2025-08-14 03:00:00
Jan Miksovsky lays out his idea for website creation as content transformation. He starts by talking about tools that hide what’s happening “under the hood”:
A framework’s marketing usually pretends it is unnecessary for you to understand how its core transformation works — but without that knowledge, you can’t achieve the beautiful range of results you see in the framework’s sample site gallery.
This is a great callout. Tools will say, “You don’t have to worry about the details.” But the reality is, you end up worrying about the details — at least to some degree.
Why? Because what you want to build is full of personalization. That’s how you differentiate yourself, which means you’re going to need a tool that’s expressive enough to help you.
So the question becomes: how hard is it to understand the details that are being intentionally hidden away?
A lot of the time those details are not exposed directly. Instead they’re exposed through configuration. But configuration doesn’t really help you learn how something works. I mean, how many of you have learned how typescript works under the hood by using tsconfig.json? As Jan says:
Configuration can lead to as many problems as it solves
Nailed it. He continues:
Configuring software is itself a form of programming, in fact a rather difficult and often baroque form. It can take more data files or code to configure a framework’s transformation than to write a program that directly implements that transformation itself.
I’m not a Devops person, but that sounds like Devops in a nutshell right there. (It also perfectly encapsulates my feelings on trying to setup configuration in GitHub Actions.)
Jan moves beyond site creation to also discuss site hosting. He gives good reasons for keeping your website’s architecture simple and decoupled from your hosting provider (something I’ve been a long time proponent of):
These site hosting platforms typically charge an ongoing subscription fee. (Some offer a free tier that may meet your needs.) The monthly fee may not be large, but it’s forever. Ten years from now you’ll probably still want your content to be publicly available, but will you still be happy paying that monthly fee? If you stop paying, your site disappears.
In subscription pricing, any price (however small) is recurring. Stated differently: pricing is forever.
Anyhow, it’s a good read from Jan and lays out his vision for why he’s building Web Origami: a tool for that encourages you to understand (and customize) how you transform content to a website. He just launched version 0.4.0 which has some exciting stuff I’m excited to try out further (I’ll have to write about all that later).
2025-08-11 03:00:00
I’ve been reading listening to Poor Charlie’s Almanack which is a compilation of talks by Charlie Munger, legendary vice-chairman at Berkshire Hathaway.
One thing Charlie talks about is what he calls “sit on your ass investing” which is the opposite of day trading. Rather than being in the market every day (chasing trends, reacting to fluctuations, and trying to time transactions) Charlie advocates spending most of your time “sitting on your ass”. That doesn’t mean you’re doing nothing. It means that instead of constantly trading you’re spending your time in research and preparation for trading.
Eventually, a top-tier opportunity will come along and your preparation will make you capable of recognizing it and betting big. That’s when you trade. After that, you’re back to “sitting on your ass”. Trust your research. Trust your choices. Don’t tinker. Don’t micromanage. Don’t panic. Just let the compounding effects of a good choice work in your favor.
As a day trader your job is to trade daily (it’s right there in the job title). If you’re not trading every day then what are you even doing? Not your job, apparently.
I think it’s easy to view “development” like this. You’re a developer. Your job is to develop programs — to write code. If you’re not doing that every single day, then what are you even doing?
From this perspective, it becomes easy to think that writing endless code for ever-changing software paradigms is just how one develops websites.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. Granted, there’s cold-blooded and warm-blooded software. Sometimes you can’t avoid that.
But I also think there’s a valuable lesson in Charlie’s insight. You don’t have to chase “the market” of every new framework or API, writing endless glue code for features that already exist or that will soon exist in browsers. Instead, you can make a few select, large bets on the web platform and then “sit on your ass” until the payoff comes later!
I think polyfills are a great example of an approach to “sit on your ass” web development. Your job as a developer is to know enough to make a bet on a particular polyfill that aligns with the future of the web platform. Once implemented, all you have to do is sit on your ass while other really smart people who are building browsers do their part to ship the polyfilled feature in the platform. Once shipped, you “sell” your investment by stripping out the polyfill and reap the reward of having your application get lighter and faster with zero additional effort.
A big part of the payoff is in the waiting — in the “sitting on your ass”. You make a smart bet, then you sit patiently while others run around endlessly writing and rewriting more code (meanwhile the only thing left for you will be to delete code).
Charlie’s business partner Warren Buffett once said that it’s “better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price, than a fair company at a wonderful price”. Similarly, I’d say it’s better to build on a polyfill aligned with the future of the platform than to build on a framework re-inventing a feature of the platform.
Want to do “Day Trading Development”?
Want to do “Sit on Your Ass Development”?
In short: spend less time glueing together tools and frameworks on top of the browser, and more time bridging tools and APIs inside of the browser. Then get out of your own way and go sit on your ass. You might find yourself more productive than ever!
Dave Rupert mentioned which web platform features he’s jumping on the bandwagon for:
And I would add to that my own (at the time of this writing):
2025-08-07 03:00:00
I was listening to a podcast interview with the Jackson Browne (American singer/songwriter, political activist, and inductee into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame) and the interviewer asks him how he approaches writing songs with social commentaries and critiques — something along the lines of: “How do you get from the New York Times headline on a social subject to the emotional heart of a song that matters to each individual?”
Browne discusses how if you’re too subtle, people won’t know what you’re talking about. And if you’re too direct, you run the risk of making people feel like they’re being scolded. Here’s what he says about his songwriting:
I want this to sound like you and I were drinking in a bar and we’re just talking about what’s going on in the world. Not as if you’re at some elevated place and lecturing people about something they should know about but don’t but [you think] they should care. You have to get to people where [they are, where] they do care and where they do know.
I think that’s a great insight for anyone looking to have a connecting, effective voice. I know for me, it’s really easily to slide into a lecturing voice — you “should” do this and you “shouldn’t” do that.
But I like Browne’s framing of trying to have an informal, conversational tone that meets people where they are. Like you’re discussing an issue in the bar, rather than listening to a sermon.
Chris Coyier is the canonical example of this that comes to mind. I still think of this post from CSS Tricks where Chris talks about how to have submit buttons that go to different URLs:
When you submit that form, it’s going to go to the URL
/submit. Say you need another submit button that submits to a different URL. It doesn’t matter why. There is always a reason for things. The web is a big place and all that.
He doesn’t conjure up some universally-applicable, justified rationale for why he’s sharing this method. Nor is there any pontificating on why this is “good” or “bad”. Instead, like most of Chris’ stuff, I read it as a humble acknowledgement of the practicalities at hand — “Hey, the world is a big place. People have to do crafty things to make their stuff work. And if you’re in that situation, here’s something that might help what ails ya.”
I want to work on developing that kind of a voice because I love reading voices like that.
2025-08-04 03:00:00
I’ve written previously about reloading a document using only HTML but that got me thinking: What are all the values you can put in an anchor tag’s href attribute?
Well, I looked around. I found some things I already knew about, e.g.
mailto:, tel:, sms: and javascript: which deal with specific ways of handling links.href="//"
href="#:~:text=foo"
But I also found some things I didn’t know about (or only vaguely knew about) so I wrote them down in an attempt to remember them.
Scrolls to the top of a document. I knew that.
But I’m writing because #top will also scroll to the top if there isn’t another element with id="top" in the document. I didn’t know that.
(Spec: “If decodedFragment is an ASCII case-insensitive match for the string top, then return the top of the document.”)
Update: HTeuMeuLeu pointed out to me on Mastodon that you can use #page= to deep-link to a specific page in a PDF, e.g. my-file.pdf#page42 would like to page 42 in the file.
Reloads the current page, preserving the search string but removing the hash string (if present).
| URL | Resolves to |
|---|---|
/path/ |
/path/ |
/path/#foo |
/path/ |
/path/?id=foo |
/path/?id=foo |
/path/?id=foo#bar |
/path/?id=foo |
Reloads the current page, removing both the search and hash strings (if present).
Note: If you’re using href="." as a link to the current page, ensure your URLs have a trailing slash or you may get surprising navigation behavior. The path is interpreted as a file, so "." resolves to the parent directory of the current location.
| URL | Resolves to |
|---|---|
/path |
/ |
/path#foo |
/ |
/path?id=foo |
/ |
/path/ |
/path/ |
/path/#foo |
/path/ |
/path/?id=foo |
/path/ |
/path/index.html |
/path/ |
Update 2025-08-15: as pointed out by @AmeliaBR on Mastodon, “reloads the current page” probably isn’t the best terminology for this. It’s more like “loads the default index page for the current directory, based on the URL structure” which might be a reload, but might be something else based on the current URL (see my note and table above).
Reloads the current page, removing both the search and hash strings (if present). However, it preserves the ? character.
Note: Unlike href=".", trailing slashes don’t matter. The search parameters will be removed but the path will be preserved as-is.
| URL | Resolves to |
|---|---|
/path |
/path? |
/path#foo |
/path? |
/path?id=foo |
/path? |
/path?id=foo#bar |
/path? |
/index.html |
/index.html? |
You can make links that navigate to data URLs. The super-readable version of this would be:
<a href="data:text/plain,hello world">
View plain text data URL
</a>
But you probably want data: URLs to be encoded so you don’t get unexpected behavior, e.g.
<a href="data:text/plain,hello%20world">
View plain text data URL
</a>
Go ahead and try it (FYI: may not work in your user agent). Here’s a plain-text file and an HTML file.
Media fragments allow linking to specific parts of a media file, like audio or video.
For example, video.mp4#t=10,20 links to a video. It starts play at 10 seconds, and stops it at 20 seconds.
(Support is limited at the time of this writing.)
I tested a lot of this stuff in the browser and via JS. I think I got all these right.
Thanks to JavaScript’s URL constructor (and the ability to pass a base URL), I could programmatically explore how a lot of these href’s would resolve.
Here’s a snippet of the test code I wrote. You can copy/paste this in your console and they should all pass 🤞
const assertions = [
// Preserves search string but strips hash
// x -> { search: '?...', hash: '' }
{ href: '', location: '/path', resolves_to: '/path' },
{ href: '', location: '/path/', resolves_to: '/path/' },
{ href: '', location: '/path/#foo', resolves_to: '/path/' },
{ href: '', location: '/path/?id=foo', resolves_to: '/path/?id=foo' },
{ href: '', location: '/path/?id=foo#bar', resolves_to: '/path/?id=foo' },
// Strips search and hash strings
// x -> { search: '', hash: '' }
{ href: '.', location: '/path', resolves_to: '/' },
{ href: '.', location: `/path#foo`, resolves_to: `/` },
{ href: '.', location: `/path?id=foo`, resolves_to: `/` },
{ href: '.', location: `/path/`, resolves_to: `/path/` },
{ href: '.', location: `/path/#foo`, resolves_to: `/path/` },
{ href: '.', location: `/path/?id=foo`, resolves_to: `/path/` },
{ href: '.', location: `/path/index.html`, resolves_to: `/path/` },
// Strips search parameters and hash string,
// but preserves search delimeter (`?`)
// x -> { search: '?', hash: '' }
{ href: '?', location: '/path', resolves_to: '/path?' },
{ href: '?', location: '/path#foo', resolves_to: '/path?' },
{ href: '?', location: '/path?id=foo', resolves_to: '/path?' },
{ href: '?', location: '/path/', resolves_to: '/path/?' },
{ href: '?', location: '/path/?id=foo#bar', resolves_to: '/path/?' },
{ href: '?', location: '/index.html#foo', resolves_to: '/index.html?'}
];
const assertions_evaluated = assertions.map(({ href, location, resolves_to }) => {
const domain = 'https://example.com';
const expected = new URL(href, domain + location).toString();
const received = new URL(domain + resolves_to).toString();
return {
href,
location,
expected: expected.replace(domain, ''),
received: received.replace(domain, ''),
passed: expected === received
};
});
console.table(assertions_evaluated);
2025-07-28 03:00:00
Some lessons I’ve learned from experience.
Become totally dependent on others, that’s why they call them “dependencies” after all! Lean in to it.
Once your dependencies break — and they will, time breaks all things — then you can spend lots of time and energy (which was your goal from the beginning) ripping out those dependencies and replacing them with new dependencies that will break later.
Why rip them out? Because you can’t fix them. You don’t even know how they work, that’s why you introduced them in the first place!
Repeat ad nauseam (that is, until you decide you don’t want to make websites that require lots of your time and energy, but that’s not your goal if you’re reading this article).
Once you hitch your wagon to a framework (a dependency, see above) then any updates to your site via the framework require that you first understand what changed in the framework.
More of your time and energy expended, mission accomplished!
Put a critical dependency between working on your website and using it in the browser. You know, some mechanism that is required to function before you can even see your website — like a complication step or build process. The bigger and more complex, the better.
This is a great way to spend lots of time and energy working on your website.
(Well, technically it’s not really working on your website. It’s working on the thing that spits out your website. So you’ll excuse me for recommending something that requires your time and energy that isn’t your website — since that’s not the stated goal — but trust me, this apparent diversion will directly affect the overall amount of time and energy you spend making a website. So, ultimately, it will still help you reach our stated goal.)
Requiring that the code you write be transpiled, compiled, parsed, and evaluated before it can be used in your website is a great way to spend extra time and energy making a website (as opposed to, say, writing code as it will be run which would save you time and energy and is not our goal here).
Do you have more advice on building a website that will require a lot of your time and energy? Share your recommendations with others, in case they’re looking for such advice.
2025-07-18 03:00:00
Here’s Jony Ive in his Stripe interview:
What we make stands testament to who we are. What we make describes our values. It describes our preoccupations. It describes beautiful succinctly our preoccupation.
I’d never really noticed the connection between these two words: occupation and preoccupation.
What comes before occupation? Pre-occupation.
What comes before what you do for a living? What you think about. What you’re preoccupied with.
What you think about will drive you towards what you work on.
So when you’re asking yourself, “What comes next? What should I work on?”
Another way of asking that question is, “What occupies my thinking right now?”
And if what you’re occupied with doesn’t align with what you’re preoccupied with, perhaps it's time for a change.
