Josh Collinsworth

Frontend dev/designer/instructor. Currently frontend engineer @ Deno (previously: Shopify). Blogger at https://JoshCollinsworth.com. Maker of https://Quina.app and https://PlayHondo.com. Dad (jokes|bod). Svelte enthusiast: author of open-source #SvelteKit blog starter. Semi-notorious React critic. CSS lover. Lifelong Nintendo fan. Aspiring DEI accomplice and a11y advocate. KC area. he/him/his. Less prickly in person. Opinions my own (if anyone's at all). Header by Nolan Fabricius.

Public Key

npub1ldtggxfcwg9c8v34e730ss2frag40nqjdhywg8hz4084wryxygxqhdefvy

NIP-05 Address

collinsworth_at_hachyderm.io@mostr.pub

Profile Code

nprofile1qqs0k45yryu8yzurkg6ulghcg9y3752hesfxmj8yrm32hn6hpjrzyrqpzemhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumn0wd68ytnzv9hxgglvhjv

Publishing to

relay.nostr.band

Author Public Key

npub1ldtggxfcwg9c8v34e730ss2frag40nqjdhywg8hz4084wryxygxqhdefvy

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Last Notes

2024-11-06 22:29:43

I don't know what this is. I really don't. I just knew the only way I could cope was to write, and this was what came out.
https://joshcollinsworth.com/blog/childlike-and-childish

2024-11-04 04:05:41

"You used to be able to say [regressive thing] and nobody would say anything."
Yes, and I used to be able to shit my pants in public without anybody thinking much of it, but then I turned five and it turns out people expect you to actually act on what you've learned.
You don't get to keep doing something forever just because you did it once.

2024-10-22 03:00:18

I find it decidedly delightful that I can cast a vote for Trump to go to prison *and* for Musk to have wasted tens of millions of dollars, all with one simple ballot selection.

2024-10-01 13:55:42

Welp looks like Mullenweg read my post. 🙄😂
https://media.hachyderm.io/media_attachments/files/113/232/501/798/161/937/original/1bbb7723c881b932.png

2024-09-27 16:41:12

I decided to (hastily, probably clumsily, definitely verbosely) put down all of my thoughts on the Matt Mullenweg/WP Engine fiasco.
In short: I believe it's in the best interest of #wordpress that Matt's powers be severely curtailed, if not entirely removed.
https://joshcollinsworth.com/blog/fire-matt

2024-09-19 22:22:46

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@npub1xed…yg9w No I insist I am the worst

2024-09-19 22:16:38

That Midwestern thing where any time you receive anything resembling a compliment, all your energy goes into trying to humbly downplay it, so you realize later you were so busy being self-deprecating you completely forgot to reciprocate the kindness in any way at all.

2024-08-14 15:35:37

You know that AI "roast my GitHub profile" thing that was going around a week or so ago?
A lot of people posted theirs, because they thought the AI roast was funny.
So I tried it. And honestly, mine was just *mean.*
It wasn't funny; it was *cruel.* My feelings were legitimately hurt. I felt genuinely awful after reading it—even though literally nobody else saw it, and I *knew* it was just AI barf.
And all I can think about since then is: *this tool is going to help bullies do so much harm.*

2024-08-06 14:25:27

CSS opinion: don't hide overflow-x. You're just causing yourself more problems later. Fix the overflow.

2024-07-31 14:01:05

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@npub1xy8…k9gh Don't know about Slack, but you can actually do this with Discord servers from the server sidebar. Each server has its own notification settings, and you can set them to "nothing."

2024-07-17 14:56:53

My mind was blown by this
https://css-tip.com/screen-dimension/

2024-07-15 14:08:15

CSS is awesome and it just keeps getting more awesome.

2024-07-01 21:49:56

2014: How do I get robots to notice my website?
2024: How do make my website impossible for robots to survive intact?

2024-06-23 15:50:54

Responding to every recruiter on LinkedIn by asking if they have any Rick roles available

2024-06-11 16:18:18

It will never stop astounding me that, for all of our sophistication as a species and as a society, we still hold on to the primitive notion that a person's rights should be determined by *where they were born.*
We're somehow still stupid enough to think it matters where your mother was when you came out of her.
The idea is precisely as archaic as any prehistoric lizard-brained illiterate barbarism you can think of.
And yet...here we are, in the year 20-fucking-24, assigning rights on THAT.

2024-06-03 12:39:13

Anybody else notice it seems like *all* software has gotten *extra* buggy and unreliable over the last year or two?
I don't have an exact timeframe, but I'd say it loosely coincidences with when all the big tech companies started doing mass layoffs.
Weird.

2024-06-02 15:22:09

It occurs to me that LLMs ("AI," if you like) are used pretty much exclusively in areas where quality is difficult to define.
Art, service, design, communication, writing...arenas full of ambiguity, where it's hard to quantify success or failure.
It strikes me that LLMs are deployed mainly here, rather than in less equivocal places, at least in part because this masks the terminal flaw of LLMs:
They are designed for generation, not for accuracy.
They are not at all truthful or reliable.

2024-05-24 19:22:12

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@npub1vfq…57sa ...Just one? Is this a post about your admirable restraint?

2024-05-24 19:22:12

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@npub1vfq…57sa ...Just one? Is this a post about your admirable restraint?

2024-05-16 23:05:10

I know it's ludicrously privileged for somebody in tech like me to think the grass is greener on the other side, because that's just not the reality of the situation, economically or otherwise.
BUT
Today a guy came by our house to give us a quote on a new fence, and when it crossed my mind that he has no idea what's going on in tech and will absolutely never need to hop on a video call, or know a single damn thing about AI, I was just a little bit envious.

2024-05-13 18:38:37

Shout-out to that one random JavaScript developer, whose free confetti library bursts at the end of every user flow on every website nowadays.

2024-05-07 23:55:17

"React is, for the vast, vast majority of organisations…objectively worse than many of the alternatives.
React meta-frameworks…are never going to outperform dedicated server frameworks or tailored front-end code.
They make hiring easier but they also make it easier for management to fire your entire team and replace you with something cheaper.
So it doesn’t matter if it’s worse. …Tech management will sacrifice technological progress if it disempowers labour."
https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2024/react-electron-llms-labour-arbitrage/

2024-05-02 17:48:07

Somehow I am both the cat and the human in this comic.
https://media.hachyderm.io/media_attachments/files/112/372/740/444/613/774/original/2ad143205ca8994c.jpg

2024-04-29 12:30:59

The question of whether CSS is a programming language serves only one purpose: to demote those who write it.
There is no confusion that needs to be clarified, and no other purpose in asking, beyond the most trivial kind of pedantry.
The debate itself is an act of gatekeeping, whether intentional or not. Its only significant effect is to elevate some work over other work, despite their essentially identical nature.
The only meaningful function of the question is segregation. #css

2024-04-16 00:21:17

I think we're focused on the wrong thing when we look at what tech works for a company like Amazon or Facebook or Netflix.
We should be looking at what tech works when you *don't* have a small army of staff engineers optimizing it. I want to know what I can scale *without* paying someone a half million dollar salary to do it.
There should be more case studies on things that don't have a billion-dollar company propping them up, humming along quietly on a cheap-ass VPS somewhere.

2024-04-15 20:33:07

If your product is a docs generator, the one thing you should definitely have is good docs.

2024-04-03 02:59:32

Which one are you: the one who's too busy finishing projects to ever do them well, or the one who's too busy doing projects well to ever finish them?

2024-03-31 15:44:04

"Do your own research" is horrible advice, because almost nobody has any idea how to do actual, unbiased research.
Rule of thumb: if it involved a search algorithm (and just about everything on the Internet does), it wasn't research.

2024-03-29 16:42:34

I don't generally like critiquing app redesigns, but since Slack updated a couple months ago, I feel like I regularly have a little (1) notification number in the Activity tab, with no idea where the "new" message is.
After just going into a click frenzy until I finally found it about a half dozen times, I finally realized there's a very, VERY slight change in font weight and color.
Designers: if a difference in design indicates something meaningful, PLEASE make it obvious.

2024-03-07 16:00:59

New post, kind of weirdly personal-feeling one. I don't know if it'll land with you, but I hope it at least gives you something to consider.
https://joshcollinsworth.com/blog/devaluing-frontend

2024-03-05 15:28:52

One of the best things I've learned over the last few years is: you don't owe it to anyone to respond, rebut, or even read what they say. You can ignore it, you can block it, or you can delete it. You don't owe anyone anything just because they typed some stuff in a box and you saw it.

2024-02-28 21:08:17

Me: "When does useEffect fire?"
Google: "After every render!"
Me: "No, but initially."
Google "After paint!"
Me: "No, when does useEffect run the *first* time?"
Google: "After every render!"
Me: "What *event*? Is it after domcontentloaded? Will deferred scripts have run by the point useEffect runs?"
Google:
Me:
Google: "Look, I'm sorry, dude, nobody who uses React has any idea how browsers work. Here's twenty articles that don't answer your question. Care for a cookie?"

2024-02-28 13:54:18

Wow. A lot more collateral damage than I expected here. I kinda thought my humble little PWA games would be mostly unaffected, since they barely use app features, but it looks like I was wrong.
“So, what exactly did Apple break in the EU?” by @tomayac: https://blog.tomayac.com/2024/02/so-what-exactly-did-apple-break-in-the-eu.md/

2024-02-20 23:11:23

Serious question: do all programming languages get made fun of? Or is it only certain ones?
I'm realizing JavaScript, PHP, and CSS are pretty commonly the butt of programming humor. But to the best of my knowledge, I have literally never seen a joke or meme about Python, Ruby, Rust, Go, barely even Java.
Is this because I don't operate in those circles? Do I just see the languages I'm close to?
Or is it just fashionable to make fun of certain languages and not others?

2024-02-20 16:02:24

Although the Nintendo Switch remains popular, I contend a Nintendo If/Else works just as well in most cases.

2024-02-13 17:34:00

Finally hit publish on a draft I've been working on for a while now
"I worry our Copilot is leaving some passengers behind."
https://joshcollinsworth.com/blog/copilot

2024-02-08 22:56:31

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@npub1xed…yg9w Is *anything* on LinkedIn earnest?
I thought LinkedIn was just like, Christian Mingle but for people in sales.

2024-02-02 16:36:27

Dear UI designers: artwork cannot always go to the edge.
In the vast sea of possible devices, the edge will always be an unpredictable distance away, with possible variance of many thousands of pixels. It may be much closer or further than the mockups accounted for, and stretching artwork to that edge may not be practical or possible.
Have a plan for what it looks like when you don't have an edge available, and hand that plan to the developer implementing the design, please.

2024-02-01 14:29:51

"Won't it be amazing what tech we'll have in the future?"
It's amazing what tech we have NOW. It's just all unaffordable, inequitable, locked behind a never-ending subscription, built to fail, and/or data mining and advertising disguised as a product.
The tech isn't the problem, and the next round of advancements isn't going to free us.

2024-01-25 19:40:11

Just had a slight moment of panic when I noticed the word "butt" in production code and thought I'd forgotten to remove something I used for debugging.
Thanks for that, `stroke-linecap` SVG attribute.

2024-01-23 16:03:04

I like TypeScript, but I maintain that beyond a certain point, it makes you *feel* more productive than it actually *makes* you.
It *feels* like an amazing achievement when you finally, satisfyingly, invoke the proper incantation to banish those cursed squigglies in your editor...
...but you might have just spent hours "improving" the code, when what actually ships and runs is 0% different that it was before.
It's possible the only thing you meaningfully changed was your own feelings.

2023-12-30 14:20:47

Self-indulgent year in review post: https://joshcollinsworth.com/blog/enjoyed-in-2023

2023-12-24 14:05:53

Quite the damning piece on Tesla and its recklessly (probably criminally) irresponsible application of the "move fast and break things" ethos.
tl;dr: the company has known for ages that its cars have the kind of chronic defects that would get a company like Chevy or Toyota sued into oblivion (way more than just autopilot stuff; basic mechanical stuff). And it's often gotten away with blaming its users for those issues.
https://defector.com/youre-supposed-to-be-glad-your-tesla-is-a-brittle-heap-of-junk

2023-12-18 15:29:56

If I had been paying for Adobe Creative Cloud every month since graduating, I would have now spent over $5,000 on it.
And if I cancelled, I'd have nothing to show for it; no access to my work, no right or ability to open the programs any longer.
Instead, I bought the Affinity creative suite, for which I have spent under $400 total (I've bought it more than once), and which I own to use for as long as they'll run.
I don't always make good choices, but this one turned out rather nicely.

2023-12-11 15:53:53

Do we have any sense for when (if?) the View Transitions API for cross-page animations will be unflagged as experimental, and just a default part of the browser?
It's nice to have it to play around with now, behind a flag, but it also kinda sucks to know literally nobody but web devs are ever going to see those transitions (because normal users don't go edit their Chrome flags). #webDev #chrome #browsers #css

2023-12-06 17:56:32

One thing about being an adult I never saw coming:
There's almost *nothing* you don't have mixed feelings about.

2023-11-20 15:53:29

Staring at 32 lines of React and TypeScript code that literally just put a single link tag on the page, and wondering how the fuck we got here.

2023-11-13 02:38:03

The workable solution and the optimal solution never appear within a sleep of one another.

2023-11-02 00:22:41

LinkedIn is all the worst coworkers you've ever had cosplaying as people with valuable insights.

2023-09-26 16:37:31

New post:
https://joshcollinsworth.com/blog/tailwind-is-smart-steering

2023-08-22 20:58:20

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@npub1xed…yg9w Is the next option called a greener screener?

2023-07-29 23:06:53

Psst! Hey you! Yeah you, the frontend dev with all the JSX files! ...Wanna know a secret?
You know all those articles you read with titles like "what's the difference between useMemo and useCallback, and when would you not want to use them?"
Or maybe, "How not to shoot yourself in the foot with useEffect?"
The secret is: other frameworks don't have nearly so many of those. They just work. You don't have to micromanage them.
React is way more antiquated than you think it is.

2023-07-25 15:27:34

The only relatable thing about Elon Musk is that he's had a spare domain sitting around for years that he's determined to use for something even if it's at great personal expense.

2023-07-19 18:12:39

Do any other developers occasionally hide values that have personal meaning in their code, just to have fun tucking that little Easter egg away in the company codebase?
(e.g., I need random numbers for a test; I choose the month and day of my family's birthdays)

2023-05-26 22:13:32

Happy 11 years of being married to me to my wife.