I’ve really gotten into podcasts this summer. Normally, I find them difficult to focus my attention on, but some habits I’ve picked up recently have helped with this: I started running regularly, and I started playing Euro Truck Simulator 2. In fact, I liked the latter so much that I started a blog about it at eurotruckin.tumblr.com.

Just as French Fries are my delivery vehicles for ketchup, these new activities are my delivery vehicles for podcasts.

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Sometimes a person wanders by the #badges IRC channel and asks us how to issue a badge.

The response usually involves asking the user what kind of technical expertise they have; if they’re a programmer, we point them at the specification. If they’re not, well, we usually point them to a place like badg.us or credly.

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Many software projects enforce mandatory code reviews, even for their most senior developers. While I’ve mentioned before that code reviews can be very useful, I also think that mandatory code reviews among trusted members of a software team can have a number of downsides.

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Recently the Twitter Bootstrap documentation gave a name to something that I've been excited about for a pretty long time: Markup API.

Markup APIs give superpowers to HTML.

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Much has been said about the greatness of the Web, yet most websites don’t actually work like the Web does. And some experiences that aren’t even on the web can still embody its spirit better than the average site.

Here are three webbish characteristics that I want to see in every site I use, and which I try my best to implement in anything I build.

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Marco Zehe recently wrote a good, sobering blog post comparing the accessibility of Web apps to those of native ones.

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Recently my friend Jono wrote an excellent blog post entitled Everybody hates Firefox updates. I agree with pretty much everything he says.

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HTML is a very interesting machine language because, like human languages, most things that interpret it are very forgiving.

For instance, did you know that the following HTML is technically invalid?

<video>
  <source src="movie.mp4"></source>
</video>

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Presentations take a long time to make. Particularly when I’m just conceptualizing my presentation, it takes a lot of work to record myself talking, use a tool to sync it with the proper visuals, and then repeat the recording and syncing process as I iterate on the content. I recently made a simple tool called Quickpreso to make the process of “prototyping” a presentation quicker, and more like writing a simple HTML page. ... Read more

The Toronto and San Francisco Mozilla offices each feature very different coffee makers. The Toronto office has a Rancilio Epoca espresso machine. It has lots of knobs and switches, and one has to be taught how to use it. When one learns, the first few drinks they make are likely to taste very bad; a conscious effort must be made to learn from one’s mistakes and create better drinks. ... Read more