AI can make mistakes. Please double-check responses.
Even in the world of AI agents, you still need experts guiding them because they're just probability machines.
Snugug
Sam's personal blog: recipes and musings
Latest posts
Coding Was Never The Job
Converging on an idea around what software engineering means in the world of AI coding tools.
Vibe Coding Vibes
As part of learning more about AI, I've tried vibe coding in some personal projects. It's been an interesting ride.
The Last SPA Router You'll Need
The Navigation API provides a standards-based way to build a client-side router that can be used with anything you desire to build your front-end in. I'll show you how I used it to rebuild the CMS for my photography site, and why the new Runes feature of Svelte 5, when combined with this, make for a truly killer combo.
In search of dynamic range
Thoughts on my journey as a photographer and my search for dynamic range.
Yom Kippur 2024
I was in Poland during Yom Kippur, and went to Auschwitz and Birkenau. These are my reflections on that trip. Holocaust trigger warning.
Strategy, Team Culture, and Organizational Change
How strategy, culture, and organizational change influence each other based on a number of influential books I've read and my lived experience working through, teaching, and helping lead change initiatives.
Brown Butter, Sage, and Wild Mushroom Dressing
Adaptable Components with CSS Style Queries
Use CSS Style Queries to let components adapt to more scenarios than just container size or screen width.
Comparing Privacy-Focused Analytics Tools
A head-to-head-to-head comparison of Cloudflare Web Analytics, Plausible, and Fathom, three privacy-preserving analytics solutions, after running each on my site for a week.
Tamago-Style Egg Sandwiches
Art Directed Images with CSS Container Queries
How to art direct images with container queries, no JavaScript required.
Introducing Starchart Studio
Introducing Starchart Studio, a component story tool for island architectures, powered by Astro
Sanity, Astro, and GitHub Oh My!
Why I chose Sanity and Astro for my site rebuild, and how I got continuous deployment working for both using GitHub Actions from a monorepo-like setup.
Return of the CMS
After rebuilding my blog on a new generation headless CMS, I've rethought whether flat Markdown files in site code is worth the complexity, especially for JAMStack sites.
A Beginner's Guide to Diabetes
My personal story about what I've learned over the past year since getting diagnosed with diabetes.
Eleventy + Vite
A pattern I've started using combining Eleventy and Vite.
Book Recommendations
Books that I've read and plan on reading, and that I recommend you read too.
Split Pea Soup
Vegan Peanut Butter Chocolate Chunk Cookies
Fragrant Sticky Rice with Yuzu Chicken
Lobster Mac & Cheese
Cookbook
I've added a cookbook section to the site!
Slow Scrambled Egg Toast
Setting up a Chrome OS Development Environment
After joining Google, I was given a Google Pixelbook as my main computer. This is my journey to get it set up for web development
A Modern Take on Cutting the Mustard
By taking advantage of JavaScript module support, we can update the Cutting the Mustard progressive enhancement technique to allow for modern JavaScript syntaxes and features!
Lighthouse, Web Performance, Architecture, And You
A primer on how the performance auditing tool Lighthouse works, thoughts on web performance and was of improving it, and how the two can be used as a basis for architectural discussions.
A Recipe for Documentation
Technical documentation should be more like recipes in a cookbook.
Saying Goodbye to Singularity
With a very heavy heart, today I am stopping further development on Singularity.
Getting Started with Grid
CSS Grid is out! I've started playing it, here are my first thoughts.
Austin
I've moved to Austin and taken a new role at IBM
Persona Alignment
Dungeons and Dragons character alignment, but to make user personas
Armadillo
Armadillo 3.0 is out! It's faster, easier to maintain, and comes with service workers! Let's learn what Armadillo is!
Performance Sketches
Creating and enforcing performance budgets are hard to begin with, but getting everyone to understand the impact of their choices on the performance of a project can be doubly so. Having a way to "sketch" performance can help onboard new team members to the concept of performance budgets.
It all started with our motion designer.
Our team transformation all started with our motion designer…
Dude, Where's My Modal?
Modals. Popups. Overlays. Dialog Boxes. No matter what you call them; ugh. I can't even. If I were being gracious, I'd say that nine times out of ten, modals are the lazy way out of solving a hard (or sometimes not so hard) design or development problem. We should stop doing that.
Empathy vs Understanding
In order to solve the problems of our users or to work better with each other, we need both empathy *and* understanding.
Bulletproof Combo Fixed and Fluid Grids with CSS3 Calc
CSS3 Calc can be used to do all sorts of neat things, including creating some fantastic advanced responsive grids. Oh yah, and a new Singularity output style to support it.
Element Queries
When building responsive sites, especially style and component guide driven responsive sites, being able to query an item's width instead of the viewport is invaluable for re-usability. While we don't have them natively, we can emulate them with JavaScript.
CSS Strategy
My current thoughts on this subject have been codified in North
Aurora 3.0 - Magic Birds and Boars
I'm excited to announce the official release of Aurora 3.0! Ian and I have been worked hard to build out a base theme that truly is designed around the best tools and techniques available for front end development today.
Do You Believe in Magic?
Today I'm excited to announce Magic, a first-of-its-kind module for Drupal designed to integrate advanced theme development settings into any theme.
Responsive Nirvana
While they've been soft launched for a few weeks now, I'm crazy excited to announce that we've finally, officially, launched [Singularity 1.0](https://github.com/Team-Sass/Singularity) and [Breakpoint 2.0](https://github.com/team-sass/breakpoint).
Singularity 1.0
I'm super excited to announce [Singularity 1.0](https://github.com/Team-Sass/Singularity)!
Measure Tester
A tool to help measure your measure, helping you design for an ideal reading experience.
Debugging Sass with Source Maps
One of the super exciting features in Sass 3.3, currently in development, is the introduction of native Source Maps as a successor to Sass Debug Info. Working Source Map reading for Sass in Google Chrome Canary means this is a real debugging option you can start looking at today.
Amusing Analytics for December
Just decided to take a look at my analytics for the month of December, and I thought they were amusing, so I've decided to share.
DrupalCon Munich Presentation
The slides and video from my DrupalCon Munich presentation along with some links.
Override Theme Functions from Drupal 7 Module
Ever need to really override a core or contrib module's theme output? You won't believe what you can do with this one weird hook!
NYC Camp Presentation
The slides from my NYC Camp 2012 presentation along with some links.