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button table { margin: 0; } .fa-arrow-left::before {content:"←"} Bad code <button type="button" onclick="window.open('https://example.com/other-page')"> <table> <tbody> <tr> <td> <i class="fa fa-arrow-left" aria-hidden="true"></i> </td> <td align="left">Back</td> </tr> </tbody> </table> </button> Back Issues and how to fix them The HTML isn't valid because the table element isn't allowed as a child of the button element. Based on the content categories listed on MDN, the table element qualifies as flow content and can only be placed inside an element that expects flow content. The button element, on the other hand, expects phrasing content, not flow content. The semantic information of the table doesn't cause any issues because the button's content is presentational See Buttons Role on W3C, Presentational Children. Keep it simple and structure the button element using CSS, such as Flexbox. Instead of using tables to structure the button element, use phrasing content elements, such as span, img, or SVG. Good code <button type="button" onclick="alert('Hello World!')"> Back </button> Resources <button> on MDN <table> on MDN Content categories on MDN Buttons Role on W3C <button> on W3Schools <table> on W3Schools Presentational Children
by Rian Rietveld It's a common pattern to use a logo in the header as a link to the homepage. Fun fact: the alt text of the image inside a link, will be added to the link text. The problem with linking a logo is that it serves 2 purposes: a logo, that tells you which site you are visiting; a link, that leads to the homepage. So add both that info in the alt text. Explain what's on the image and where the link leads to: "Site name logo, to the homepage". Note: Start the alt text with the visible text, then the link will be easier to target for people using voice recognition software. Let's take as example the logo of my home town Leidschendam-Voorburg. In code (simplified): <a href="/"> <img alt="Leidschendam-Voorburg logo, to the homepage" src="logo-lv.svg" /> </a> Generated HTML: VoiceOver in Safari will announce this as: All info is there. There is an advantage of using the alt text instead of an aria-label solution. When the connection is slow, the alt text will show up before the image does and already informs all users of the site name and link destination. It's quite robust. Discussion Do I need the word logo? Isn't that redundant, like the word image or picture? Yes, in this case the fact that this is a logo tells important info. Not only for blind users, but for all screenreader users. If you are visually impaired but not totally blind, you may see the image vaguely. With the addition of the word logo, you also know what the image is. The site name is required, but the logo gives extra context. Isn't this a violation of 2.5.3 Label in Name? No, the visible name is in the alt text, which becomes the accessible name of the link. Adding extra context to the link is common practice. Compare this with the notorious "Read more" link in a card. A common pattern is to use a sr-only CSS class (or equivalent) with additional text: <a href="url">Read more<span class="sr-only"> about cute kitten</span></a> . You see Read more. You hear Read more about cute kitten. In our case: You see the site name and logo; the visual position tells the link destination. You hear the site name, the fact it's a logo and the link destination. The whole visible text should be in the accessible name, but extra information, like the meaning of the image and link destination can be added for context. That way the purpose of the link is explained. Why didn't you use an aria-label? Of course there are other and also valid solutions. By using plain simple HTML I want to honor the first rule of ARIA: If you can use a native HTML element or attribute with the semantics and behavior you require already built in, instead of re-purposing an element and adding an ARIA role, state or property to make it accessible, then do so. Happy Holidays!
Bad code <button type="button" onclick="window.open('https://example.com/other-page')">Link target description</button> Issues and how to fix them A button opening a link will be unexpected behavior for screen reader users. No matter how it is styled. Links disguised as buttons won’t show up in the link list of a site in assistive technologies. Use links for navigation to other pages or sections, and buttons for actions performed on the current page or within the application. Good code <a href="https://example.com/other-page">Link target description</a> Resources ` on MDN](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/a) - [`` on MDN](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/button) - [Buttons vs. Links by Eric Eggert](https://yatil.net/blog/buttons-vs-links)
The good intentions were there but in the HTML and Accessibility world, less is sometimes more. Bad code <label for="textinput">First name</label> <input type="text" id="textinput" aria-label="First name" placeholder="First name" title="First name"> Issues and how to fix them The aria-label, placeholder, and title attributes all provide the same informaton ("First name"), leading to the screenreader reading the same text multiple times. The aria-label is unnecessary since the input is already correctly labeled by the <label> element. <label> elements should be preferred to aria-label since they are also visible to sighted users. The title attribute is not needed here, as the label and placeholder already convey the necessary information. Using title in this context adds unnecessary complexity. The placeholder text should provide a hint / example to the user what kind of input is expected, it should not act as a label or contain the same content. Good code <label for="textinput">First name</label> <input type="text" id="textinput"> Resources <label> on MDN aria-label on MDN placeholder on MDN title on MDN
by Vasilis van Gemert Recently when I gave a coding assignment — an art directed web page about a font — a student asked: does it have to be semantic and shit? The whole class looked up, curious about the answer — please let it be no! I answered that no, it doesn’t have to be semantic and shit, but it does have to be well designed and the user experience should be well considered. Relieved, all of my students agreed. They do care about a good user experience. The joke here is, of course, that a well considered user experience starts with well considered HTML. Somehow my students are allergic to semantics and shit. And they’re not alone. If you look at 99% of all websites in the wild, everybody who worked on them seems to be allergic to semantics and shit. On most websites heading levels are just random numbers, loosely based on font-size. Form fields have no labels. Links and buttons are divs. It’s really pretty bad. So it’s not just my students, the whole industry doesn’t understand semantics and shit. Recently I decided to stop using the word semantics. Instead I talk about the UX of HTML. And all of a sudden my students are not allergic to HTML anymore but really interested. Instead of explaining the meaning of a certain element, I show them what it does. So we look at what happens when you add a label to an input: The input and the label now form a pair. You can now click on the label to interact with a checkbox. The label will be read out loud when you focus on an input with a screenreader. When you hover over a label, the hover state of the connected input is shown. My students love stuff like that. They care about UX. I show them that a span with an onclick-event might seem to be behaving like a link, but that there are many layers of UX missing when you look a bit closer: right-click on this span, and a generic context menu opens up. When on the other hand you right-click on a proper link like this one a specialised context menu opens, with all kinds of options that are specific to a link. And I show them that proper links show up when you ask your screen reader to list all the links on a page, yet spans with an onclick-event don’t. Moreover, a span doesn’t receive focus when you tab to it. And so on. My students see this and they get it. And they love the fact that by being lazy they get much more result. So when I teach about HTML I always start with the elements that are obviously interactive. I show them the multitude of UX layers of a link, I show them the layers and layers of UX that are added to a well considered form. I show them what happens on a phone when you use an input with a default text type instead of the proper type of email. They get this, and they want to know more. So I show them more. I show them the required attribute which makes it possible to validate not only form fields, but also fieldsets and forms. They love this stuff. Then I go on and show the details element with a summary. Whoah! No JavaScript! These interactive things are the most important parts of HTML. These are the things that truly break or make a site. If you don’t use these elements properly, many people are actively excluded and the UX degrades in many ways. The interactive elements are what makes the web the web. The old focus on semantics Every time I come home from a web conference I hang the lanyard with the badge on a doorknob. There are at least 35 lanyards there. The oldest is more than fifteen years old, the newest just a few months. On most of these conferences there was someone telling us about the importance of using proper semantic HTML. And they all talked about the importance of heading levels. So for at least 15 years we’ve been telling the web design and web development community that heading levels are very important. Yet after all these years, and after all these conferences there are almost no websites that do it right. Later, when HTML5 was introduced the talks about semantics were still mostly about creating a proper document outline, but this time with sectioning elements in combination with headings. Unfortunately this idea was never properly implemented by browsers. And it turned out that these sectioning elements are very hard to understand. For years I’ve tried to explain the difference between a section and an article, and almost nobody gets it. And of course they don’t, because it’s very, very complicated theory. And above all: There’s no clear UX feature to point at. The user experience doesn’t change dramatically if you use a section instead of an article. It’s mostly theoretical. So nowadays, next to divitis, we also have sectionitis. Understanding how heading levels work is hard. And understanding how sectioning elements work is really hard. And explaining these things is even harder. What’s the use for theoretical purity if the end result is the same? Yes, I know that some sectioning elements actually have some UX attached to it. But not that much UX if you compare it to the real interactive elements. Not getting your heading levels right is not at all as destructive as using divs instead of links. Now, I’m not saying that we should stop teaching people about heading levels and sections. We shouldn’t. Heading levels and sections do things as well. But we should think about when we teach these more complicated and subtle parts of HTML. First we need to get people exited about HTML by showing all the free yet complex layers of UX you get when you use the interactive elements properly. And then, when they do understand the interactive elements, when they’re really excited and they ask for more, show them the more obscure UX patterns. You need a good idea of what UX is before you can understand things like the option to nagivate through the headings on the page with a screen reader. Without an idea of what UX means you cannot understand what landmarks do. First start with the obvious, then show the details. I am very much looking forward to 15 more years of web conferences and publications. I look forward to seeing inspiring talks about the UX of HTML. Talks about the incredible radio button and its wonderful indeterminate state! Talks about validating forms in a friendly way with just HTML and some clever CSS. Talks about the different context menus that appear on different elements. In other words, talks about what HTML does, and much less about what it means in theory. Let’s talk about user experience, and let’s stop talking about semantics and shit.
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Today we are releasing the version 1.0 of Lexxy. Lexxy is a rich text editor for Rails built on Lexical. It already powers Basecamp, Fizzy and many others, and it will become the default editor in Rails. I recently presented it in Rails World (slides, video coming soon). This is the article version of my talk. Trix hit a wall Trix has been our editor since 2015, and every Rails app’s editor since Action Text shipped in Rails 6. It’s small and reliable, and it has served millions of people for a decade. But in the last few years our customers kept asking for features like tables or code highlighting, and we kept struggling to deliver them. The reason is the Trix document model. A Trix document is a flat list of blocks. A block is a line of text with some labels attached, like quote, bullet list, bullet. There is no tree, and a block can never contain another block. Nesting is an illusion: at render time, adjacent blocks with the same labels get wrapped together. A flat list of blocks with very limited extensibility options That design bought a lot of simplicity, but you can’t express something like a table with it. Two cells next to each other would carry exactly the same labels, so Trix would merge them into one. The model can say “this bullet is one level deeper”. It cannot say “this cell is different from the cell next to it”. A tables issue has been opened since 2015! The model just can’t do it. The second problem was maintenance. An editor built on contenteditable behaves differently in every browser and even changes from time with operating system releases. In 2024, three iOS releases in a row broke typing, dictation or the caret in Trix, and each one cost us real effort to work around. Check this one as an example. Why Lexical This was a conversation we had at 37signals for years: 2022. We started a project to add tables to Trix. We gave up after a week. The document model can’t represent two-dimensional things. 2023. I built a proof of concept with Tiptap inside HEY. We liked it, but we never started a serious project with it. 2024. We built House, our own Markdown editor, for Writebook. Not WYSIWYG, but WYSIWYM: what you see is what you mean. A wonderful editor for long-form writing like books or technical documentation. 2025. We tried House in another product, and it didn’t fit. For most apps, WYSIWYG was just the right answer. 2025. We had the discussion again, and this time we looked at the whole field. Four years of the same conversation David ruled out Tiptap, CKEditor and the other commercial editors: an open source core with features kept proprietary, and a sales team behind them. We didn’t want our editor to depend on somebody else’s licensing decisions. Then we found Lexical: MIT, from Meta, and very powerful. I spent two weeks evaluating it, and in May we made the call to go with it. A tiny core. Pick the rest. Lexical’s core has zero dependencies and weighs forty-two kilobytes. In a way, it validates the approach that Trix pioneered. The document is an immutable state you never mutate directly, you just get new snapshots when performing updates; contenteditable is an input device and a rendering surface, never the source of truth. It has a DOM reconciler to update the actual DOM very efficiently, and other primitives to deal with handling commands and node transformations. Everything else, from lists to tables to markdown, is a package in the orbit. Lexxy uses thirteen of them. Lexical solved the maintenance problem too. Meta’s products like Facebook or Instagram use Lexical and their user count is in the hundreds of millions. This means that even small issues with new keyboards and devices are fixed fast by the dedicated Meta team that maintains it. Furthermore, Meta’s business is the products, not the editor. We much rather liked this structure of incentives for the long-term investment an editor represents. The iceberg The plan was simple. Pick Lexical, wire it up to Action Text, add a toolbar and ship it. Well, it didn’t go exactly like that. What you envision, and what's under the water Lexxy today is thirteen thousand lines of vanilla JavaScript on top of Lexical. A great editing experience is very hard to get right. An editor is a machine where the user can change the state in a thousand different ways. For example. you have two images one after the other and want to put the cursor between them, but there is nothing there to put a cursor in. Or somebody pastes from Google Docs, and you have to turn a pile of inline styles and empty spans into clean markup. And then Safari, and Android keyboards, and the clipboard, and undo, and… From the first pull request to Basecamp 5 The first pull request landed in May 2025. Fizzy launched with Lexxy in December, and Basecamp 5 in May this year. Basecamp was the real test: twenty years of content written with Trix, and people who use the editor all day, every day. Zoltán Hosszú and Samuel Péchèr were the key people who made this happen. The took a very green version of Lexxy, added a ton of features (including Tables) and polish, and they fixed countless bugs. They also pulled off a remarkable milestone: seamlessly switching millions of Basecamp users from Trix to Lexxy. What’s included? We didn’t want a to build Trix with tables. We had Lexical and we had agents to help, so we wanted to be ambitious here. We went for the whole package. Features In terms of major features: A color highlighter, built in instead of this being a custom Basecamp extension, as it was with Trix. Tables, with an interface we worked hard to keep simple and accessible. Markdown. You type it, you get rich text. Code blocks with syntax highlighting as you type, in more than twenty languages. Image galleries you can navigate and reorder with the keyboard. Prompts. Type a character, get a menu: mentions, emoji, or whatever your app needs. Links by pasting a URL over selected text. Previews of attachments like videos and PDFs, rendered as your app renders them. Action Text Native Lexxy is also Action Text native. Action Text stores attachments in a canonical format that Trix doesn’t speak, so it translates on save and again on render. We taught Lexxy to emit exactly that markup. What you see in the editor is what gets saved, and what gets saved is what your app renders. Your existing content, attachments and views keep working. That opened another door. Action Text now talks to an editor adapter, with an implementation for Trix and one for Lexxy, so switching is one line: config.action_text.editor = :lexxy. Here the credit goes to Sean Doyle, who started that pull request before Lexxy existed and took it to the finish line with our input. It ships with Rails 8.2, and we hope other editors will use it too. Extensibility And you can extend Lexxy. Extensions are built on Lexical’s own mechanism, and this is not a second-class API: Lexxy itself is thirteen extensions, tables included, and Basecamp has nine more. class MyExtension extends Lexxy.Extension { get enabled() { … } get allowedElements() { … } get lexicalExtension() { return this.defineExtension({ name: "my-extension", nodes: [ … ], register(editor) { … } }) } initializeToolbar(toolbar) { … } dispose() { … } } Lexxy.configure({ global: { extensions: [ MyExtension ] } }) My favorite of how extensible is Lexxy are voice notes in Basecamp: you record, you see the waveform while you talk, and it becomes a player inside the document. About a thousand lines, without forking or patching anything. Performance Lexxy is fast, because Lexical is fast. In a ten thousand word document, Trix takes thirty-eight milliseconds to process a keystroke. Lexxy takes four. Above fifty milliseconds, the editor starts feeling sluggish. Compared to Trix, Lexxy brought a whole new performance regime. Milliseconds per keystroke by document size Accessibility Accessibility in Trix was not great. In general, building accessible experiences for rich text editors built on top of contenteditable is quite hard. We had a dream team to help with Lexxy accessibility. Bruno Prieto worked with Michael Berger, our accessibility champion at 37signals, to bring the bar to where we wanted it to be. Bruno is an outstanding programmer who happens to be blind, so he knows one thing or two about accessibility, and he delivered. As a result, in Lexxy everything is reachable with the keyboard. The editor announces itself properly to screen readers, and it gets a thousand details right so that the editing experience using a screen reader is fantastic. You can learn more about accessibility in our docs. Security The latest AI models have resulted in an unprecedented explosion of vulnerabilities found, and we took this thread quite seriously. Lexxy counted with programmers of the caliber of Jeremy Daer and Mike Dalessio helping to make it more secure. We have put a lot of attention to sanitizing the editor contents, validating attachment URLs and making sure that the types of attachments and nodes the editor support are allow-listed. Lexxy also comes with preliminary Trusted Types support, to offer CSP-level control over certain DOM manipulation APIs. The trusted types policy is there, but we are not enforcing it everywhere yet. Agents We started Lexxy using Claude since day one. A main lesson was that an agent needs to drive the editor like a user does. The best decision we made in this project was moving the system tests from Capybara to Playwright: three browsers instead of one, a suite that runs in seconds, and a much more faithful clipboard, keyboard and focus. This represented a tremendous improvement in how agents could close the loop by themselves. Write a test, see it fail, fix it, see it pass. We have more than six hundred browser tests today. Moving the suite to Playwright changed how fast we could write tests With a solid testing foundation in place, we could start fixing bugs in large batches. As mentioned, getting a text editor right implies a ton of work, and the kind of backlog we got at some point would have have buried us in pre-agent times. We also used agents to validate the fixes: an agent reproduces the bug in the public Lexxy sandbox, checks that it’s gone with the branch applied, and labels the pull request. Agents were essential to get Lexxy done with the people and the deadlines we had: we are a small company, and the same people were shipping two products in parallel. 275 cards closed The new Rails default We believe Lexxy is the best rich text editor out there right now, and we are going to make it the default editor in Rails next. If you’re starting a Rails application today, use Lexxy. If you’re using Action Text with a standard configuration, switch. It’s one line, and we’ve worked hard to make it seamless.
Reading my recent computing retrospective, I realised there was a big section missing: the people in my life that made an impact and helped shape my career. Outside my immediate family, one person made an outsized contribution, and I’m fairly certain that without his influence my life would have taken a very different path. The fact that I’m still here in 2026, still writing code and being fortunate enough to have a career in something I love is testament to him. So I’d like to take a few moments to talk about my old secondary school teacher, George Dryden. Denied Back in 1995, I had a problem. I knew I wanted to study computing at university and build a career out of my passion, but there was a snag. For those unfamiliar with the UK schooling system, when you’re 15-16 you take a set of GCSE exams in a broad range of subjects. After that, you pick around 3 subjects to really focus on over a period of 2 years. These are called A Levels, and they are a big step up and are meant to prepare you for a degree-level course at university. Admission to university is also governed by these results - if you want to study computing, you’re going to need a computing A-Level, and most universities will only accept you (or “make an offer”) if you achieve a certain grade. And whilst I had taken computing at a GCSE level, my school did not offer a computing A-Level course. I instead had to settle on “Design & Technology”, which just didn’t inspire me. Instead of working on my portfolio and projects, I spent most of my time daydreaming and writing code on the Acorn Archimedes computers that were the staple of every 90s UK school. No disrespect to the teachers - they were all awesome - but it just wasn’t for me. I was miserable, and by the end of my first year, I was well on my way to failing outright with my entire future plans seemingly going up in smoke. Someone noticed That’s when George stepped in. He’d taught me computing right the way through my GCSEs, and with no A-Level course on offer, that was officially where his involvement was supposed to have ended. It didn’t. He had noticed my constant presence in the computing labs - before and after school, during lunch breaks, free “study” periods - working on some little pet project or digging into RISC OS internals. I remember him as warm, with a wicked, dry sense of humour, and a refreshingly spiky attitude to authority - I always got the sense he’d worked out for himself which rules were worth taking seriously and which ones weren’t. And he always had time for me. I spent years pestering him with questions that had nothing to do with anything on the syllabus, and he’d always find a way to answer them that actually made sense. He was just as supportive of my odd little obsessions. At one point I’d got deep into the BBS scene, which I thought was the coolest thing ever, and decided what the school really needed was an internal BBS running on its own network. So I wrote one. It was deeply cringeworthy, obviously - but George helped me put posters up around the school advertising it, and even gave it a mention in assembly one morning. I think about five people in total ever checked it out. It didn’t matter: a teacher had stood up in front of the entire school and treated my weird little project like it was worth something, and that was a hugely validating moment for me. Off the books He recognised the passion, and eventually he made a suggestion: What if I quit the Design and Technology course, and instead attempt the A-level course myself? Personally, I also suspect he was enjoying himself. There was some internal school politics behind why computing wasn’t offered at A-Level in the first place - I never knew the details - and I think the prospect of one of his students simply going out and getting the qualification anyway appealed to him on two separate levels. It would get me where I wanted to go, and it would wind up exactly the right people. It wouldn’t be easy, he warned. The school would be against it, plus it was a two-year course which I’d have to cram into one year. I’d have to do it all myself - studying, lesson planning, coursework - he couldn’t help me in an official capacity, but he said he’d advocate for me and help where he could. If I had assignments, he’d send them off to be graded and would give feedback in his own time. He’d enter me in for the exams and also gave me a set of keys to the computer lab so I could use it whenever I needed. It was the first time anybody outside my own family had really shown faith in my abilities and encouraged me to take a stand. It was a pivotal moment for me - I realised if I wanted something badly enough I would have to fight for it, but I could still make it happen. I didn’t have to take “NO” for an answer - a lesson I think I picked up from watching him as much as from anything he ever actually said to me. After a few weeks of dithering, I took the jump. I remember a few awkward meetings with the school administration but thanks to his behind-the-scenes work, I was soon following my dream. An intense year And yes, it was bloody hard work. I had to condense an entire two year course into under a year, be disciplined enough to produce my own study plan, and be critical enough of my own shortcomings that I could focus my study where it was needed. I pretty much lived and breathed it for months straight and was more-or-less a permanent fixture in the labs or school library poring over my course books. I’d make lists of questions and chat to George over lunch, and he’d provide guidance and encouragement. It was a lonely way to learn with no classmates to compare notes with, no lessons to turn up to, and right up until the end I had no real idea whether any of it was good enough - but bit by bit, it started to feel like something I could actually pull off. And sure enough, in the late spring of 1996, I sat down in an exam hall with my fellow students, the only one with an A-Level computing question paper in front of me. The final exam went by in a blur - I can only remember a few of the questions now (and a peculiar obsession with the Pascal language) - but I do remember the euphoria as the invigilator called “time’s up, pens down, close your papers NOW”. I had done it. A few nerve-wracking months later, my Mum drove me into school to pick up my results. I ripped open the envelope and saw it - I’d passed with an A grade! I literally ran up the stairs to George’s office next to the computing labs to thank him personally. I’d taken my camera into school to take a few last photos for memory’s sake and snapped this photo of him before I walked out the school gates for the last time: A different path Because of him, I managed to get into my university of choice, studying computing with a focus on networks. Because of that, I landed my first job working as a “webmaster”, and my career since has been one of the highlights of my life. All these years later, it’s a real privilege to be able to get up each morning and actively look forward to working in an industry I love. Without George stepping up for me and encouraging me to believe in myself, none of that would have happened. I wouldn’t have had the career I have, and I wouldn’t be where I am now. I met my wife when we both worked at a software company - she sat at the desk behind me - so even my home and family life can be traced back to that spring of 1996. And the A-Level itself was only half of what I took away from that year. The qualification opened the door to university, but the lesson that came with it was every bit as important: that a “no” isn’t always the end of it, and that sometimes the answer can be argued with. I’m so proud of what I managed to achieve all those years ago, and even more thankful to have had someone like George in my life to put me on the right track. Mr. Dryden I did see him again after I left. He drank in one of my local pubs - a pub I’d been going to for a good while before I was technically old enough to be in it - and I’d say hello if I spotted him in there, mostly in the months before I moved away to university. After that it was only a handful of times. For years I’d find myself scanning the room whenever I was back home and in for a pint, half expecting him to be at the bar. At some point I stopped seeing him altogether and eventually moved across the country. The trouble was I never really knew how to talk to him outside of school. He was always Mr. Dryden, or just “Sir”, I don’t think I ever once called him George to his face! I was (and still am if I’m honest) fairly socially awkward, and I never worked out how to phrase the thing I actually wanted to say: that he had changed the entire direction of my life, and I wasn’t sure he knew it. So instead I’d say hello, and ask how he was, talk about nothing much, and go back to my friends. Epilogue Sadly, 3 years ago now, I opened the latest issue of my old school alumni newsletter to read that he’d passed away. The photo at the start of this article was taken from his obituary article and I read that he’d had a long illness and had suffered from dementia at the end. I did write to him years ago by email - I don’t know if he ever got it, or was in any capacity to understand what he’d done for me, but I hope so. There’s an old saying by one of my favourite authors (Terry Pratchett) that “no one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away”. In one of his books, a character keeps the memory of his son alive by passing his name along a series of telegraph towers. It’s in that spirit that I’m writing this post - I debated it for many years as it’s very personal to me and I also have no contact with any of George’s family so I have no idea what they would make of it all. But even though it’s 30+ years ago now, I will never forget him or what he did for me - and at least now, if someone searches his name it’ll be recorded here for as long as I’m alive and running this site. Thank you, Sir. George Dryden 1942-2023
Let’s step inside the kernel and understand how it implements copy-on-write and what are its implications for the performance of user-space systems
Yesterday, I received this email as a response to You Can't Vibe Code Love. It's such a remarkable and powerful statement that I asked permission to share it here, in its entirety, with personal information redacted: Hey Jeff, Hope you and your family are doing well.
A frustrated Reddit post about being a condom between an AI and production made the rounds in our team. Here is why I think the opposite is true and what it means for how we review code, plan work and think.
