Category: General

End of An Era

Posted on by Daniel 22 Comments on End of An Era

Today I gave a talk on the EU Web Accessibility Directive at WordCamp Turku. The slides to my talk are on SlideShare, but a blog post summarising the talk will be up here next week. Today was also my last day at Zeeland Family.

I joined H1 in 2012 as the third employee. It was my first “real” web development job working for a company, after almost 4 years of working as a freelancer. In 2016 our small team was acquired by Zeeland Family, and overnight we gained over 130 new colleagues. During these years I’ve had the priviledge of working with extremely talented, smart people and all-round fun and lovable human beings. Thank you, you know who you are.

Now though it’s time to move on, meet new people, face new challenges and learn new things. 

Lifehack Tip: Make Better Use of Your Time by Rearranging Icons

Posted on by Daniel

I recently discovered it’s pretty easy to trick myself into reading more books and wasting less time looking at my Twitter feed. A lot of my phone usage is just a habit and habits can be changed.

So here’s the magic 3-step program:

  1. Move social media apps into a folder or off the home screen of your phone. Or even better, remove them completely (which I have done to Facebook and Instagram a while ago)
  2. Replace with stuff you actually want to be doing. For me that means iBooks for various ebooks and Pocket for saved articles.
  3. Profit!

John Gruber on Annoying Sharing Bars

Posted on by Daniel

Over on Daring Fireball, John Gruber has some true words to say about those pesky floating sharing bars (or “dickbars” like he calls them) used by Medium and others.

A website should not fight the browser. Let the browser provide the chrome, and simply provide the content. Web developers know this is right — these dickbars are being rammed down their throats by SEO experts. The SEO folks are the same dopes who came up with the genius strategy of requiring 5-10 megabytes of privacy-intrusive CPU-intensive JavaScript on every page load that slows down websites. Now they come to their teams and say, “Our pages are too slow — we gotta move to AMP so our pages load fast.”

New Scientist goes independent

Posted on by Daniel

My main source of scientific news since childhood has gone independent. The future for the magazine looks bright I hope.

We are pleased to announce that New Scientist has been acquired by a company set up specifically to publish the magazine. This marks a return to independent ownership and operation for the first time in several decades.

I might even go back on my words in this tweet: