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Notes

Accessibility had never really played a significant role since I started working as a front-end developer in 2019. It didn’t have a significant role in my boot camp, or in YouTube tutorials I watched, and certainly not in my job.

Applying accessibility fixes with stealth for the greater good - Steve Frenzel

It’s desperately sad that this remains true. Steve Frenzel does an excellent job explaining how to change that. Start with your mindset and then your practices. Leave the web a better place than you found it.

So why should you be doing the work of an accessibility practitioner / designer / engineer? My answer is always: because it’s part of the work.

The whole tech industry is nothing but scumbag billionaires and smarmy marketing and unbridled enshittification and oppressive management and AI psychosis and alpha-bro startup-hustle grind-culture bullshit and I’m just… so tired.

The End - Craig Cook

Don’t we all know that feeling!

I published a semi-secret blog post recently about “burnout” asking: how are you coping? I didn’t expect anyone to email me but the response was overwhelming. We are not alone. For most people it’s not worth the backlash to reject AI publicly. Stay strong out there! The reckoning will come.

Elena from Ariel Salminen looks to solve many problems.

Layout shifts, flash of unstyled content, poor server-side rendering support, too much reliance on client side JavaScript, doesn’t play well with frame­works like React Server Components, accessibility issues, and so on…

Progressive Web Components - Ariel Salminen

I was late to exploring web components. When building a web app I ran into many problems and discovered solutions like composable adopted stylesheets. Ariel and Elena are years ahead of me. I’m still bashing rocks together trying to make fire! I’ve got Friday morning pencilled in to dive into Elena source code and docs.

Interesting to read about Jim’s notes update. Jim’s notes inspired my notes! But now I realise I am using both a captial letter and a colon in my URLs and I hate it. I have nearly 500 notes… that’s a lot of redirects to maintain forever if I want a new URL format! I think Bunny rules might be able to regex it. I’ll sleep on the idea (and hopefully forget by morning.)

In my view, we’re firmly in the fast-fashion era of coding: software is vibe-coded, used up, thrown away, vibe-coded again. This is not a fully bad thing, and I’m sure many non-coders especially are giddy at the superpowers they’ve acquired. But as coders, we shouldn’t lose sight of what we’ve lost, and we should seek to make up for it with new sources of artistic sustenance.

The diminished art of coding - Nolan Lawson

I continued to be amazed at Nolan’s willingness, or at least insistence, to accept such a fate. Clearly it is not desirable.

Does anyone think fast-code will continue to pay the same salary? The answer isn’t to switch your brain off during your McCode shift and write a poem after work. Your job will be replaced by a Banglasdeshi slop-shop if AI improves (which is inevitable, apparently). Possibly the same sweatshop that loomed my £3 T-shirt. The Luddites didn’t accept their fate so easily.

I’m not saying I believe programming is art and we should be paid to be an artist. Just give yourself more credit! It’s not the art that is being thrown away. It’s everything else that makes code work. The slopocalypse is coming for companies that see code as a commodity and programmers as slaves to the machine.

Edit: very good point from Baldur Bjarnason:

The “all software is fast fashion” view is also incredibly reductive of both fashion and software. Fast fashion is a major problem, yes, but it’s still only one part of that industry

@baldurbjarnason.com on Bluesky

Free VPNs can sometimes mean sketchy arrangements that end up compromising your privacy, but ours is built from our data principles and commitment to be the world’s most trusted browser.

More reasons to love Firefox: What’s new now, and what’s coming soon

Hmm, is this the same Mozilla who literally changed their “data principles” so that they could sell your data? They were very explicit about that. Mozilla went as far as to provide a text book definition of “selling data” lest there be confusion.

Hmm.

If you choose to opt out by March 31st 2026 11:59:59 PST ,Vercel will not use your data to train AI or share it with third parties.

Updates to Terms of Service - Vercel

Speaking of fascist Vercel, if you’re mistakenly trapped hosting on the platform, Vercel plan to sell your data and code. You have two weeks to opt-out.

I blogged about Deno’s Decline a year ago concluding: “Deno is done.” It appears as of this week, Deno is even more done. The Ides of March strike again. Yesterday at least five† key employees announced they had left the company. There’s been no official PR statement from Ryan Dahl yet. I don’t know what Dahl could say to spin a positive future for Deno but no statement would be a death knell for Deno Land Inc.

† Update: I’ve seen more Bluesky posts since. Eight people were removed from the @denoland GitHub org.

Speculation is pointless but what’s obvious is that Deno the company isn’t making enough revenue. The runtime and projects around it have simply failed to capture developers’ attention. I really hope the Deno runtime survives. I’ve been a longtime user, despite being heavily critical of most everything else the company has done.

I just can’t see how Deno moves forward now. The possibility of an acquisition like B*n seems unlikely. Unless OpenAI pulls a copycat move, or the fascist Vercel swoops in? Given Dahl’s recent tweets and blog post a pivot to AI might be the play. These options are not good. Maybe Deno just continues to survive with less employees, without trying to headline the Silicon Valley Circus. This is idle speculation; let’s see what announcement follows.

Best of luck to those looking for new jobs. Evan You wants to talk.

Yesterday was one of those days I try my best to build an accessible website but I’m reminded how hopelessly broken browsers are. This time it was <fieldset> and <legend> with CSS subgrid that destroyed my hope.

It should be obvious by now that GitHub is in a death spiral. Projects like Zig are fleeing, others like Jazzand are sunsetting. GitHub’s slopocalypse is cited as the primary reason. How much open source will be hurt before GitHub and Microsoft come to their senses? Most projects are battening down the hatches; closing issues and contributions. This is not sustainable. Get off GitHub. Move to Tangled, Codeberg, and/or self-host Forgejo or another Git forge. These services are not immune but they’re not actively trying to destroy open source either. GitHub’s network effect is big but it will collapse.

After building a thing with AT Protocol I decided to read the documentation.

OAuth and personal data like my bookmarks tool can be handled by direct PDS access. For social and aggregate features, you need to sync and listen to the event stream and then cache data locally. Dan Abramov has a nice example. Services like microcosm exist, but for how long? Who knows. Seems expensive to keep that free!

I want to expand features on attic.social that’ll need a database. I plan to prototype something basic to see how it performs. Maybe I can self-host on my Raspberry Pi alongside my PDS?

The geolocation element is odd, writes Manuel Matuzović. Yeah, it’s odder than I thought! I was confused by it when it was discussed on ShopTalk Show.

I get why it can’t just be a JavaScript API. That’d be abused or instigated at the wrong time. Users will either click “go away”, i.e. “accept”, like people blindly accept cookie banners — you can click “no”, ya know? — or they’ll get annoyed and block it entirely; web notifications.

Edit: I was reminded of navigator.geolocation, now I’m even more confused. Guess I’ve got reading to do.

Why can’t it be used inside a <form> without JavaScript? I’m sure that’s been discussed I just haven’t found an answer yet.

What are geolocated coordinates good for? Maps, obviously. That requires a 3rd-party service. They can be scarily good at centring on a location already. Otherwise coords are kinda useless without reverse geocoding to get an address. That too requires a 3rd-party, e.g. Google, Loqate, Mapbox etc. Haven’t they already solved the problem? I’m not sure an extremely finicky <geolocation> will improve user experience.

Personally, I was planning to use an extension like uBlock Origin to remove this thing from the entire web. Testing it on Matuzović’s blog revealed that macOS requires “Location Services” to be enabled per-app, so accepting my browser’s confirmation failed anyway.

Happy Monday, I’m already grumpy! What is this, Bluesky?

mysterious Bluesky arrow icon circled in red with three red question marks aside it

mysterious Bluesky arrow icon circled in red with three red question marks aside it

This button grinds my gears! What does it do? Who knows! There is not even a tooltip. Why does the left-most button have an immediate action but the mystery arrow opens a context menu?

I hate modern UI icons! Assorted bézier curves are not a UX/UI strategy. Designer are busy congratulating themselves whilst I’m left clueless. At least Apple adds a text label in some cases.

Ahhhhh! I need coffee. The week is still salvageable!

Edit: there’s an open issue.

I am building an AT protocol thing! More on that later. Whilst testing the OAuth login flow I kept hitting an issue with my self-hosted PDS.

InvalidClientError: Validation of “client_assertion” failed: “iat” claim timestamp check failed (it should be in the past)

This issue was not easily reproduced but became more common later in the day. I’m running my PDS on a Raspberry Pi with DietPi. Config showed that it was syncing time daily (around midnight).

DietPi terminal interface for system time synchronisation configuration

DietPi terminal interface for system time synchronisation configuration

Apparently time was drifting enough that by the following afternoon the millisecond tolerance of atproto OAuth began to balk! I switched to hourly sync and it’s now working. This isn’t the first time I’ve ran into time sync issues on a side quest.

Edit: Tangled has a troubleshooting login issues note with advice.

404 Media writes:

A court record reviewed by 404 Media shows privacy-focused email provider Proton Mail handed over payment data related to a Stop Cop City email account to the Swiss government, which handed it to the FBI.

Proton Mail Helped FBI Unmask Anonymous ‘Stop Cop City’ Protester - Joseph Cox

Basically, Proton were forced to comply with Swiss law. This is not the first time. The 404 headline is misleading clickbait. I’m not Proton’s biggest fan. I caused a viral PR disaster in January. I won’t defend Proton but why is the focus on them and not the erosion of privacy by governments worldwide?

This is only a story because it happened to Proton. Google hands over hundreds of thousands of accounts each year. Google mail is not encrypted. Proton complied with 8,313 legal orders in 2025 for what little unencrypted data then can give.

But okay, screw Proton. Now what? What reputable email provider offers fully anonymous, untraceable, and encrypted email? None do. Every Proton disaster people flip the table. Nobody can suggest a service that does better or is immune. Fastmail, an Australian company, reports surprisingly low data access requests if their transparency report is to be believed. Fastmail is also unencrypted. Do you think they’ll break the law for you if it comes knocking?

By the way, which email provider do you think @404media.co uses?

These tools, and the companies that manufacture them, have tremendous costs — to our labor, to our environment, to our futures. And as we’ve been seeing, those costs also include actual human lives.

Propellant. - Ethan Marcotte

Before you kneel down and place the slop pail under your LLM today, take a minute to remember what you’re supporting.

Is it officially spring? After weeks of freezing grey skies it was suddenly warm and sunny. I racked up 10K steps and possibly a tan before my podcasts ran out. I returned home to start hacking on a SvelteKit + AT Protocol side quest. I’m not entirely sure what I’m building yet but I’ve turned into an atproto nerd. I’m starting to understand how cool it is after moving Bluesky PDS. I’ve even bought a project domain!