TWIL September 18th 2025

Very short week this time since Monday was a public holiday and I'm taking Friday off to go on a long weekend trip to Nagano with the fiance.

• Even making a simple change can be complicated if it affects clients
  • Especially if those clients have distributed printed guides to using your service
• Even if it's frustrating, taking the time to make sure other teams understand how to use your features is worthwhile
  • People won't remember that they messed up by ignoring instructions, they'll remember the bad experience
• moment.js is 4MB, and dayjs offers the same API in 672kb.
  • admittedly you need plugins to replicate all the features
  • but having to manually add them makes you think 'do I really need a dependency for this one usecase?'
  • and can lead to you just writing something yourself with Intl

Links

Replace Your Animated GIFs with SVGs - John Reah

I knew you could animate SVGs, it never occured to me that you can just whack a <style> tag inside them to encapsulate the image & animation in a single file. This'll probably come in handy when I do the hero image for this site. You can even use media queries in the SVG <style> tag, though they might not work in all browsers (cough, Firefox).

Benjamin Button Reviews macOS - Rakhim Davletkali

A tongue-in-cheek but honestly pretty accurate retrospective of how MacOS' design has degraded over the years. The older screenshots look old, sure, but they also often look more usable. The list of features 'added' with each release seems compelling, until you remember what a leap forward M-series chips were and why 64-bit was a good idea. As a dev I can definitely understand the compulsive need to remove dead code (everything related to 32-bit) and constantly tinker (ever-increasing border-radii) but it's undoubtable a lot of 'steps forward' actually moved MacOS back.