Go Make ThingsMulti Author Blogs2 min read
For and against
Yesterday, good internet friend Baldur Bjarnason shared a series of shorts he made on why he doesn’t use generative AI, and it got me thinking about how much of my career has spent being against things. Early in my career, I was for web performance and accessibility and building cool things. But as JavaScript frameworks became increasingly ubiquitous, we saw the things I was for start to degrade rapidly. Sites got slower and harder to use.
Go Make ThingsMulti Author Blogs2 min read
Signal your virtues
Virtual signalling is often used as an insult, but it’s good to signal your virtues, actually. A few months back, I read a story on Bluesky from a hispanic woman who’s immigrant mother got lost in the city. Her phone ran of battery, she didn’t speak much English, and she had no idea how to get home. She approached a young woman with bright blue hair who was able to use her phone’s translation app to get the mother’s address and help her get home.
Go Make ThingsMulti Author Blogs3 min read
The SpeechRecognition API
There’s an older deaf gentleman in my town who’s very friendly, and likes to communicate with rudimentary hand gestures, but I have a hard time understand what he’s trying to say. I’d love to learn American Sign Language (ASL) at some point (shoutout King Ron), but until then, I wanted an app that could convert speech into text. Every transcription app I found required a pretty expensive subscription… so I decided to build my own using web technologies!
Go Make ThingsMulti Author Blogs1 min read
Documentation-Driven Development
Last week, I needed to make some pretty major updates to a web component in a design system I use for clients. I’m a big fan of TDD, but I wasn’t mentally in a place to write my tests first. I decided the easiest thing to do was document how the new component would work… before actually writing any code to implement the updates. It was an entirely ADHD-driven decision, but it unlocked something for me!
Go Make ThingsMulti Author Blogs2 min read
Life on Foot
We recently moved from a rural suburb in Massachusetts to a small coastal village in Rhode Island. It’s been transformative, and I wish I’d done it sooner! Trickle-Down Effects Unlike a city, a village has homes with yards. Unlike a suburb, a village has businesses and parks intermixed with homes. It’s the best of both worlds. Being able to walk or bike places has trickle-down effects. Instead of driving 20 minutes one-way to get groceries, I can ride my bike there in 5 minutes.
Go Make ThingsMulti Author Blogs2 min read
The Village
About 14 years ago, we moved out into the rural suburbs. I loved the quiet, the abundant wildlife, and our proximity to farms. I didn’t realize just how often doing anything at all would require a car. The Sprawl Absolutely nothing was walkable. We lived at the very top of a very high hill, so things weren’t really bikeable either. Groceries, restaurants, entertainment, friends, the library, and so on… you need to get in a car and drive at least 15 minutes for all of it.