Micros

In our moderation panel over at Stoat, we have a button to deploy bees.

We don’t want to have to deploy bees, but sometimes that is the only viable option. Releasing bees as a moderation action is always a difficult call to make, but sometimes bees are the only tool for the job.

We have strict policies in place regarding bee usage. As it is, of course, a destructive action, we do also have a confirmation modal to avoid accidental bee deployments.

I very much enjoy that you can identify if a writer has read the works of Hunter S Thompson simply by reading their prose.

According to my site’s analytics, someone navigated to my portfolio after reading my analysis of the year 2000 musical epic That’s How I Beat Shaq.

Solemnly staring at my computer screen in silence, trying to regain my composure after realising I’ve just been editing the SASS output, not the source files.

I don’t know why, but z-index always has to be the last declaration in a CSS rule. Anywhere else just feels wrong.

I wield the English language with the accuracy and precision of a sawn-off shotgun at 30 paces.

Carefully cutting down my JavaScript, optimising my CSS, minimising my HTML, configuring preloads, tweaking caching, and manually shrinking images to hit a good balance of size and compression, then opening a new tab to be hit by a megacorp’s 40MB hero video.

To all fleeing from Firefox due to their tone-deaf AI fumblings, please don’t move to a Chromium-based browser.

Diversity in browser engines is critical for an open web. We must avoid a monopoly at all costs.

Nobody ask Ford, Coke, or IBM what they were doing in the 1940s, and nobody ask Apple, Google, or Microsoft what they are doing in the 2020s.

Wading into my GitHub notifications with a loaded gun, a half dozen grenades, and a Molotov.

My driver evidently isn’t a logical properties guy as he gave me a weird look when I told him to turn inline-start at the lights.

People watch me start designing APIs with the same abject look of horror one might exhibit when they see their uncle meandering his way across the room to the karaoke mic after several beers.

A dystopian new addition I unfortunately felt it prudent to implement on TechConf.Directory.

I love when websites with completely static content crash.

Congrats! Instead of making a static site, you made a static dynamic site. None of the benefits of a static site but all of the downsides of a dynamic site. What’s the point?

I really just can’t understand the mindset.

Someone commented on how snappy TechConf.Directory is. That’s due to the site just being HTML/CSS/JS/JSON generated at build time. No client-side third-party dependencies.

Even on the development side, the only dependency is Web Origami, which is just used for populating templates and manipulating data

Once again, the winning formula is to bet on the web platform and not needlessly overcomplicate things.

No mortal should be permitted, as I have been, to own a jar of fruit mince and to have baked a selection of shortbread.

They call to me like a siren’s song, and though I may feign will, I do not have the strength to resist their allure.

I fear the situation has grown dire, and I may not last the day.

Proud to announce TechConf.Directory, a directory of tech conferences around the globe.

I’ve found it quite difficult to find conferences. That is true no more! I’ve made all the data fully open and available via a fully open API as well.

Heads up, the creation of this site was a manic 12 hour development Blitzkrieg throughout the course of today.

I’ve still got a lot more data to process which will flesh it out, and there are some issues, but I’m a strong believer in getting something out and then building upon it.

https://techconf.directory

I could appreciate some nuance to the situation when Bluesky initially verified some US government accounts.

However, deciding to verify ICE as they murder, abuse, and kidnap people is either direct endorsement or a blatant lack of spine.

I’m questioning remaining on the platform.

I’ve decided that, henceforth, I shall no longer go by the title of ‘front-end developer’, but instead by the traditional title, ‘webmaster’.

Please update all bylines and attributions appropriately.

My Stoat bot AutoMod had a major outage that I’ve spent several hours working to fix. It has eaten half my weekend and been quite the ordeal.

Just now it has started working perfectly again. It is fixed, but I have no idea what broke in the first place nor what fixed it.

There is no code difference between the working and non-working versions. The most awful solution to a problem is one that happens out of chance and for reasons unknown.

The onset seemed to be related to having some 180K users, 64K channels, and 6K servers cached.

🫠

So cool to see that SVG filters seem to be catching on. So many cool effects are possible on the web with them and it is high time people start embracing them.

Living in the world’s most isolated city, looking at front-end conference prices, plus the price for several connecting flights spanning multiple days of travel, plus accommodation and expenses…

Yikes.

I think the only way it’d be viable is if I can string a few together and attend a few at once.

I don’t suppose anyone has collated a list of good front-end or web conferences worth attending somewhere? Ideally with information such as dates and ticket prices.

Growing increasingly frustrated as I attempt in vain to explain how one can modify the browser chrome of a browser that isn’t Chrome to look like chrome. That is, to change the chrome of a non-Chrome browser to look like chrome, without making it look like Chrome.

Taking my ‘Adobe’s Creative Cloud has broken itself again, and I’ve got to wait for it to sort itself out’ mandated break.

We’re past any pretence or keeping up of appearances now. The United States of America is invading foreign countries, overthrowing leaders, and threatening what were previously allies, all while disappearing and murdering its own citizens. This has been the case for months, but it seems we’ve reached a tipping point in recent days.

Given that it is unclear if there will even be another election, I think it can be said without hyperbole that the United States is now a dictatorship until proven otherwise.

Things are really bad. I don’t know if it is worse that it is happening or worse that there are so many human people willingly making it happen.

One of the most horrific codebases I’ve ever seen is one in which all the styling was done using Tailwind’s @apply. No utility classes in markup, just CSS files full of selectors and @apply. They had inexplicably reinvented CSS in Tailwind, and it struck fear into my very heart.

Anyone had any luck getting past the final boss in CSS Backgrounds Module Level 4? I can never seem to dodge that final attack. I’ve been stuck on the level for months.

Look at this little woollen version of me made by my talented grandmother! Complete with unicycle and computer! What a proper-looking little fella!

Haven’t got an Apple device but need to test your site in Safari? Go into the Apple Store and test on their demo computers.

They probably won’t kick you out. It usually takes them a while to catch on.

We used to be Explorers of the Internet. We used to be Navigators of the Netscape – Browsers, Communicators. We admired the Moasic. It was the WorldWideWeb. We admired the Nexus. What happened?

Was at the doctor’s, and a trap remix of Frère Jacques was playing on loop. Simultaneously, Chumbawamba’s Tubthumping was playing from another speaker.

Needless to say, I engaged in some ethical hacking by use of my Flipper Zero.