Posts tagged: webdev

💭 the cheng lou pretext tweet

2026-03-31T18:38:39Z

webdev twitter is blowing up with implementations of pretext text calculations. The examples are absolutely fun and ridiculous.

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

💭 More Details Than You Probably Wanted to Know About Recent Upd...

2026-03-23T12:26:22Z

More Details Than You Probably Wanted to Know About Recent Updates to My Notes Site

Writing about the big beautiful mess that is making things for the world wide web.

blog.jim-nielsen.com

I love the level of thought that Jim has put into these changes and making sure that urls don’t change. I’ve got a big change in flight to my main site and this is one of the reasons that I’ve been sitting on it so long. I want to make sure urls arent broken, redirects work as they should, and there are no 404’s from existing urls. Currently the new version only exists on a separate deployement https://go.waylonwalker.com/

I also added the ability to “shuffle” between posts. This is mostly for myself. I like to randomly jump through notes I’ve published in the past for reoccurring inspiration

Love this idea and have it on my new site already as well, and have really enjoyed using it by pressing it a dozen or so times over the course of a few sessions. It highlights that I have too many posts like stars and thoughts and I should do some weighting to main posts. mine is at https://go.waylonwalker.com/random/

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

You Can Just Build Things

2026-02-25T11:10:51Z

I don’t know if you know this, but the web is a beautiful platform that allows you the freedom to create things and put them out there. Its not tied to four major platforms. You don’t have to post your thoughts, ideas, and apps to a platform, you can just make it. This is a beautiful thing that seems to have been forgotten. I was inspired this morning from @scotthanselman’s tinytooltown. Looking through all of the tiny tools that people have built for themself, as personal software, not answering to anyone but themself, it was inspiring.

Agents have gotten a lot better, like seriously better. The ai bros that were ai pilled too early that said SWE is over in six months called it too early. It wasn’t time. Now since Nov 2025 we have had agents that can do some damn work. Proving the point some of the greatest devs I’ve ever looked up to have not written a line of code since. Not hype bros or someone not good at the craft, but seriously good devs leaning on it full time.

AI hype over you don’t have to use ai, you can still just build things by hand, or if you don’t have the coding skills you can probably ask an agent to build something good enough for you to use on your own.

As I wrote in poc is not product building products is hard. You cant just vibe code out the next jira, medium, Pinterest, photos, but you can build a good enough task board, blog, and photos app that does what you need it to do without these. It may not get you off of some of these platforms, but there’s a good chance you can build out bespoke software that solves real problems you have

This is what makes the web interesting.

Why Make a Website in 2025

blogging in 2024

Blogging For Me

tinyapps

💭 FFmpeg video crop

2026-02-25T08:29:59Z

FFmpeg video crop

tools.simonwillison.net

This was the inspiration for the next update in dropper that became a full clip editor. The one that I’ve long wanted, but forgotten about. It’s going to include this cropper, resize, image extractor, and trimmer.

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

💭 Tiny Tool Town 🏘️

2026-02-25T08:27:11Z

Tiny Tool Town 🏘️

A delightful showcase for free, fun & open source tiny tools. Stupid-delightful software made with love.

Tiny Tool Town · tinytooltown.com

Learned about this one from the @stipete interview @scotthanselman did on YouTube. This is proof that the internet is alive. It’s such web 1.0 nostalgia to see that people can just build things! Did you know that you can literally just build things and make them exist? You don’t need users, You don’t need a big platform, you can just make something into existance. It seems like something we have forgotten through web 2.0 where everything as become 4 major apps all linking to each other and trying to hoard all of the attention. Scroll through tehre are some really cool apps, probably nothing that has the polish you want, or is going to change your world. What these apps have more than anything you’ve probably used in the recent years, is inspiration. Its xyz, but the way I wanted, or with my little twist. And no one else has to like it but me because I’m the user.

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

Is Ai Faster Yet

2026-02-20T14:37:36Z

Is AI making us more productive yet, more faster yet?

Non-code #

probably not

I’ve seen this question hitting all over the Internet lately, and often points to people not writing code. Copilot turns prompts into emails, emails back into summaries that look a lot like prompts. I think there’s a place for this, making rambled thoughts sound more coherent, summarizing notes and meeting minutes. All good stuff but does it make us more productive, probably not by an amount that you can put $ $ behind, unless you are reducing headcount. thats not what we are doing right???

Coding #

with chat, probably not

When we talk about chatbots like gippity I think there’s a benefit to having someone with jr skills in everything to talk to, someone who can read all of the docs in an instant to get you some code snippet that might have taken all day to research and get right, but more productive, probably not.

Agentic Coding #

maybe

I’ve hit a stride with coding agents this year unlike I’ve hit before. Its able to bang out huge swaths of code in a prompt, with a good enough spec/plan. It absolutely churns out code. The bottleneck quickly becomes UAT.

I definitely feel like I’m doing a lot. There’s a lot that’s getting done that there’s no way I could do alone, it would take a full team with heavy coordination.

Am I more productive #

I’m definitely doing more, there are more lines of code, more ideas flowing, more docs written, more notes taken, more bugs squashed, more features out.

In the sense of generating more $ $ for the stakeholder. I really don’t know that I’m there yet, everything feels so new and different that there’s a bit of a learning curve to understand it all. There’s a pace and cadence to everything that may not be quite caught up yet.

It definitely feels like more is happening at a different pace that is hard to explain.

I’m sure there is a wide spectrum of folks out there from some generating millions of additional revenue in new greenfield industries, to those burning tokens and getting nothing in return.

With this SUPER AUTO COMPLETE engine it’s easy to say we found a bug affecting a user, but rather than squashing that one and getting a release out quickly squash ALL related bugs that a user might find in this category, it only takes a few more keystrokes right??

Right now it feels like a lot is happening but its hard to sus out the real productivity from the noise.

FIN #

As with anything AI It took me a few weeks to wrap this up and everything is already different. But I had some recent experiences of feeling slower than just doing it, and its all around context. I have built out a lot of the systems that I maintain by hand, I really know them well and I can solve a lot of problems within the hour by hand with coffee break. But now that I’m trying to lean on agents, I know they can do a more thorough job than I can faster, but I don’t have all of the data harnessed up. Just today I spent all day trying to solve CI problems. I can see the issue, I know the solution, but I want agents to solve this for me in the future so I spent the say working on a CLI to pull data from ci pipeline runs, manage the tokens get the logs, status, all of the data. Because I know this will be the way of the future, they will outpace me, I just need to have methods of getting context ready for them, and agents that know how to do it set up.

double gutter

2026-02-14T09:12:42Z

I keep forgetting about the double gutter problem with nested containers. When you put padding on a parent and the child also has padding, you get twice the spacing you wanted.

The Problem #

.container {
  padding: 2rem;
}

.child {
  padding: 2rem;
}

Now your content is 4rem from the edge. Not what I meant at all.

The Fix #

Either remove padding from the parent or use box-sizing: border-box and plan for it. I usually just drop the parent padding when I realize what I have done.

💭 feat: add llms.txt endpoint for LLM-optimized documentation by...

2026-01-08T01:22:02Z

feat: add llms.txt endpoint for LLM-optimized documentation by quantizor · Pull Request #2388 · tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com

Add /llms.txt endpoint that serves a concatenated, text-only version of all Tailwind CSS documentation pages optimized for Large Language Model consumption.

Extract text from MDX files, removing J…

GitHub · github.com

Damn this one is getting some reach, I’ve seen it from Simon Willison and Justin Searls and t3.gg. I feel for Adam, He has built a fantastic product that the world is running with, something we all needed. Something that everyone laughs at turns their nose up “ppft I don’t need that” the first time they see it, but once they try people get it, and a lot of them like it and keep it. But its something that no one really wants to pay for, no matter how big of products get built on it. As we see more and more features coming to css, its not stopping, the work will always be there. I really hope to see something happen to tailwind to keep it afloat. massive growth and revenue down 80% does not help.

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

light mode screen recording css

2026-01-02T10:29:10Z

Yesterday I wrote about a way to do light mode screen recording to convert to light mode from dark mode with ffmpeg. I was wondering if it could be done entirely on the front end for web applications. Turns out you can. I’m sure there are limited wikis and site builders that don’t allow adding style like this, but it works if you can.

<video
    src="https://dropper.waylonwalker.com/file/1c53dbcb-4b84-4e94-9f04-a42986ab3fa1.mp4?width=800"
    controls
    style="filter: invert(1) hue-rotate(180deg) contrast(1.2) saturate(1.1);"
    >
</video>

0 deg hue rotate

90 deg hue rotate

180 deg hue rotate

270 deg hue rotate

💭 Convert a video from dark mode to light mode with FFmpeg!

2026-01-01T18:00:56Z

Convert a video from dark mode to light mode with FFmpeg!

Here

cassidoo.co

Converting video from dark mode to light mode after the fact is a pretty great idea, I’m surprised at how well it does. Its definitely not perfect, but looks really good.

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

web snow fall

2025-12-09T10:21:17Z

I found snow-fall component from zachleat, and its beautiful… to me. I like the way it looks, its simple and whimsical.

Install #

There is an npm package <a href="https://zachleat.com" class="mention" data-name="Zach Leatherman" data-bio="A post by Zach Leatherman (zachleat)" data-avatar="https://www.zachleat.com/og/opengraph-default.png" data-handle="@zachleat">@zachleat</a>/snow-fall if that’s your thing. I like vendoring in small things like this.

curl -o static/snow-fall.js https://raw.githubusercontent.com/zachleat/snow-fall/refs/heads/main/snow-fall.js

I generally save it in my justfile so that I remember how I got it and how to update…. yaya I could use npm, but I don’t for no build sites.

get-snowfall:
    curl -o static/snow-fall.js https://raw.githubusercontent.com/zachleat/snow-fall/refs/heads/main/snow-fall.js

Usage #

Now add the component to your page.

<!-- This belongs somewhere inside <head> -->
<script type="module" src="snow-fall.js"></script> <!-- Adjust the src to your path -->

<!-- This belongs somewhere inside <body> -->
<!-- Anything before will be below the snow. -->
<snow-fall></snow-fall>
<!-- Anything after will show above the snow. -->

💭 snow-fall Web Component—zachleat.com

2025-12-06T15:25:11Z

snow-fall Web Component—zachleat.com

A post by Zach Leatherman (zachleat)

Zach Leatherman · zachleat.com

This is a very fun way to add some whimsy to your site, added it to mine immediately when I saw it. This is what digital gardens are for, Fun, entertainment, and self-exxpression.

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

starlette head request

2025-10-22T09:11:31Z

FastAPI.">Starlette has a head request that works right along side your get requests. This morning I fiddled around with custom routes for GET and HEAD, but had to manually set some things about the file, and was still missing e-tag in the end. Turns out as a developer you can just add a head route to your get routes and starlette will strip the content for you, while preserving all of those good headers that fastapi FileResponse created automatically for you.

from fastapi import APIRouter
from fastapi.response import FileResponse
from fastapi import Request
from pathlib import Path

router = APIRouter()

@router.get("/file/{filename}")
@router.head("/file/{filename}")
async def get_file(filename: str, request: Request,):
    headers = {
      "Cache-Control": "no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate",
    }
    from pathlib import Path
    filename = Path(f"data/{filename}")
    if not filename.exists():
        raise HTTPException(status_code=404, detail="File not found")
    return FileResponse(filename, headers=headers)

Here is an example of the response with curl.

❯ curl -I -L "http://localhost:8100/api/file/e5523925-1565-454c-bab3-c70c4deabc83.webp?width=250"
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
date: Wed, 22 Oct 2025 14:16:03 GMT
server: uvicorn
cache-control: no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate
content-type: image/webp
content-length: 17206
last-modified: Tue, 23 Sep 2025 14:03:20 GMT
etag: f891660c1543feb1af7564f08abdd511

❯ curl -I -L "http://localhost:8100/api/file/unknown-file.webp?width=250"
HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
date: Wed, 22 Oct 2025 14:16:11 GMT
server: uvicorn
content-length: 27
content-type: application/json

💭 This Web Server Is 100% Solar Powered - YouTube

2025-10-11T22:21:38Z

This is super cool, thanks to Brodie for reading me this content as I do household chores. lowtech magazine is a website ran completely on solar power with only enough battery backup to cover most days. Adding enough to cover all days would increase its carbon footprint and negate the carbon offset of the solar panels it runs on.

It’s fascinating to see a web server running completely off grid in a close power system. These interesting websites are fascinating keep em coming Brodie.

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

💭 Litewind

2025-10-05T01:12:20Z

Litewind

Litewind is Tailwind without the build step

litewindcss.com

This is a sick no-build version of tailwind. I have a couple of projects that the build step of tailwind is cumbersome on, mostly because they are for non-js devs. Some are for backend python devs, some are for folks that mostly want markdown with some styles. This is a perfect no-build tailwind alternative.

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

Why Make a Website in 2025

2025-09-16T19:37:23Z

Inspired by Jim and Dave

It’s Fun #

If it’s not something that you enjoy, you might as well move on there are far better ways to spend your time in 2025. Only the weirdos read this shit anymore, the masses have long moved on to curated social media feeds, and on to chatting with llms. I enjoy spending some time in the digital garden every once in awhile tweaking templates, creating markata plugins to do interesting things. I enjoy expressing my thoughts, or at least shouting them into the ether.

I’ll be the first to admit that I often go to an llm for first pass at many things that I could look up in a guide or 😲 the docs.

I enjoy reading others #

This year I have made extra effort to add more and more people into my Reader. I enjoy reading content from people I chose to follow and can remove whenever I want. I enjoy reading actual human thoughts and not ai generated content all day.

I even will create Thoughts based on these posts that I find interesting, and want to further share to others. I want to give these people that took time to make something a little boost.

Not Perfection #

The last thing we need in 2025 is perfection. We have enough ai generated slop that is far from perfectly accurate that sits behind a veil of mostly clean look, semi consistent feel, and a narrow set of tone. I see it in gen z there is something about the imperfect that is coming out. Not perfectly cut video or audio. I just heard Gary Vee mention this morning that a siren going off in the background of NYC has a somewhat natural human feel to it now.

Ownership #

Dave points out that the first thought for most people trying to make a business or pop off as an influencer is TikTok, then a few similar apps. If you are trying to reach a large audience and swim in the big pond with the big fish thats where you need to go.

But you don’t own that content anymore. Some posts will pop, some will be lost to the algorithm for nothing more that the first few eyes that got it swiped past too fast. The whole platform can go, or choose to not show your content, its their platform. You don’t pay them for anything. They are allowed to do what they want.

If you want some ownership to keep your content alive, curate a small, focused, core audience, also put that on a website.

Not for the faint of heart #

It’s not easy to manage hundreds of posts, images, builds, servers. Theres probably a hundred ways to make it easier, but if you really want full control, full DIY, it takes time to do.

Learn a skill #

This can go a few different ways, One is that you can make a blog or site about a topic, deep dive into this topic. Create blogs, videos, images, about this topic. Create real content that real people find interesting.

OR a bit meta, you can learn more about tech. This site is built with markata, its a static site generator that I built myself mostly to make this site. I’ve learned a ton about markdown, html, ast, python, plugin architecture in doing so. I build this site in kubernetes, another skill that I wanted to develop, and owning my own services that I have real skin in the game for is a great way to do so.

Just Build Websites #

As the opening to shoptalkshow says, just make websites. Who the fuck cares why or how. The important thing is that you built something, maybe it is for an audience of one or one million, doesn’t matter, keep the internet alive and just build something.

💭 Why everyone is quitting social media - YouTube

2025-08-25T01:36:35Z

Damn, social media is at an all time low. I’ve felt all of these issues and when I got a new phone I started fresh, I didn’t install one social media app. Luckily Youtube has remained solid for me. Yes shorts are a bit less what I came for and more addicting content they had to do in order to keep up. There are some legit good commedians, a bit of good knowledge and a bunch of trash that is hard to look away from on shorts. I still find myself able to find content I enjoy and signed up for on YouTube. I feel like I get a one way relationship with someone similar to a TV show or news anchor of old media.

Social Media has morphed from follows likes and similar, to viral posts by creators I don’t recognize. posting and immediately getting like by two hot women with accounts created this week. The rest of the real creators left on there are stuck trying to keep up, echo viral trends, trying to keep up the content treadmill. A few come through, but most feel somewhat forced. A lot of it is ai generated, and whats not mostly doesn’t feel that human anyways.

The people on here seem to really tie the internet to social media and are ready to quit the internet. I think there is more to the internet, we can find each other, but setting up rss feeds, following others, and scrolling their own website lacks that dopamine hit social media has right now.

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

A More Human Internet

2025-08-21T14:36:00Z

💭 OverType - The Markdown Editor That's a Textarea

2025-08-21T00:50:01Z

The most under hyped, under engineered text editor overtype. Going to be popping this into some places like Thoughts, and maybe more, looks small and easy to use. Gives just a bit of nice features over a text editor.

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

💭 Digitized Signatures

2025-08-17T15:47:05Z

Digitized Signatures

signature.cnrad.dev

seriously cool dumb app that no one asked for but is really creative and unique.

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts