Reading List

The most recent articles from a list of feeds I subscribe to.

Just rambling

Sometimes I feel like rambling out into the void at no one in particular.

I don’t have anything specific to ramble about yet.

Just rambling

Sometimes I feel like rambling out into the void at no one in particular.

I don’t have anything specific to ramble about yet.

Elise Hein: 'Fighting inter-component HTML bloat'

As I’m refactoring an existing design system, this article by Elise Hein came quit timely.

We consider HTML to be cheap, but wrapping divs in divs in divs comes with a cost that slowly creeps up.

Why avoid extra wrapper elements?

  1. Bloated html hurts performance
  2. Redundant elements can create problems with accessibility
  3. Redundant elements can break styling
  4. Deeply nested dom trees are annoying to work with

TinyPilot: Month 33

New here?

Hi, I’m Michael. I’m a software developer and the founder of TinyPilot, an independent computer hardware company. I started the company in 2020, and it now earns $60-80k/month in revenue and employs six other people.

Every month, I publish a retrospective like this one to share how things are going with my business and my professional life overall.

Highlights

  • I’ve started the process of transitioning TinyPilot’s fulfillment to a third-party vendor.
  • TinyPilot customers are less sensitive to price than I expected.
  • I invested a lot of resources into a trade-in for TinyPilot that I’m not sure paid off.

Goal grades

At the start of each month, I declare what I’d like to accomplish. Here’s how I did against those goals:

GitHub Copilot for Docs – putting the “fun” into RTFM

Here’s a quick video of me showing you the benefits of GitHub Copilot for docs: AI powered chat interfaces are a great and fun way to learn about new technologies. The problem is quality and relevance. Chat GPT for example doesn’t tell you the source of the information. Bing chat does at times pull from […]