Software systems engineer, founder of iNfernalSoft, ex-Apple. I build and test on iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, visionOS, Android, Windows and Linux, and write about what actually breaks. Musician. Cinephile and occasionally a film critic.
Every roadmap lists the same technologies in the same order. Fewer are honest about what to skip, what the job actually rewards, and how much the entry bar has moved.
Breakpoints were a workaround for a layout system that could not adapt on its own. CSS can now express most responsive behaviour directly, and the result needs far less code.
The business case for accessibility has been made a thousand times. What is harder to find is the implementation detail, so this skips the argument and goes to the code.
Front-end does not evolve in a straight line, and the confident predictions about its future have a poor record. What the misses have in common is more useful than any new forecast.
Mobile stopped being a special case a decade ago. The hard parts now are viewport units that lie, forms that fight the keyboard, and devices with CPUs unlike yours.
Most SEO advice aimed at developers is really content strategy in disguise. These are the parts that live in your code, starting with the rendering decision that nobody frames as an SEO decision.
Most front-end security advice is really server advice wearing a different hat. These practices live in the browser, where your code actually runs.
Most image optimisation advice stops at compression, which your build tool already handles. The decisions that actually move your LCP are elsewhere.
Most CSS architecture advice is a workaround for features the browser now ships natively. Here is what a large stylesheet should actually look like in 2026, built on cascade layers, container queries and scope.
Designing a Ghost theme is the easy part. The time goes into a handful of boundary problems where Ghost doesn't give you control, and none of them is documented.
A working Ghost and Cloudinary integration will happily send a 4K original to someone on a train and never mention it. No errors, no warnings, and the images look fine.
This is the fifth time I have started this blog. The previous four didn't die because I ran out of things to write, so this time I tested what actually killed them.