More from Eric Bailey
A thing you should know is that you get put on a lot of lists if you spend a decent chunk of time publishing blog posts on your website. Your website and contact information will be shared around on these lists, for the purpose of soliciting you for guest posts. If you’re not familiar with the concept, guest posts are a way for other people to take advantage of your website’s search ranking as a way to divert traffic to other websites. There are benefits to doing this. The most straightforward one is SEO. Here, outward going links serves a heuristic web search engines look to for quality when weighing results. Guest posts can also have some additional gray hat goals, including audience segmenting and identification via things like UTM-driven campaigns. There are also straight-up cons such as linking to spyware, cryptominers and other forms of malware, and browser-based zero day exploits. Curiouser and curiouser I’ve always been curious about what exactly you get when you agree to a guest post offer. So, I dredged my spam folder and found one that sounded more direct and sincere. Here’s the cold call email pitch: Subject: Body: Keeping up with annual home and property maintenance is essential for preserving value and preventing costly repairs down the line. Whether it's inspecting your roof, cleaning gutters, or checking heating systems, regular upkeep can save homeowners time, money, and stress. I’m putting together an article that highlights key tasks for effective yearly maintenance, offering tips to help homeowners protect their biggest investment. I think this piece could really resonate with your audience! Let me know if you'd be interested in featuring it on your website. Thank you so much for your time today! Erin Reynolds P.S. If you’d like to propose an alternative topic, please do so. I would be happy to write on a topic that best suits your website. Don’t want to hear from me again? Please let me know. My reply reads: Hi Erin, This might be a weird one, but bear with me: My blog is a personal site, and its content is focused on web development and internet culture. I've always wanted to take someone up on this sort of offer, presented in the context of the article being something you get if you take the person reaching out on the offer to write a guest post. Is this something you'd be interested in? Erin took me up on my offer, and wrote about annual home and property maintenance. To her credit, she also did ask me if there was another subject I was interested in, but I figured we could stay the course of the original pitch. She was also prompt and communicative throughout the process, and delivered exactly what was promised. Here is the article in question: By Erin Reynolds, [diymama.net](https://diymama.net/) There's a quiet rhythm to living in a well-loved home. If you listen closely, your house speaks to you-whispers, mostly. The soft drip of a tired faucet, the groan of an HVAC unit that's been running too long, or the gentle scold of a clogged dryer vent. These aren't just annoyances. They re the language of upkeep, and whether you're in your first place or celebrating twenty years in the same four walls, learning to listen—and act—is everything. Annual maintenance isn't just about fixing what's broken. It's about stewardship, about being the kind of homeowner who doesn't wait for the ceiling to leak before checking the roof. There's something incredibly satisfying about having all your home maintenance documents in one tidy digital folder-no more rummaging through drawers for that appliance manual or the roof warranty. Digitizing receipts, inspection reports, and service invoices gives you a clear, accessible record of everything that's been done and when. Saving these as PDFs makes them universally readable and easy to share, whether you're selling your home or just need to reference them quickly. When you use a tool to create PDF files, you can convert virtually any document into a neat, portable format. You might not think much about gutters unless they're sagging or spilling over during a thunderstorm, but they play a quiet hero's role in protecting your home. Clean them out once a year —twice if you're under heavy tree cover—and you'll avoid water damage, foundation cracks, and even basement flooding. Take a Saturday with a sturdy ladder, some gloves, and a hose; it's oddly meditative work, like adult sandbox play. And if climbing rooftops isn't your thing, call in the pros-your future self will thank you during the next torrential downpour. That whoosh of warm or cool air we all take for granted? It comes at a price if neglected. Your heating and cooling system needs a checkup at least once a year, ideally before the seasons shift. A technician can clean the coils, swap the filter, and make sure it's all running like a symphony-not the death rattle of a dying compressor. Skipping this task means flirting with energy inefficiency and sudden breakdowns during a July heatwave or a January cold snap-and no one wants that call to the emergency repair guy at 2 a.m. Keep Your Appliances Running Like Clockwork Your appliances work hard so giving them a little yearly attention goes a long way. Cleaning refrigerator coils, checking for clogged dryer vents, and running cleaning cycles on dishwashers and washing machines helps extend their lifespan and keep things humming. But even with routine care, breakdowns happen, which is why investing in a home warranty can provide peace of mind when repairs crop up. Be sure to research home warranty appliance coverage that includes not only repair costs, but also removal of faulty units and protection against damage caused by previous poor installations. It's easy to forget the trees in your yard when they're not blooming or dropping leaves, but they're worth an annual walkaround. Look for branches that hang a little too close to power lines or seem precariously poised above your roof. Dead limbs are more than an eyesore-they're projectiles in a windstorm, liabilities when it comes to insurance, and threats to your peace of mind. Hiring an arborist to prune and assess health may not be the most glamorous expense, but it's a strategic one. This one's for all the window-ledge neglecters and bathroom corner deniers. Every year, old caulk shrinks and cracks, and when it does, water starts to creep in—under tubs, around sinks, behind tile. The same goes for gaps around doors and windows that let in drafts, bugs, and rising utility bills. Re-caulking is a humble chore that wields mighty results, and it's deeply satisfying to peel away the old and lay down a clean bead like you're frosting a cake. A tube of silicone sealant and an hour of your time buys you protection and a crisp finish. Sediment buildup is sneaky—it collects at the bottom of your water heater like sand in a jar, slowly choking its efficiency and shortening its life. Once a year, flush it out. It's not hard: a hose, a few steps, and maybe a YouTube video or two for moral support. You'll end up with cleaner water, faster heating, and a unit that isn't harboring the mineral equivalent of a brick in its belly. This is the kind of maintenance no one talks about at dinner parties but everyone should be doing. Roof problems rarely introduce themselves politely. They crash in during a storm or reveal themselves as creeping stains on the ceiling. But if you check your roof annually-scan for missing shingles, flashing that's come loose, or signs of moss and algae—you stand a better chance of catching issues while they're still small. If you're uneasy climbing up there, a good drone or a pair of binoculars can give you a decent read. Think of it like checking your teeth: do it regularly, and you'll avoid the root canal of roof repair. There's an entire category of small, often-overlooked chores that quietly hold your house together. Replacing smoke detector batteries, testing GFCI outlets, tightening loose deck boards, cleaning behind the refrigerator, checking for signs of mice in the attic. These aren't major jobs, but ignoring them year after year adds up like debt. Spend a weekend with a checklist and a good podcast and knock them out-it's as much about peace of mind as it is about safety. Being a homeowner isn't just about mortgages, paint colors, and patio furniture. It's about stewardship, a kind of quiet attentiveness to the place that holds your life. Annual maintenance doesn't come with applause or Instagram likes, but it keeps the scaffolding of your world solid and serene. When you walk into a home that's been cared for, you can feel it—the air is calmer, the floors don't squeak quite as loud, and the house seems to breathe easier, knowing someone's listening. Explore the world of inclusive design with Eric W. Bailey, where insightful articles, engaging talks, and innovative projects await to inspire your next digital creation! I mean, this is objectively solid advice! The appearance of trust What was nice to note here is none of the links contained any UTM parameters, and the sites linked out looked relatively on the up and up. It could be relevant and actionable results, or maybe some sort of coordinated quid-pro-quo personal or professional networking. That said: Be the villain. The deliverable was a Microsoft Word document attached to an email. On the surface this seems completely innocuous—a ton of people use it to write compared to Markdown. However, in the wrong hands it could definitely be a vector for bad things. Appearing legitimate is a good tactic to build a sense of trust and get me to open that file. From there, all sorts of terrible things could happen. To address this, I extracted the text via a non-Windows operating system installed on a Virtual Machine (VM). I also used a copy of LibreOffice to open the Word document. The idea was to take advantage of the VM’s sandboxing, as well as the less-sophisticated interoperability between the two word processing apps. This allowed for sanitized plain text extraction, without enabling anything else more nefarious. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar I also searched certain select phrases from the guest post to see if this content was repeated anywhere else, and didn’t find anything. I found other guest posts written by Erin on the web, but that’s the whole point, isn’t it? The internet is getting choked out by LLM-generated slop. Writing was already a tough job, and now it’s even gotten more thankless. It’s always important to keep in mind that there’s people behind the technology. I choose to believe that this is an article written in earnest by someone who cares about DIY home repair and wants to get the word out. So, to Erin: Here’s to your article! And to you, the reader: I hope you learned something new about taking care of the place you live in.
I’ve been seeing, and enjoying reading these posts as they pop up in my RSS reader. Dave Rupert tagged me into the chain, so here we go! Why did you start blogging in the first place? With the gift of hindsight, I guess I came up being blog-adjacent. Like Dave, I also had a background in publishing as a youth. I worked for my high school newspaper, and had a part- and then later full-time job at my local newspaper. I also published a weirdo, monkey cheese nerd zine. Its main claims to fame were both pissing off the principal and preventing me from getting dates. Zines are cool and embracing cringe will set you free. I read a ton of blogs, but I never initially thought I’d be be someone who published one. This was due to fear of dog-piling criticism, as well as not thinking I had anything meaningful to contribute. Then I got Kivikoskied. Reader, I strongly encourage you to get Kivikoskied yourself. The first post I put on my site was a reaction to the WebAIM Millions report. Reading through it generated enough feelings that I needed a place to put them in a constructive way. What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it? The reaction to the WebAIM Millions report was originally just a HTML page with a dream. That page seemed to resonate with people, so with that encouragement I had to build blogging infrastructure after the fact. That infrastructure wound up being Eleventy. I love Eleventy, and it’s only gotten better since that initial adoption. Zach Leatherman is a mensch, and I sing the praises of his project every chance I can get. I love blogging with Eleventy because it prioritizes speed, stability, and performance. Static web pages generated via Markdown are easy enough to wrangle, and it means I can spend the majority of my time focusing on writing, and not managing dependencies or database updates. Have you blogged on other platforms before? WordPress, Jekyll, thoughtbot’s homegrown CMS, and a few others. May you never have to work with Méthode. How do you write your posts? For example, in a local editing tool, or in a panel/dashboard that’s part of your blog? I’ve evaluated countless writing apps, but find myself keep coming back to Dropbox Paper. I’m highly distractible, and love to fiddle and tinker. Because of this, I find that Paper’s intentional, designed simplicity keeps me focused and on-task. It’s a shame that we live in the rot economy—where innovation is synonymous with value extraction—and there is apparently no longer enough incentive to maintain it. The post is then exported as a Markdown file from Paper, has its contents pasted into VS Code, cleaned up a little bit, metadata is added, merged into GitHub, and voilà! Blog post! There are more efficient ways to do this, but I find the ritual of it all soothing. When do you feel most inspired to write? I’m going to share a little secret with you: Nearly every technical blog post I write is a longform subtweet. By this, I mean I use writing as a way to channel a lot of my anxieties and frustrations into something constructive. I wish I wrote more silly posts, but it’s difficult to prioritize them given the state of things. Do you publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft? I’ll chip away at a draft for weeks, moving sections around and tweaking language until the entire thing feels cohesive. It’s less perfectionism and more wanting to be sure I’m communicating my thoughts as clearly as I can. There is also the inevitable flurry of edits that follow hitting publish. I’d bottle that feeling of sudden, panicked clarity if I could. What are you generally interested in writing about? The intersection of accessibility, usability, design systems, and the web platform. I’m also a sucker for CSS, tech culture, and a good metaphor. Who are you writing for? I write for people who are curious about the web, accessibility, and frontend technology at a medium-to-high level of familiarity. It has been so liberating to not have to explain the basics of accessibility and why it matters anymore. I also write for myself as augmented memory. This, along with services like Pinboard help with my memory. Blog posts are also conversations. It is also a disservice to both audiences if I’m not weaving a lot of contextually relevant voices into the work as outgoing links. What’s your favorite post on your blog? My favorite post on my website is my opus, Accessibility annotation kits only annotate. It took forever to put those thoughts into words. My favorite post on another website is Consider the Tomato. thoughtbot tolerated and encouraged a lot of my shenanigans, and I’m thankful for that. Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, a move to another platform, or adding a new feature? This website is in desperate need of a redesign, and the “updating in the open” banner is an albatross around my neck. Ironically, the time I should spend on that is spent writing blog posts. I’m now at the point where I fantasize about taking a month off of work to make said redesign happen. Grinning face with sweat emoji. Tag ‘em I’d tag everyone on my RSS reader, if I could. Until then: Adrian Roselli. I’m more or less contractually obligated to include a link to Adrian’s site any time I write about accessibility, as chances are he’s already covered it. Ben Myers. Another favorite accessibility author. I really enjoy his takes on disability and digital accessibility. Jan Maarten. Coworker and samebrain friend, whose longform pieces are always worth reading. Jim Nielsen. A Melanie Richards. Melanie is, in a word, prolific. I’m in awe of her digital gardening efforts. Miriam Suzanne. Less a triple threat and more a, uh, quintuple threat? Brilliance at every turn.
I debuted these principles in my axe-con 2025 talk, It is designed to break your heart: Cultivating a harm reduction mindset as an accessibility practitioner. They are adapted from The National Harm Reduction Coalition’s original eight principles. My adapted principles reflect philosophical and behavioral changes I’ve been cultivating. This is done to try and offset, and defend against systemic trauma and its resultant depression, burnout, and other negative experiences you can incur when doing digital accessibility work. If you have the time, I’d advise reading the original eight principles. I also recommend watching or reading the talk. I say this not in a self-promotional way, but instead that there is a lot of context that will be helpful in understanding: How these adapted principles came to be, and also The larger mindset shifts and practices that led to their creation. The principles There are eight principles in total. They are delivered in the context of how to approach evaluating a team’s efforts, and are: Accepting ableism and minimizing it Accepting, for better or worse, that ableism is a part of our world and choosing to work to minimize its harmful effects, rather than simply ignoring or condemning it. The original principle this is derived from is: “Accepts, for better or worse, that licit and illicit drug use is part of our world and chooses to work to minimize its harmful effects rather than simply ignore or condemn them.” Provisioning of resources is non-judgemental Calling for the non-judgemental provision of services and resources for people who create access barriers within the disciplines in which they work, in order to assist them in reducing harm. The original principle this is derived from is: “Calls for the non-judgmental, non-coercive provision of services and resources to people who use drugs and the communities in which they live in order to assist them in reducing attendant harm.” Do not minimize or ignore real harm Does not attempt to minimize or ignore the real and tragic harm and danger that can be created by inaccessible experiences. The original principle this is derived from is: “Does not attempt to minimize or ignore the real and tragic harm and danger that can be associated with illicit drug use.” Some barriers are worse than others Understands that how access barriers are created is a complex, multi-faceted phenomenon that encompasses a range of severities from life-endangering to annoying, and acknowledges that some barriers are clearly worse than others. The original principle this is derived from is: “Understands drug use as a complex, multi-faceted phenomenon that encompasses a continuum of behaviors from severe use to total abstinence, and acknowledges that some ways of using drugs are clearly safer than others.” Social inequalities affect vulnerability Recognizes that the realities of poverty, class, racism, social isolation, past trauma, sex-based discrimination, and other social inequalities affect both people’s vulnerability to, and capacity for effectively dealing with creating inaccessible experiences. The original principle this is derived from is: “Recognizes that the realities of poverty, class, racism, social isolation, past trauma, sex-based discrimination, and other social inequalities affect both people’s vulnerability to and capacity for effectively dealing with drug-related harm.” Improvement of quality is success Establishes quality of individual and team life and well-being—not necessarily cessation of all current workflows—as the criteria for successful interventions and policies. The original principle this is derived from is: “Establishes quality of individual and community life and well-being—not necessarily cessation of all drug use—as the criteria for successful interventions and policies.” Empowering people also helps their peers Affirms people who create access barriers themselves as the primary agents of reducing the harms of their efforts, and seeks to empower them to share information and support each other in creating and using remediation strategies that are effective for their daily workflows. The original principle this is derived from is: “Affirms people who use drugs themselves as the primary agents of reducing the harms of their drug use and seeks to empower people who use drugs to share information and support each other in strategies which meet their actual conditions of use.” Ensure that disabled people have a voice in change Ensures that people who are affected by access barriers, and those who have been affected by your organization’s access barriers, have a real voice in the creation of features and services designed to serve them. The original principle this is derived from is: “Ensures that people who use drugs and those with a history of drug use routinely have a real voice in the creation of programs and policies designed to serve them.” Reframe My talk digs deeper into into the parallels between the adapted and original principles, as well as the similarities between digital accessibility and harm reduction work. This is in the service of attempting to reframe our efforts. By this, I mean that we are miscategorized participants in imperfect, trauma-generating systems. The change in perspective I am advocating for also compels changes in behavior in order to not only survive, but also flourish as digital accessibility practitioners. The adapted principles are integral to making this effort successful.
I get asked about my opinion on overlay-adjacent accessibility products with enough frequency that I thought it could be helpful to write about it. There’s a category of third party products out there that are almost, but not quite an accessibility overlay. By this I mean that they seem a little less predatory, and a little more grounded in terms of the promises they make. Some of these products are widgets. Some are browser extensions. Some are apps. Some are an odd fourth thing. Sometimes it’s a case of a solutioneering disability dongle grift, sometimes its a case of good intentions executed in a less-than-optimal way, and sometimes it’s something legitimately helpful. Oftentimes it’s something that lies in the middle area of all of this. Many of them also have some sort of “AI” integration, which is the unfortunate upsell du jour we have to collectively endure for the time being. The rubric I use to evaluate these products remains very similar to how I scrutinize overlays. Hopefully it’s something that can be helpful for your own efforts. Should the product’s functionality be patented? I’m not very happy with the idea that the mechanism to operate something in an accessible way is inhibited by way of legal restriction. This artificially limits who can use it, which is in opposition to the overall mission of digital accessibility. Ideally the technology is the free bit, and the service that facilitates it is what generates the profit. Do I need to subscribe to use it? A subscription-based model is a great way to run a business, but you don’t need to pay a recurring fee to use an accessible website. The nature of the web’s technology means it can be operated via keyboard, voice control, and other assistive technology if constructed properly. Workarounds and community support also exist for some things where it’s not built well. Here I’d also like you to consider the disability tax, and how that factors into a rental model. It’s not great. Does the browser or operating system already have this functionality? A lot of the time this boils down to an issue of discovery, digital literacy, or identity. As touched on in the previous section, browsers and operating systems offer a lot to help you self-serve. Notable examples are reading mode, on-screen narration, color filters, interface and text zoom, and forced color inversion. Can it be used across multiple experiences, or just one website? Stability and predictability of operation and output are vital for technology like this. It’s why I am so bullish on utilizing existing browser and operating system features. Products built to “enhance” the accessibility of a single website or app can’t contribute towards this. Ironically, their presence may actually contribute friction towards someone’s existing method of using things. A tricky little twist here is products that target a single website are often advertised towards the website owner, and not the people who will be using said website. Can I use the keyboard to operate it? I’ve gotten in the habit of pressing Tab a few times when I first check out the product’s website and see if anything happens. It’s a quick and easy test to see if the company walks the walk in addition to talking the talk. Here, I regrettably encounter missing focus indicators and non-semantic interactive controls more often than not. I might also sometimes run the homepage through axe DevTools, to see if there are other egregious errors. I then try to use the product itself with a keyboard if a demo is offered. I am usually found wanting here. How reliable is the AI? There are two broad considerations here: How reliable is the output? How can bias affect someone’s interpretation of things? While I am a skeptic, I can also acknowledge that there are some good use cases for LLMs and related technology when it comes to disability. I think about reliability in terms of the output in terms of the “assistive” part of assistive technology. By this, I mean it actually helps you do what you need to get done. Here, I’d point to Salma Alam-Naylor’s experience with newer startups in this space versus established, community supported solutions. Then consider LLM-based image description products. Here we want to make sure the content is accurate and relevant. Remember that image descriptions are the mechanism that some people rely on to help them understand the world. If that description is not accurate, it impacts how they form an understanding of their environment. A step past that thought is the biases inherent in, and perpetuated by LLM-based technology. I recall Ben Myers’ thoughts on implicit, hegemonic normalization, as well as the sobering truth that this technology can exert influence over its users worldview at scale. Can the company be trusted with your data? A lot of assistive technology is purposely designed to not announce the fact that it is being used. This is to stave off things like discrimination or ineffective, separate-yet-equal “accessibility only” sites. There’s also the murky world of data brokerage, and if the company is selling off this information or not. AccessiBe comes to mind here, and not in a good way. Also consider if the product has access to everything you visit and interact with, and who has access to that information. As a companion concern, it is also worth considering the product’s data security practices—or lack thereof. Here, I would like to point out that startups tend to deprioritize this boring kind of infrastructure work in favor of feature creation. Not having any personal information present in a system is the best way to guard against its theft. Also know that there is no way to undo a data breach once it occurs. Leaked information stays leaked. Will the company last? Speaking of startups, know that more fail than succeed. Are you prepared for an outcome where the product you rely on is is no longer updated or supported because the company that made it went out of business? It could also be a case where the company still exists, but ceases to support the product you use. Here, know that sometimes these companies will actively squash attempts for community-based resurrection and support of the service because it represents potential liability. This concern is another reason why I’m bullish on operating system and browser functionality. They have a lot more resiliency and focus on the long view in this particular area. But also I’m not the arbiter of who can use what. In the spirit of “the best camera is the one you have on you:” if something works for your specific access needs, by all means use it.
A lieutenant colonel in the Soviet Air Defense Forces prevented the end of human civilization on September 26th, 1983. His name was Stanislav Petrov. Protocol dictated that the Soviet Union would retaliate against any nuclear strikes sent by the United States. This was a policy of mutually assured destruction, a doctrine that compels a horrifying logical conclusion. The second and third stage effects of this type of exchange would be even more catastrophic. Allies for each side would likely be pulled into the conflict. The resulting nuclear winter was projected to lead to 2 billion deaths due to starvation. This is to say nothing about those who would have been unfortunate enough to have survived. Petrov’s job was to monitor Oko, the computerized warning systems built to centralize Soviet satellite communications. Around midnight, he received a report that one of the satellites had detected the infrared signature of a single launch of a United States ICBM. While Petrov was deciding what to do about this report, the system detected four more incoming missile launches. He had minutes to make a choice about what to do. It is impossible to imagine the amount of pressure placed on him at this moment. Source: Stanislav Petrov, Soviet officer credited with averting nuclear war, dies at 77 by Schwartzreport. Petrov lived in a world of deterministic systems. The technologies that powered these warning systems have outputs that are guaranteed, provided the proper inputs are provided. However, deterministic does not mean infallible. The only reason you are alive and reading this is because Petrov understood that the systems he observed were capable of error. He was suspicious of what he was seeing reported, and chose not to escalate a retaliatory strike. There were two factors guiding his decision: A surprise attack would most likely have used hundreds of missiles, and not just five. The allegedly foolproof Oko system was new and prone to errors. An error in a deterministic system can still lead to expected outputs being generated. For the Oko system, infrared reflections of the sun shining off of the tops of clouds created a false positive that was interpreted as detection of a nuclear launch event. Source: US-K History by Kosmonavtika. The concept of erroneous truth is a deep thing to internalize, as computerized systems are presented as omniscient, indefective, and absolute. Petrov’s rewards for this action were reprimands, reassignment, and denial of promotion. This was likely for embarrassing his superiors by the politically inconvenient shedding of light on issues with the Oko system. A coerced early retirement caused a nervous breakdown, likely him having to grapple with the weight of his decision. It was only in the 1990s—after the fall of the Soviet Union—that his actions were discovered internationally and celebrated. Stanislav Petrov was given the recognition that he deserved, including being honored by the United Nations, awarded the Dresden Peace Prize, featured in a documentary, and being able to visit a Minuteman Missile silo in the United States. On January 31st, 2025, OpenAI struck a deal with the United States government to use its AI product for nuclear weapon security. It is unclear how this technology will be used, where, and to what extent. It is also unclear how OpenAI’s systems function, as they are black box technologies. What is known is that LLM-generated responses—the product OpenAI sells—are non-deterministic. Non-deterministic systems don’t have guaranteed outputs from their inputs. In addition, LLM-based technology hallucinates—it invents content with no self-knowledge that it is a falsehood. Non-deterministic systems that are computerized also have the perception as being authoritative, the same as their deterministic peers. It is not a question of how the output is generated, it is one of the output being perceived to come from a machine. These are terrifying things to know. Consider not only the systems this technology is being applied to, but also the thoughtless speed of their integration. Then consider how we’ve historically been conditioned and rewarded to interpret the output of these systems, and then how we perceive and treat skeptics. We don’t live in a purely deterministic world of technology anymore. Stanislav Petrov died on September 18th, 2017, before this change occurred. I would be incredibly curious to know his thoughts about our current reality, as well as the increasing abdication of human monitoring of automated systems in favor of notably biased, supposed “AI solutions.” In acknowledging Petrov’s skepticism in a time of mania and political instability, we acknowledge a quote from former U.S. Secretary of Defense William J. Perry’s memoir about the incident: [Oko’s false positives] illustrates the immense danger of placing our fate in the hands of automated systems that are susceptible to failure and human beings who are fallible.
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As search gets worse and “working code” gets cheaper, apps get easier to make from scratch than to find.
I’ve never published an essay quite like this. I’ve written about my life before, reams of stuff actually, because that’s how I process what I think, but never for public consumption. I’ve been pushing myself to write more lately because my co-authors and I have a whole fucking book to write between now and October. […]
Less known desktop UI frameworks Writing desktop software is hard. The UI technologies of Windows or MacOS are awful compared to web technology. What can trivially be done with HTML/CSS/JavaScript in few minutes can take hours using Windows’s win32 APIs or Mac’s Cocoa. That’s why the default technology for desktop apps, especially cross-platform, is Electron: a Chrome browser combined with Node runtime. The problem is that it’s bloaty: each app is a unique build of Chrome with a little bit of application code. Chrome is over 100MB so many apps ship less than 1MB of code in a 100M wrapper. People tried to address the problem of poor OS APIs by writing UI frameworks, often meant to be cross-platform. You’ve heard about QT, GTK, wxWindows. The problem with those is that they are also old, their APIs are not the greatest either and they are bloaty as well. There just doesn’t seem to be a good option. Writing your own framework seems impossible due to the size of task. But is it? I’ll show a couple of less-known UI frameworks written mostly be a single person, often done simply to enable writing an application. SWELL in WDL WDL is interesting. Justin Frankel, the guy who created Winamp, has a repository of C++ code he uses in different projects. After selling Winamp to AOL, a side quest of writing file sharing application, getting fired from AOL for writing file sharing application, he started a company building Reaper a digital audio workstation software for Windows. Winamp is a win32 API program and so is Reaper. At some point Justin decided to make a Mac version but by then he had a lot of code heavily using win32 APIs. So he did what anyone in his position would: he implemented win32 APIs for Mac OS and Linux and called it SWELL - Simple Windows Emulation Layer. Ok, actually no-one else would do it. It was an insane idea but it worked. It’s important to not over-state SWELL capabilities. It’s not Wine. You can’t take any win32 program and recompile for Mac with SWELL. Frankel is insanely pragmatic and so is his code. SWELL only implements the subset of APIs he uses in Reaper. At the same time Reaper is a big app so if SWELL works for Reaper, it could work for your app. WDL is open-source using permissive MIT license. Sublime Text For a few years Sublime Text was THE programmer’s editor. It was written by a single developer in C++ and he wrote a custom UI toolkit for it. Not open source but its existence shows it can be done. RAD Debugger RAD Debugger is an open-source Windows debugger for C/C++ apps written in C by mostly a single person. It implements a custom UI framework based on 3D renderer. The UI is integral part of the the app but the code is well structured so you probably can take just their UI / render code and use it in your own C / C++ app. Currently the app / UI is only for Windows but it’s designed to be cross-platform and they are working on porting the renderer to Mac OS / Linux. They use permissive MIT license and everything is written in C. Dear ImGUI Dear ImGui is a newer cross-platform, UI framework in C++. Open source, permissive MIT license. Written by mostly a single person. Ghostty Ghostty is a cross-platform terminal emulator and UI. It’s written in Zig by mostly a single person and uses it’s own low-level GPU renderer for the UI. You too can write your own UI framework At first the idea of writing your own UI framework seems impossibly daunting. What I’m hoping to show is that if you’re ambitious enough it’s possible to build cross platform desktop apps that are not just bloated 100MB Chrome wrappers around few kilobytes of custom code. I’m not saying it’s a simple thing, just that enough people did it that it’s possible. It shouldn’t be necessary but both Microsoft and Apple have tragically dropped the ball on providing decent, high-performance UI libraries for their OS. Microsoft even writes their own apps, like Teams, in web technologies. Thanks to open source you’re not at the staring line. You can just use Dear ImGUI or WDL’s SWELL. Or you can extract the UI code from RAD Debugger or Ghostty (if you write in Zig). Or you can look at how their implementation to speed up your own design and implementation.
I released Logic for Programmers exactly one year ago today. It feels weird to celebrate the anniversary of something that isn't 1.0 yet, but software projects have a proud tradition of celebrating a dozen anniversaries before 1.0. I wanted to share about what's changed in the past year and the work for the next six+ months. The Road to 0.1 I had been noodling on the idea of a logic book since the pandemic. The first time I wrote about it on the newsletter was in 2021! Then I said that it would be done by June and would be "under 50 pages". The idea was to cover logic as a "soft skill" that helped you think about things like requirements and stuff. That version sucked. If you want to see how much it sucked, I put it up on Patreon. Then I slept on the next draft for three years. Then in 2024 a lot of business fell through and I had a lot of free time, so with the help of Saul Pwanson I rewrote the book. This time I emphasized breadth over depth, trying to cover a lot more techniques. I also decided to self-publish it instead of pitching it to a publisher. Not going the traditional route would mean I would be responsible for paying for editing, advertising, graphic design etc, but I hoped that would be compensated by much higher royalties. It also meant I could release the book in early access and use early sales to fund further improvements. So I wrote up a draft in Sphinx, compiled it to LaTeX, and uploaded the PDF to leanpub. That was in June 2024. Since then I kept to a monthly cadence of updates, missing once in November (short-notice contract) and once last month (Systems Distributed). The book's now on v0.10. What's changed? A LOT v0.1 was very obviously an alpha, and I have made a lot of improvements since then. For one, the book no longer looks like a Sphinx manual. Compare! Also, the content is very, very different. v0.1 was 19,000 words, v.10 is 31,000.1 This comes from new chapters on TLA+, constraint/SMT solving, logic programming, and major expansions to the existing chapters. Originally, "Simplifying Conditionals" was 600 words. Six hundred words! It almost fit in two pages! The chapter is now 2600 words, now covering condition lifting, quantifier manipulation, helper predicates, and set optimizations. All the other chapters have either gotten similar facelifts or are scheduled to get facelifts. The last big change is the addition of book assets. Originally you had to manually copy over all of the code to try it out, which is a problem when there are samples in eight distinct languages! Now there are ready-to-go examples for each chapter, with instructions on how to set up each programming environment. This is also nice because it gives me breaks from writing to code instead. How did the book do? Leanpub's all-time visualizations are terrible, so I'll just give the summary: 1180 copies sold, $18,241 in royalties. That's a lot of money for something that isn't fully out yet! By comparison, Practical TLA+ has made me less than half of that, despite selling over 5x as many books. Self-publishing was the right choice! In that time I've paid about $400 for the book cover (worth it) and maybe $800 in Leanpub's advertising service (probably not worth it). Right now that doesn't come close to making back the time investment, but I think it can get there post-release. I believe there's a lot more potential customers via marketing. I think post-release 10k copies sold is within reach. Where is the book going? The main content work is rewrites: many of the chapters have not meaningfully changed since 1.0, so I am going through and rewriting them from scratch. So far four of the ten chapters have been rewritten. My (admittedly ambitious) goal is to rewrite three of them by the end of this month and another three by the end of next. I also want to do final passes on the rewritten chapters; as most of them have a few TODOs left lying around. (Also somehow in starting this newsletter and publishing it I realized that one of the chapters might be better split into two chapters, so there could well-be a tenth technique in v0.11 or v0.12!) After that, I will pass it to a copy editor while I work on improving the layout, making images, and indexing. I want to have something worthy of printing on a dead tree by 1.0. In terms of timelines, I am very roughly estimating something like this: Summer: final big changes and rewrites Early Autumn: graphic design and copy editing Late Autumn: proofing, figuring out printing stuff Winter: final ebook and initial print releases of 1.0. (If you know a service that helps get self-published books "past the finish line", I'd love to hear about it! Preferably something that works for a fee, not part of royalties.) This timeline may be disrupted by official client work, like a new TLA+ contract or a conference invitation. Needless to say, I am incredibly excited to complete this book and share the final version with you all. This is a book I wished for years ago, a book I wrote because nobody else would. It fills a critical gap in software educational material, and someday soon I'll be able to put a copy on my bookshelf. It's exhilarating and terrifying and above all, satisfying. It's also 150 pages vs 50 pages, but admittedly this is partially because I made the book smaller with a larger font. ↩
Translating user interface of SumatraPDF SumatraPDF is the best PDF/eBook/Comic Book viewer for Windows. It’s small, fast, full of features, free and open-source. It became popular enough that it made sense to translate the UI for non-English users. Currently we support 72 languages. This article describes how I designed and implemented a translation system in SumatraPDF, a native win32 C++ Windows application. Hard things about translating the UI There are 2 hard things about translating an application code for translation system (extracting strings to translate, translate strings from English to user’s language) translating them into many languages Extracting strings to translate from source code Currently there are 381 strings in SumatraPDF subject to translation. It’s important that the system requires the least amount of effort when adding new strings to translate. Every string that needs to be translated is marked in .cpp or .h file with one of two macros: _TRA("Rename") _TRN("Open") I have a script that extracts those strings from source files. Mine is written in Go but it could just as well be Python or JavaScript. It’s a simple regex job. _TR stands for “translation”. _TRA(s) expands into const char* trans::GetTranslation(const char* str) function which returns str translated to current UI language. We auto-detect language at startup based on Windows settings and allow the user to explicitly set UI language. For English we just return the original string. If a string to be translated is e.g. a part of const char* array[], we can’t use trans::GetTranslation(). For cases like that we have _TRN() which expands to English string. We have to write code to translate it at some point. Adding new strings is therefore as simple as wrapping them in _TRA() or _TRN() macros. Translating strings into many languages Now that we’ve extracted strings to be translated, we need to translate them into 72 languages. SumatraPDF is a free, open-source program. I don’t have a budget to hire translators. I don’t have a budget, period. The only option was to get help from SumatraPDF users. It was vital to make it very easy for users to send me translations. I didn’t want to ask them, for example, to download some translation software. Design and implementation of AppTranslator web app I couldn’t find a really simple software for crowd sourcing translations so I wrote my own: https://github.com/kjk/apptranslator You can see it in action: https://www.apptranslator.org/app/SumatraPDF I designed it to be generic but I don’t think anyone else is using it. AppTranslator is simple. Per https://tools.arslexis.io/wc/: 4k lines of Go server code 451 lines of html code a single dependency: bootstrap CSS framework (the project is old) It’s simple because I don’t want to spend a lot of time writing translation software. It’s just a side project in service of the goal of translating SumatraPDF. Login is exclusively via GitHub. It doesn’t even use a database. Like in Redis, changes are stored as a series of operations in an append-only log. We keep the whole state in memory and re-create it from the log at startup. Main operation is translate a string from English to language X represented as [kOpTranslation, english string, language, translation, user who provided translation]. When user provides a translation in the web UI, we send an API call to the server which appends the translation operation to the log. Simple and reliable. Because the code is written in Go, it’s very fast and memory efficient. When running it uses mere megabytes of RAM. It can comfortably run on the smallest 256 MB VPS server. I backup the log to S3 so if the server ever fails, I can re-install the program on a new server and re-download the translations from S3. I provide RSS feed for each language so that people who provide translations can monitor for new strings to be translated. Sending strings for translation and receiving translations So I have a web app for collecting translations and a script that extracts strings to be translated from source code. How do they connect? AppTranslator has an API for submitting the current set of strings to be translated in the simplest possible format: a line for each string (I ensure there are no newlines in the string itself by escaping them with \n) API is password protected because only I can submit the strings. The server compares the strings sent with the current set and records a difference in the log. It also sends a response with translations. Again the simplest possible format: AppTranslator: SumatraPDF 651b739d7fa110911f25563c933f42b1d37590f8 :%s annotation. Ctrl+click to edit. am:%s մեկնաբանություն: Ctrl+քլիք՝ խմբագրելու համար: ar:ملاحظة %s. اضغط Ctrl للتحرير. az:Qeyd %s. Düzəliş etmək üçün Ctrl+düyməyə basın. As you can see: a string to translate is on a line starting with : is followed by translations of that strings in the format: ${lang}: ${translation} An optimization: 651b739d7fa110911f25563c933f42b1d37590f8 is a hash of this response. If I submit this hash with my request and translations didn’t change on the server, the response is empty. Implementing C++ part of translation system So now I have a text file with translation downloaded from the server. How do I get a translation in my C++ code? As with everything in SumatraPDF, I try to do things in a simple and efficient way. The whole Translation.cpp is only 239 lines of code. The core of translation system is const char* trans::GetTranslation(const char* s); function. I embed the translations in exact the same format as received from AppTranslator in the executable as data file in resources. If the UI language is English, we do nothing. trans::GetTranslation() returns its argument. When we switch the language, we load the translations from resources and build an index: an array of English strings an array of corresponding translations Both arrays use my own StrVec class optimized for storing an array of strings. To find a translation we scan the first array to find an index of the string and return translation from the second array, at the same index. Linear scan seems like it would be slow but it isn’t. Resizing dialogs I have a few dialogs defined in SumatraPDF.rc file. The problem with dialogs is that position of UI elements is fixed. A translated string will almost certainly have a different size than the English string which will mess up fixed layout. Thankfully someone wrote DialogSizer that smartly resizes dialogs and solves this problem. The evolution of a solution No AppTranslator My initial implementation was simpler. I didn’t yet have AppTranslator so I stored the strings in a text file in repository in the same format as what I described above. People would download it, make changes using a text editor and send me the file via email which I would then checkin. It worked for a while but it became worse over time. More strings, more languages created more work for me to manually manage e-mail submissions. I decided to automate the process. Code generation My first implementation of C++ side used code generation instead of embedding the text file in resources. My Go script would generate C++ source code files with static const char* [] arrays. This worked well but I decided to improve it further by making the code use the text file with translations embedded in the app. The main motivation for the change was to open a possibility of downloading latest translations from the server to fix the problem of translations not being all ready when I build the release executable. I haven’t done that yet but it’s now easier to implement given that the format of strings embedded in the exe is the same as the one I can download from AppTranslator. Only utf-8 SumatraPDF started by using both WCHAR* Unicode strings and char* utf8 strings. For that reason the translation system had to support returning translation in both WCHAR* and char* version. Over time I refactored the code to use mostly utf8 and at some point I no longer needed to support WCHAR* version. That made the code even smaller and reduced memory usage. The experience I’m happy how things turned out. AppTranslator proved to be reliable and hassle free. It runs for many years now and collected 35440 string translations from users. I automated everything so that all I need to do is to periodically re-run the script that extracts strings from source code, uploads them to AppTranslator and downloads latest translations. One problem is that translations are not always ready in time for release so I make a release and then people start translating strings added since last release. I’ve considered downloading the latest translations from the server, in addition to embedding them in an executable at the time of building the app. Would I do the same today? While AppTranslator is reliable and doesn’t require on-going work, it would be better to not have to run a server at all. The world has changed since I started SumatraPDF. Namely: people are comfortable using GitHub and you can edit files directly in GitHub UI. It’s not a great experience but it works. One option would be to generate a translation text file for each language, in this format: :first untranslated string :second untranslated string :first translated string translation of first string :second translated string translation of second string Untranslated strings are listed at the top, to make it easier to find. A link would send a translator directly to edit this file in GitHub UI. When translator saves translations, it creates a PR for me to review and merge. The roads not taken But why did you re-invent everything? You should do X instead. All other X that I know about suck. Using per-language .rc resource files Traditional way of localizing / translating Window GUI apps is to store all strings and dialog definitions in an .rc file. Each language gets its own .rc file (or files) and the program picks the right resource based on a language. This doesn’t solve the 2 hard problems: having an easy way to add strings for translations having an easy way for users to provide translations XML horror show There was a dark time when the world was under the iron grip of XML fanaticism. Everything had to be an XML file even when it was the worst possible solution for the problem. XML doesn’t solve the 2 hard problems and a string storage format is an absolute nightmare for human editing. GNU gettext There’s a C library gettext that uses .po files. This is much saner solution than XML horror show. .po files are relatively simple text format. The code is already written. Warning: tooting my own horn. My format is better. It’s easier for people to edit, it’s easier to write code to parse it. This looks like many times more than 239 lines of code. Ok, gettext probably does a bit more than my code, but clearly nothing than I need. It also doesn’t solve the 2 hard problems. I would still have to write code to extract strings from source code and build a way to allow users to translate them easily.