I switched my default search engine to @duckduckgo.com and it is soooo much better than Google. Most of the searches I do on the web are software dev related, it DuckDuckGo is so much better at this.
Kris Walker
@kriswalker.me
Creating the @kixx.dev web development framework | Booster for the World Wide Web | https://www.kixx.news | https://www.kriswalker.me/
How often have you stepped away from the keyboard, only to have the solution come to you later while you were doing something unrelated (a walk, shower, commuting)? There is a pile of scientific evidence showing that our brains continue working on hard problems in the background.
We've spent way too many brain cycles on creating low friction ways to sling slop. Time for a change.
Kixx@kixx.dev · last mo.Creating great user experiences for humans on the web should be low friction. Contributing to the slop shoveling, bloated, frustrating web should be high friction.
A world with fewer things (less software, fewer products, less production), but things which are designed well, work exceedingly well, and bring joy to their users, is a better world. There is another world, flourishing in slop now. But, we don't have to be a part of that world. It's a choice.
I'm torn on the local-first software pardigm. While having control and offline access to your data is a huge benefit, I also despise the single page JavaScript architecture and explosion of complexity when synchronizing databases. rxdb.info/articles/loc...
Why Local-First Software Is the Future and its Limitations | RxDB - JavaScript Database
Discover how local-first transforms web apps, boosts offline resilience, and why instant user feedback is becoming the new normal.
rxdb.info
I think this means JavaScript 5 is gone. The announcement made me feel nostalgic. Remember when Array map, filter, and reduce were introduced? And "use strict"; Object.create , Object.defineProperties? We didn't have const and let yet, but we knew it was coming! babeljs.io/blog/2026/06...
Releasing Babel 8 today: ESM-only, drop ES5 default, and a smooth migration path · Babel
Today we are releasing Babel 8. It's been 8 years since we released Babel 7. And that's not without reason.
babeljs.io
This phase shift in engineering cultures (it's not just Meta) is going to present some exciting new opportunities. - People leave to start their own ventures - More people leave to join them - We get a sub-culture of innovation with momentum - Break the current technology consolidation phase
Gergely Orosz@gergely.pragmaticengineer.com · 2mo agoThis headline is pretty accurate based on Meta folks I’ve been talking with Meta is successfully destroying their formerly standout engineering culture: forcefully assigning standout devs to this unit + the layoffs It makes no rational sense. Hiring from Meta never been easier!
The usefulness of LLMs for software can't be denied any longer. But, I really don't like the closed and proprietary nature of the whole thing. It feels contrary to the spirit of programming. I'm also 100% confident we're going to find a way to open source all of this ...
Absolutely, 100%, true. I've been working in the streaming industry for 10 years, and every year end up in contract negotiations or app rejections with Roku over the collection of data.
Alejandra Caraballo@esqueer.net · 2mo agoThe thing is, Roku is a data company. It tracks users viewing habits to sell ads and data to ad companies. That's how it subsidizes its devices and services. This is about Fox getting exclusive viewing habits of millions of Americans to use and abuse.
The AI bubble is different than the dot com bubble. I don't remember corporations shoving new technology down our throats in 1999. It felt like we were the rebel rousers back then. HT @doctorow.pluralistic.net pluralistic.net/2026/05/26/t...
Pluralistic: The AI bubble isn’t like the internet bubble (26 May 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.net
Among the over-hyped agentic coding workflows this thoughtful post by Mitchell Hashimoto (creator of Vagrant, Terraform, and Ghostty terminal, among others) is one of the best illustrations of how we got here, one possible way to work, and how he gets quality results: mitchellh.com/writing/my-a...
My AI Adoption Journey
mitchellh.com
Spend more time living in the now.
Piccalilli@piccalil.li · 2mo ago'Wise people I’ve met seem unhurried. I don’t think it’s because they’re slow thinkers or actors. I think it’s because they’ve learned that important things take the time they take, no amount of urgency changes that.' Wait it out. blog.jim-nielsen.com/2026/speed-n...
Novel idea: Build websites with HTML, first. Hypermedia as the engine of application state. Thanks to @moh-kohn.eurosky.social for writing the post mohkohn.co.uk/writing/html... Which got a good discussion on HN news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4847...
How building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight
My client was a utility company, and they had a big problem...
mohkohn.co.uk
There are a *lot* of software organizations laying people off and the remainders are choosing to leave and do something else. Don't take a job just because it was offered. I've made this mistake too many times in my career. Times will change, and you'll have opportunities you won't want to miss.
taylor desseyn@tdesseyn.bsky.social · 2mo agoquestions to ask yourself before you take an offer: >is this company growing headcount or just replacing exits >when were their last layoffs >are they still hiring interns and new grads or only senior i>s your team ai adjacent or the part getting automated
It has now been 3 months since I've had to attend a meeting. I went from 100 to zero, almost overnight. I get to live in the now, this moment, each day, every day.
Portability is absolutely critical for a truly open framework. While it is true that Cloudflare and AWS Lambda are proprietary platforms, it's hard to image how else the edge compute and tiny isolated container concepts could exist.
Kixx@kixx.dev · 2mo agoBuild your app with Kixx and deploy to: - [ ] Cloudflare - [ ] AWS Lambda - [x] Any ol' web server - [ ] Deno Deploy
The Small Web is Beautiful: A Study of Web Development as if People Mattered. Ben Hoyt wrote this in 2021 and I can't get it out of my mind these days. It's a take on E. F. Schumacher’s "Small is Beautiful" economics treatise benhoyt.com/writings/the...
The small web is beautiful
A vision for the "small web", small software, and small architectures.
benhoyt.com
Code is cheaper now. "Everyone wants to be the sorcerer and not the apprentice. But a sorcerer must understand the code." Great, thought provoking post (as usual) by Carson Gross htmx.org/essays/code-...
</> htmx ~ Code is Cheap(er)
In this essay, Carson Gross argues that as AI makes code cheap to produce, understanding code becomes the expensive and scarce resource. He warns of the complexity that LLM code can generate and propo...
htmx.org
Compelling idea: Create a small language model, trained on a single software development framework. Keep it extremely domain specific. This is in contrast to the scorched earth approach taken by frontier models. Cool project by @theletterf.bsky.social got me thinking passo.uno/fine-tuning-...
Fine-tuning an LLM to write docs like it's 1995
In my predictions for 2030 I wrote that tech writers would be using specialized LLMs, running locally on powerful hardware. I see hints of this move to “local first” among engineering pundits, but we’...
passo.uno
We need to live "in the now", more often "In 1911, Frederick Winslow Taylor turned the commoditisation of the minute into a science when he published The Principles of Scientific Management - which he had assembled by standing over the shoulder of various factory workers, wielding a stopwatch"
80% of good software is deleting the thing you were proud your agents wrote yesterday.
JA Westenberg@joanwestenberg.com · 2mo agoHalf of good writing is deleting the thing you were proud of yesterday.
Common folks. We can do better. I know we can. Also, everyone wants to blame this on AI slop, but the enshittification has been happening for a while.
The software eng team at LinkedIn is shipping some real garbage lately. Terrible page load times - I mean the real page load time, not the time it takes to print a <body> tag. Failed DB transactions without rollback. Race conditions while I'm using the same browser tab
I'm making my SVG favicon by hand today. Because there is nobody to tell me not to ;-) That's what I love about the solo builder thing. I can prioritize crazy stuff just because I think it's important.