The personal digital-garden/dumpster fire of Nathan Long: former designer turned Front-End Developer, motion design tinkerer, and Senior UI Developer at Viget.
It's very common near the end of a project to have a hot pile of dead branches : branches that originally tracked something upstream but have since been deleted. Your original super-awesome-feature branch was merged via PR (pull request) on GitHub and deleted there after review, but you still have it locally, which means the branch is now considered dead. Manually cleaning up these branches can be…
Do you have a physical note system? Do you write anything down by hand? If not, you’re missing out. Digital notes are convenient, but there is something special about the tactile act of putting pen to paper. Perhaps it’s just the old artist in me, but it feels like an expansive idea space. There are no boundaries, no database or field restrictions, no rules; just you and the paper. It’s the…
I love RSS. I love that it gives me a direct line to what people are publishing. No algorithm, no intermediary, just me and the voices I choose—and there are so many interesting voices out there! Managing the feeds is the real drag. Since they pulled the plug on Google Reader, there hasn’t been one app that I could really get behind. Fortunately, a group of folks who love RSS even more than I do…
Ambient videos, or "short looping videos as a background element," are both common and tricky to get right. They can add a lot of visual texture to a design, but are often large, chunky elements that can slow down your performance. But this is 2026! We have some new tools to help with video compression! We're going to utilize some of the techniques Evil Martians demonstrated with AV1 encoding and…
At Viget we have a tradition of weekly rotating LabShares , which are a 10-12 minute presentations on ANYTHING the presenter is passionate about. We've talked about coffee, aloha shirts, sunscreen, adult autism, and many many other interesting topics. Recently, I was privileged to present my recent thinking on the nature of creativity and how we can continue to create even during the busiest…
This week marks a big milestone for me: 100 newsletter issues! 🙌🎉 ( Go sign up if you haven't already! Or go check out the archives of the last 100 issues!) Am I an expert at writing now? 𝔸𝔹𝕊𝕆𝕃𝕌𝕋𝔼𝕃𝕐 ℕ𝕆𝕋. But I have learned a few helpful things along the way: Writing happens all the time, all around you When I started trying to write more , I was under the impression that writing was…
Git—love it or hate it, you'll be using it nearly every day as a developer. When I started using Git, I felt like I was one bad command from blowing up a project history. Now, I still blow things up regularly, but now I know how to fix them. 😎 (Usually.) Mistakes happen—pretty much all the time. Knowing how to back out of them is like knowing where the brakes are on a car. It lets you try things…
I was disappointed when AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol in 2016, but intrigued when it influenced opening strategies that had been set for decades (or even centuries). I was alarmed in 2022 by how confidently ChatGPT spouted hallucinations with no factual basis but amused that it enabled me to create a haiku about my love of cheese effortlessly. I've been an AI skeptic, but it's frickin' everywhere. The…
Roll in enough Vim circles and you'll hear people sing the praises of tmux , the terminal multiplexer . And to be honest... I've never really quite gotten it. I tried it and didn't get why it was great. Recently, Adam Stacoviak from the Changelog mirrored my thoughts in this short clip: The selling points that Nick and Jared make for tmux actually made me realize why it's never quite fit for me.…
In a blast of nostalgia I came across this old clip from the PBS show Ghostwriter: In addition to this encapsulation of a part of my early childhood, there's some immediate takeaways: Sick Neuromancer reference. We should all petition to change our titles to Console Cowboys in Cyberspace . 🤠 The idealistic representation of 90's hacker culture... I think after decades of internet culture it's…
That colorscheme in your editor... ...how long have you been looking at it? When did you change it last? Years? Yeah, me too. 😅 I recently took a spin to see what was new out there, and boy, are there some cool colorschemes! I eventually settled on a lovely theme called Catppuccin (specifically the Mocha variant, the darkest one). But here are some of the others I came across. Maybe there's…
Recently I wrote about ffmpeg , a Swiss-army knife command-line utility for media. While I find it incredibly handy NOW, it took time to build up a working knowledge of the tool to handle certain tasks with confidence. The downside of having a versatile tool is that it can do an awful lot of things! So let's break down how it works and I'll share some of my most common recipes for converting…
I've recently been perusing the setups at uses.tech . It's interesting to see where people have landed on hardware and software options, but I started thinking about some of the miscellaneous CLI utilities I've tried and picked up along the way. My work LIVES inside the terminal (as a Vim user) and here are some of the small things I've found to make it easier on myself (in no particular order):…
I mentioned last year that I was working on a series on building motion for the web . Well, that series turned into a talk, and we recorded it. In it, I talk about: Ways to Classify motion to help build shared language when talking about types of motion for the web. Building a ' Complexity tier list' for motion to help assist in planning. Some recommended Collaboration methods for designing and…
Captain's Log, Stardate 41503.7. We have entered the Neutral Zone where a Talarian freighter has been severely damaged in a battle. I have sent an away team to investigate. — Captain Jean Luc Picard (S1E20: Heart of Glory) I grew up watching Star Trek (specifically reruns of The Next Generation) and listening to Captain Jean Luc Picard (the BEST captain, fight me ...) record the events of their…
Sometimes while using Tailwind, you need to place classes into things that aren't structured like HTML elements. Take a look at this Twig snippet from a Craft site: {{ entry . primaryDescription ? tag ( ' div ' , { class : ' text-body-lg text-rich ' , html : entry . primaryDescription , } ) }} This checks for the existence of a field and wraps it in a <div> tag... But that little bit there as…
There's been a lot of folks talking recently about the tools that they use so I thought this would be a good time pull a Marie Kondo on everything that's rolling around in this machine to see if it still holds up to inspection. While several of these things won't spark joy, they should at least spark VALUE. Paper Planner : Task/Life Management Alright, stay with me. My first tool choice has…
I've recently been noodling on motion and its use in web interfaces. I've been frustrated that most examples and material you find about motion fall into a few common categories: Another rehash of Disney's motion principles Explanations of easing and CSS transitions Imaginary app interactions built entirely in prototyping tools Wild and technically complex demos that can be inscrutable. (Have fun…
One of the things I love about Vite is how FAST it is to spin up. When I had the idea for my Sandclock toy app (which I'll write about once I get a little further with it) I used the Vite React starter to quickly spin up a basic project. No configuration, no hunting for packages, just drop and go. This got me thinking about prototypes. Prototypes Sometimes when building a user interface a concept…
It's no secret that I love Vim. I've been using it since I started in the industry, but rather than talking about WHY I love it so much (that feels like a separate post) let's talk about adding some key modern features of a code editor for writing JavaScript. Note: These features are going to require us to run with Neovim , a relatively recent retooling of Vim , the modal editor that's been in…
Take a quick nostalgia trip with me... Back when I started my career in this industry, the web was my starry-eyed, fairy-winged teacher: Molly Holzschlag helped me take my first baby-steps with HTML and CSS. I learned responsive web design from Ethan Marcotte 's articles . Jeremy Keith taught me the new things in HTML5 . Luke Wroblewski taught me how to build ' mobile first '. Rachel Nabors's…