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...
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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....
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 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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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It’s expected to freeze this evening in Austin and we may even see snow, which is exciting and novel for us Texans. But as we’ve learned in 2021 and 2023,...
You might have noticed that I did a big design refresh on my entire site… unless you’re on RSS I guess. I’ll talk about aspects in detail, but at a high level there’s been three big changes:
A monospace font
Named CSS grid lines
Juicier multi-page...
As I was playing around with contrast-color(), I got a wild idea that you could use contrast-color() to invert its return value by nesting it: contrast-color(contrast-color(var(--some-color)). When would this be useful? Uh… Good question. I couldn’t...
In my first post on contrast-color() I demo’d using color-mix() to change a background-color on hover, but I will be honest… mixing black and white isn’t always what you want. It would be cool and helpful to coerce contrast-color() to return either 1...
One predictable pain point with contrast-color() is that it only returns black and white named colors. From a design systems perspective, that’s not ideal because you want your colors. You want your harmonious brand and the colors you and your team...
Firefox 146 added support for contrast-color() joining Safari 26 in the First Implementor’s Club. For those unfamiliar, contrast-color(<color>) is a new CSS function that will take a <color> as input and returns either white or black...
2025 was… a year. And I made it to the end of that year. If you’re reading this, I imagine you did too and let’s celebrate that. But also not one without loss; of loved ones, of health, of relationships, of jobs, of liberties, of pursuits of...
🎵 Christmas time is here. Happiness and cheer. Fun for all… that children call… their favorite time of year.
School’s out. The work laptop’s closed. Now is a good time to recount the vibes. I wanted to get out this vibecheck before embarking on the...
Two friends of mine (brothers, actually) got laid off from their job at a megachurch here in Austin. We met through a mutual friend that started attending their church. Our kids hang out on Roblox, so we’re connected through dadship and games. They...
Try Grid Paper
I’ve been getting into drawing dungeons on isomorphic grids. It’s fun but I was a little frustrated with the process of sourcing and printing out graph paper with an isomorphic grid on it. You have two bad options, basically:
Download...
Inkwell Games bills itself as “Daily puzzles worth thinking about” and that’s a great tagline. Right now they offer two daily puzzles: Stars and Fields. Both are enjoyable but I rank Stars as a bit above Fields but as I get better at understanding the...