NeuralSVG is an AI-powered tool that generates scalable, editable vector graphics, revolutionizing workflows for web designers and creatives. By combining deep learning with vector-based design, it enables precision, creativity, and seamless integration into popular design tools.
I wrote a post for Smashing Magazine that was published today about this thing that Chrome and Safari have called “Tight Mode” and how it impacts page performance. I’d never heard the term until DebugBear’s Matt Zeunert mentioned it in a passing conversation, but it’s a not-so-new deal and yet there’s precious little documentation about it anywhere.
So, Matt shared a couple of resources with me and I used those to put some notes together that wound up becoming the article that was published. In short:
Tight Mode discriminates resources, taking anything and everything marked as High and Medium priority. Everything else is constrained and left on the outside, looking in until the body is firmly attached to the document, signaling that blocking scripts have been executed. It’s at that point that resources marked with Low priority are allowed in the door during the second phase of loading.
The implications are huge, as it means resources are not treated equally at face value. And yet the way Chrome and Safari approach it is wildly different, meaning the implications are wildly different depending on which browser is being evaluated. Firefox doesn’t enforce it, so we’re effectively looking at three distinct flavors of how resources are fetched and rendered on the page.
It’s no wonder web performance is a hard discipline when we have these moving targets. Sure, it’s great that we now have a consistent set of metrics for evaluating, diagnosing, and discussing performance in the form of Core Web Vitals — but those metrics will never be consistent from browser to browser when the way resources are accessed and prioritized varies.
Tight Mode: Why Browsers Produce Different Performance Results originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.
Mark Zuckerberg’s pattern of shifting Meta’s policies to appease changing U.S. administrations and his decision to abandon biased fact-checking partnerships reveal a leader driven by corporate survival rather than public accountability. These actions highlight the urgent need for more transparent and impartial oversight of online discourse.
Spotify’s hidden Star Wars Easter egg turns the playbar into a glowing lightsaber when playing certain official Star Wars playlists. This playful feature delights fans by adding a touch of the Force to their listening experience.
Getty Images and Shutterstock are merging in a $3.7 billion deal, creating a powerhouse for visual content with expanded libraries, cutting-edge AI tools, and integrated solutions for creatives. This merger promises to streamline access to assets and innovate resources for designers.
The FTC has ordered accessiBe to pay $1 million for falsely claiming its AI-powered tool could make websites fully compliant with accessibility standards. This action is part of the FTC’s crackdown on deceptive AI marketing practices.
I never thought my family would be able to do this. My parents are of hardscrabble rural West Virginia and rural North Carolina origins. They barely managed to claw their way to the bottom of the middle class by the time they ended up in Virginia. Unfortunately, due to the demons passed on to them by their parents, my father was an alcoholic and my mother participated in the drinking. She ended up divorcing my father when I was 16 years old. It was only after the divorce that my parents were able to heal themselves, heal their only child, and stop the drinking, which was so destructive to our family. If the divorce hadn’t forced the issue, alcohol would have inevitably destroyed us all.
My parents may not have done everything right, but they both unconditionally loved me. They taught me how to fully, deeply receive love, and the profound joy of reflecting that love upon everyone around you.
I went on to attend public school in Chesterfield County, Virginia. In 1992 I graduated from the University of Virginia, founded by
We are at an unprecedented point in American history, and I’m concerned we may lose sight of the American Dream:
We must act now to keep the dream alive. Our family made eight $1 million donations to nonprofit groups working to support those most currently in need:
I encourage every American to contribute soon, however you can, to organizations you feel are effectively helping those most currently in need here in America.
We must also work toward deeper changes that will take decades to achieve. Over the next five years, my family pledges half our wealth towards long term efforts ensuring that all Americans continue to have access to the American Dream.
I never thought my family would be able to do this. My parents are of hardscrabble rural West Virginia and rural North Carolina origins. They barely managed to claw their way to the bottom of the middle class by the time they ended up in Virginia. Unfortunately, due to the demons passed on to them by their parents, my father was an alcoholic and my mother participated in the drinking. She ended up divorcing my father when I was 16 years old. It was only after the divorce that my parents were able to heal themselves, heal their only child, and stop the drinking, which was so destructive to our family. If the divorce hadn’t forced the issue, alcohol would have inevitably destroyed us all.
My parents may not have done everything right, but they both unconditionally loved me. They taught me how to fully, deeply receive love, and the profound joy of reflecting that love upon everyone around you.
I went on to attend public school in Chesterfield County, Virginia. In 1992 I graduated from the University of Virginia, founded by Thomas Jefferson.
During college, I worked at Safeway as a part-time cashier, earning the federal minimum wage, scraping together whatever money I could through government Pell grants, scholarships, and other part-time work to pay my college tuition. Even with lower in-state tuition, it was rocky. Sometimes I could barely manage tuition payments. And that was in 1992, when tuition was only $3,000 per year. It is now $23,000 per year. College tuition at a state school increased by 8 times over the last 30 years. These huge cost increases for healthcare, education, and housing are not compatible with the American Dream.
Programmers all over the world helped make an American Dream happen in 2008 when we built Stack Overflow, a Q&A website for programmers creating a shared Creative Commons knowledge base for the world. We did it democratically, because that’s the American way. We voted to rank questions and answers, and held elections for community moderators using ranked choice voting. We built a digital democracy – of the programmers, by the programmers, for the programmers. It worked.
With the guidance of my co-founder Joel Spolsky, I came to understand that the digital democracy of Stack Overflow was not enough. We must be brave enough to actively, openly share love with each other. That became the foundation for Discourse, a free, open source tool for constructive, empathetic community discussions that are also Creative Commons. We can disagree in those discussions because Discourse empowers communities to set boundaries the community agrees on, providing tools to democratically govern and strongly moderate by enforcing these boundaries. Digital democracy and empathy, for everyone.
In order for digital democracy to work, we need to see each other through our screens.
We often behave online in ways we never would in the real world because we cannot see the person on the other side of the screen. But as our world becomes more digital, we must extend our kindness through that screen.
I’ve always felt Stack Overflow and Discourse are projects for the public good that happen to be corporations. I probably couldn’t have accomplished this in any other country, and I was rewarded handsomely for a combination of hard work and good luck. That’s what the American Dream promises us.
We built it, and people came. I earned millions of dollars. I thought that was the final part of the American Dream. But it wasn’t.
I recently attended a theater performance of The Outsiders at my son’s public high school. All I really knew was the famous “stay gold” line from the 1983 movie adaptation. But as I sat there in the audience among my neighbors, watching the complete story acted out in front of me by these teenagers, I slowly realized what staying gold actually meant: sharing the American Dream.
In the printed program, the director wrote:
This play is a reminder that strength lies not just in overcoming hardships but in staying true to ourselves and lifting up those around us.
We hope you feel the raw emotions, sense the camaraderie, and connect with the enduring themes of resilience, empathy, and unity. Whether you’ve read this story recently, long ago, or not at all, I hope you are able to find inspiration in the strength and passion of youth. Thank you for being part of this journey with us.
I believe deeply in sharing The American Dream. It is the foundation of our country, the second paragraph in our Declaration of Independence, written by the founder of the public university I attended:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
But the American Dream is not always available to every American. Its meaning can be distorted. Jimi Hendrix captured this distortion so eloquently in his rendition of our national anthem.
We are still trying to live up to those ideals today. In November 2024, enough of us voted for people who interpret the dream in a way that I don’t understand.
34% of adults in America did not exercise their right to vote. Why? Is it voter suppression, gerrymandering causing indifference, or people who felt their vote didn’t matter? The 7.6% that are ineligible to vote are mostly adults living in America who have not managed to attain citizenship, or people convicted of a felony. Whatever the reasons, 42% of adults living in America had no say in the 2024 election. The vote failed to represent everyone.
I think many of the Americans who did vote are telling us they no longer believe our government is effectively keeping America fair for everyone. Our status as the world’s leading democracy is in question. We should make it easier for more eligible Americans to vote, such as making election day a national holiday, universal mail in voting, and adopting ranked choice voting so all votes carry more weight. We should also strengthen institutions keeping democracy fair for everyone, such as state and local election boards, as well as the Federal Election Commission.
It was only after I attained the dream that I was able to fully see how many Americans have so very little. This much wealth starts to unintentionally distance my family from other Americans. I no longer bother to look at how much items cost, because I don’t have to. We don’t have to think about all these things that are challenging or unreachable for so many others. The more wealth you attain, the more unmistakably clear it becomes how unequal life is for so many of us.
Even with the wealth I have, I can’t imagine what it would feel like to be a billionaire. It is, for lack of a better word, unamerican.
In 2012, the top 1% of Americans held 24% of our country’s wealth. By 2021, the top 1% of Americans held 30%. So many have so little, while a tiny few have massive, wildly disproportionate wealth, which keeps growing. Now the global top 1% hold nearly twice as much wealth as the rest of the world combined.
I grew up poor in America, inspired by the promise of the American Dream that I could better myself and my family by building things that mattered:
Work is service, not gain. The object of work is life, not income. The reward of production is plenty, not private fortune. We should measure the prosperity of a nation not by the number of millionaires, but by the absence of poverty, the prevalence of health, the efficiency of the public schools, and the number of people who can and do read worthwhile books.
Our version of capitalism delivered so much wealth to my family for my hard work in co-founding two successful companies. My partner and I gladly paid our full taxes, and we always planned to give most of our remaining wealth to charities when we pass, following the Warren Buffet Philanthropic Pledge:
More than 99% of my wealth will go to philanthropy during my lifetime or at death.
I admire Buffett, but even having only a tiny fraction of his $325 billion fortune, to me this pledge was incomplete. When would this wealth be transferred?
Last year he amended the pledge, giving all his wealth at death to a charitable trust run by his children, aged 71, 69, and 66, who do not make for natural charitable bedfellows. I am only holding back enough wealth for my children so they can afford college educations and buy a home. I am compelled to, because being a parent is the toughest job I’ve ever had, and I am concerned about their future.
November 5th raised the stakes. It is now time to allocate half the wealth I was so fortunate to be dealt within the next five years, not just for my own family, but for all my fellow Americans.
Our government seems to be slower and slower at delivering change due to the increased polarization of our two party system. The last meaningful constitutional amendment we’ve managed to pass in the last 60 years was the 26th amendment in 1971, lowering the voting age to 18 and giving more people a voice in our democracy.
Political polarization is at historically high levels and rising. In a two party system, this level of polarization is counterproductive and even dangerous. Do we all still believe in the same American Dream?
I’ve always loved the ideals behind the American Dream, though we continually struggle to live up to them. They are worth fighting for, even if it means making “good trouble”. We must come together and believe in our shared American Dream so deeply that we can improve our democracy… but which dream?
The American Dream contains the path of hate, and the path of love. Throughout our history, one hand is always fighting the other. Which path are we choosing?
Our family pledges half our wealth toward an American Dream founded on love.
Here are some starting points for longer term efforts:
We’ve already completed the eight $1 million donations listed above to help those most immediately in need. Within the next five years, half of our family wealth will support longer term efforts. There is no single solution, so let’s work together. I will gladly advise and empower others working towards the same goal.
Please join us in Sharing the American Dream:
Stay gold, America.
(I could not have done this without the support of my partner Betsy Burton and the rest of my family. I’d also like to thank Steve McConnell, whose writing inspired me to start this blog in 2004. So many people from all walks of life generously shared their feedback to improve this post. We wrote it together. Thank you all.)
I’ll set out my stall and let you know I am still an AI skeptic. Heck, I still wrap “AI” in quotes a lot of the time I talk about it. I am, however, skeptical of the present, rather than the future. I wouldn’t say I’m positive or even excited about where AI is going, but there’s an inevitability that in development circles, it will be further engrained in our work.
We joke in the industry that the suggestions that AI gives us are more often than not, terrible, but that will only improve in time. A good basis for that theory is how fast generative AI has improved with image and video generation. Sure, generated images still have that “shrink-wrapped” look about them, and generated images of people have extra… um… limbs, but consider how much generated AI images have improved, even in the last 12 months.
There’s also the case that VC money is seemingly exclusively being invested in AI, industry-wide. Pair that with a continuously turbulent tech recruitment situation, with endless major layoffs and even a skeptic like myself can see the writing on the wall with how our jobs as developers are going to be affected.
The biggest risk factor I can foresee is that if your sole responsibility is to write code, your job is almost certainly at risk. I don’t think this is an imminent risk in a lot of cases, but as generative AI improves its code output — just like it has for images and video — it’s only a matter of time before it becomes a redundancy risk for actual human developers.
Do I think this is right? Absolutely not. Do I think it’s time to panic? Not yet, but I do see a lot of value in evolving your skillset beyond writing code. I especially see the value in improving your soft skills.
A good way to think of soft skills is that they are life skills. Soft skills include:
I believe so much in soft skills that I call them core skills and for the rest of this article, I’ll refer to them as core skills, to underline their importance.
The path to becoming a truly great developer is down to more than just coding. It comes down to how you approach everything else, like communication, giving and receiving feedback, finding a pragmatic solution, planning — and even thinking like a web developer.
I’ve been working with CSS for over 15 years at this point and a lot has changed in its capabilities. What hasn’t changed though, is the core skills — often called “soft skills” — that are required to push you to the next level. I’ve spent a large chunk of those 15 years as a consultant, helping organizations — both global corporations and small startups — write better CSS. In almost every single case, an improvement of the organization’s core skills was the overarching difference.
The main reason for this is a lot of the time, the organizations I worked with coded themselves into a corner. They’d done that because they just plowed through — Jira ticket after Jira ticket — rather than step back and question, “is our approach actually working?” By focusing on their team’s core skills, we were often — and very quickly — able to identify problem areas and come up with pragmatic solutions that were almost never development solutions. These solutions were instead:
One thing AI cannot do — and (hopefully) never will be able to do — is be human. Core skills — especially communication skills — are very difficult for AI to recreate well because the way we communicate is uniquely human.
I’ve been doing this job a long time and something that’s certainly propelled my career is the fact I’ve always been versatile. Having a multifaceted skillset — like in my case, learning CSS and HTML to improve my design work — will only benefit you. It opens up other opportunities for you too, which is especially important with the way the tech industry currently is.
If you’re wondering how to get started on improving your core skills, I’ve got you. I produced a course called Complete CSS this year but it’s a slight rug-pull because it’s actually a core skills course that uses CSS as a context. You get to learn some iron-clad CSS skills alongside those core skills too, as a bonus. It’s definitely worth checking out if you are interested in developing your core skills, especially so if you receive a training budget from your employer.
The main message I want to get across is developing your core skills is as important — if not more important — than keeping up to date with the latest CSS or JavaScript thing. It might be uncomfortable for you to do that, but trust me, being able to stand yourself out over AI is only going to be a good thing, and improving your core skills is a sure-fire way to do exactly that.
The Importance of Investing in Soft Skills in the Age of AI originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.
Advanced UX goes beyond Nielsen’s principles, focusing on cognitive load, workflow continuity, and customization to empower expert users. These pro-level heuristics enhance efficiency and resilience in high-performance environments.
Product Hunt, once a hub for diverse and innovative products, has become oversaturated with repetitive AI tools, crowding out other types of creativity and frustrating users. To regain its appeal, the platform needs to balance its focus on AI with better curation and support for a wider range of product categories.
