledgeable about, yet continue to trust reporting in other areas despite recognizing similar potential inaccuracies. Summarizing, AI sounds like an incredible genius synthesizing…
If I can make it smaller, I should. If I can make it dumber, I should. Smaller, dumber things have more applications, go more places, and require less maintenance.
I had a small, intrusive realization the other day that computers and the internet are probably bad for me. I mean that beyond the general advice to touch grass. From an ADHD and generalized anxiety perspective, computers and the internet have become an endless supply of poison pills for my brain; feeds full of constant dopamine hits with doom at every turn. This is hard to accept because a lot of…
Skills are the newest hype commodity in the world of agentic AI. Skills are text files that optionally get stapled onto the context window by the agent. You can have skills like “frontend design” or “design tokens” and if the LLM “thinks” it needs more context about that topic, it can import the contents of those files into the context to help generate a response. Generally speaking, skills do an…
There’s a lot that’s not going well; politics, tech bubbles, the economy, and so on. I spend most of my day reading angry tweets and blog posts. There’s a lot to be upset about, so that’s understandable. But in the interest of fostering better discourse, I’d like to offer a challenge that I think the world desperately needs right now: It’s cheap and easy to complain and say “ [ Thing ] is bad”,…
I got a lot of ideas for side projects rattling around in the old tin can. As part of my “No new projects” initiative, I’m trying to jump on building prototypes so I can decide if I want to explore ideas more or call it quits. A handful of my ideas are riffs or twists on existing app categories: A tennis ranking app… but modern and performant A nearby historical marker app… but with CarPlay…