2025-08-20 03:00:00
I refreshed the little thing that let’s you navigate consistently between my inconsistent subdomains (video recording).
Here’s the tl;dr on the update:
Want more info on the behind-the-scenes work? Read on!
It might look like a simple iteration on what I previously had, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t explore the universe of possibilities first before coming back to the current iteration.
A tab-like experience seemed the most natural, but how to represent it? I tried a few different ideas. On top. On bottom. Different visual styles, etc.
And of course, gotta explore how that plays out on desktop too.
Some I liked, some I didn’t. As much as I wanted to play with going to the edges of the viewport, I realized that every browser is different and you won't be able to get a consistent “bleed-like” visual experience across browsers. For example, if you try to make tabs that bleed to the edges, it looks nice in a frame in Figma, and even in some browsers. But it won’t look right in all browser, like iOS Safari.
So I couldn’t reliably leverage the idea of a bounded canvas as a design element — which, I should’ve known, has always been the case with the web.
I really like this pattern on mobile devices, so I thought maybe I’d consider it for navigating between my sites.
But how to theme across differently-styled sites? The favicon styles seemed like a good bet!
And, of course, what do to on larger devices? Just stacking it felt like overkill, so I explored moving it to the edge.
I actually prototyped this in code, but I didn’t like how it felt so I scratched the idea and went other directions.
The more I explored what to do with this element, the more it started taking on additional responsibility.
“What if I unified its position with site-specific navigation?” I thought.
This led to design explorations where the disparate subdomains began to take on not just a unified navigational element, but a unified header.
And I made small, stylistic explorations with the tabs themselves too.
You can see how I played toyed with the idea of a consistent header across all my sites (not an intended goal, but ya know, scope creep gets us all).
As I began to explore more possibilities than I planned for, things started to get out of hand.
Questions I began asking:
feeds.jim-nielsen.com?
Wait, wait, wait Jim. Consistent navigation across inconsistent sites. That’s the goal. Pare it back a little.
To counter my exploratory ambitions, I told myself I needed to ship something without the need to modify the entire design style of all my sites.
So how do I do that?
That got me back to a simpler premise: consistent navigation across my inconsistent sites.
Better — and implementable.
The implementation was pretty simple. I basically just forked my previous web component and changed some styles. That’s it.
The only thing I did different was I moved the web component JS file from being part of my www.jim-nielsen.com git repository to a standalone file (not under git control) on my CDN.
This felt like one of the exceptions to the rule of always keeping stuff under version control. It’s more of the classic FTP-style approach to web development. Granted, it’s riskier, but it’s also way more flexible. And I’m good with that trade-off for now. (Ask me again in a few months if I’ve done anything terrible and now have regrets.)
Each site implements the component like this (with a different subdomain attribute for each site):
<script type="module" src="https://cdn.jim-nielsen.com/shared/jim-site-switcher.js"></script>
<jim-site-switcher subdomain="blog"></jim-site-switcher>
That’s really all there is to say. Thanks to Zach for prodding me to make this post.
2025-08-18 03:00:00
Jason Fried writes in his post “Knives and battleships”:
Specific tools and familiar ingredients combined in different ratios, different molds, for different purposes. Like a baker working from the same tight set of pantry ingredients to make a hundred distinct recipes. You wouldn't turn to them and say "enough with the butter, flour, sugar, baking powder, and eggs already!"
Getting the same few things right in different ways is a career's worth of work.
Mastery comes from a lifetime of putting together the basics in different combinations.
I think of Beethoven’s 5th and its famous “short-short-short-long” motif. The entire symphony is essentially the same core idea repeated and developed relentlessly! The same four notes (da-da-da-DAH!) moving between instruments, changing keys, etc.
Beethoven took something basic — a four note motif — and extracted an enormous set of variations. Its genius is in illustrating how much can be explored and expressed within constraints (rather than piling on “more and more” novel stuff).
Back to Jason’s point: the simplest building blocks in any form — music, code, paint, cooking — implemented with restraint can be combined in an almost infinite set of pleasing ways.
As Devine noted (and I constantly link back to): we haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of what we can do with less.
2025-08-16 03:00:00
Conrad Irwin has an article on the Zed blog “Why LLMs Can't Really Build Software”. He says it boils down to:
the distinguishing factor of effective engineers is their ability to build and maintain clear mental models
We do this by:
It’s kind of an interesting observation about how we (as humans) problem solve vs. how we use LLMs to problem solve:
One adds information — complexity you might even say — to solve a problem. The other eliminates it.
You know what that sort of makes me think of? NPM driven development.
Solving problems with LLMs is like solving front-end problems with NPM: the “solution” comes through installing more and more things — adding more and more context, i.e. more and more packages.
Contrast that with a solution that comes through simplification. You don’t add more context. You simplify your mental model so you need less to solve a problem — if you solve it at all, perhaps you eliminate the problem entirely!
Rather than install another package to fix what ails you, you simplify your mental model which often eliminates the problem you had in the first place; thus eliminating the need to solve any problem at all, or to add any additional context or complexity (or dependency).
As I’m typing this, I’m thinking of that image of the evolution of the Raptor engine, where it evolved in simplicity:
This stands in contrast to my working with LLMs, which often wants more and more context from me to get to a generative solution:
I know, I know. There’s probably a false equivalence here. This entire post started as a note and I just kept going. This post itself needs further thought and simplification. But that’ll have to come in a subsequent post, otherwise this never gets published lol.
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.
