Top picks — 2026 January
A month ago I published “Look Back at 2025” where I mentioned that the past year has been super stable and how grateful I was for it. This state didn’t last much longer. I lost my job, one of my best friends was diagnosed with a cancer and another good buddy of mine had a heart attack. Fuck off January, I’m glad you’re over. FUCK OFF!
I’m on the hunt for a new full-time position. If you or your company needs an experienced full stack developer who understands how the web works, knows modern tech, and communicates well, please reach out. To find out more about my past experience and skills, have a look at my CV page. Wish me luck, folks!
After this little pessimistic intro, let’s get into the meat of this monthly series. As always, a quick music recommendation for you to check out!
Album of the month
The “Mishaps Happening” by Quantic is as fresh today as it was on the release day 22 years ago. It will never stop surprising me how diverse Quantic’s productions are. A good portion of afro beats, funk, live instruments and electronic accents are here. It is one of those albums that you just play from the beginning and you don’t have any reason to skip a song. I was well chuffed when I picked this album up in the record store that recently opened in my neighbourhood.
Top picks
“A Website To End All Websites” by Henry Desroches
An essay about the current state of the broken web but mostly a great incentive to abandon some terrible tech and dedicate your energy to more decentralised and honest alternatives. A beautiful ode to the Indie Web. I appreciate the effort of creating a very custom design for this page. Not only is there custom design, but there is also a dedicated a-website-to-destroy-all-websites.com domain that proxies to this post.
21 Lessons From 14 Years at Google
Addy Osmani was always a huge inspiration for me. He helped me to fall in love with the web in the early days, and I learned a ton from his books, mainly “Learning JavaScript Design Patterns,” which was a huge help for my programming career. He has been at Google for as long as I can remember, and it is good to see his list of insights after working there for so many years. A bunch of invaluable advice for developers of any level.
It’s hard to justify Tahoe icons
Hats off to Nikita Prokopov for this detailed research of the recent macOS Tahoe icons situation. In short, it’s a mess! A lot of unintuitive choices, an absolute lack of consistency, hilarious repetitions. The unclear ambition to assign an icon to every freaking thing is silly to start with. Nikita’s posts on a regular basis hit the top of the HackerNews board, and this one was not an exception for a good reason. It is a good post.
Go 1.26 interactive tour
The upcoming release 1.26 of the Go programming language is going to be a huge one. Anton Zhiyanov published this interactive guide with a lot of examples and explanations of all the new features and upcoming changes to the language. This is very useful for new Gophers, as the release notes from the official channels are pretty dry and very technical. I massively appreciate Anton’s effort on this one.
The Astro Technology Company joins Cloudflare
Recent release notes of Astro 6 Beta, where they dedicated a whole section to Astro 6 on Cloudflare Workers gave me a hint that something is cooking, but I didn’t expect this bomb to drop so quickly. Yeah, my favourite framework for building websites and my favourite infrastructure platform just married, and I’m well excited about this. It may remind you of the times when Netlify bought Gatsby, but this feels different to me. I host a a local meetup in Northampton/UK, and everything related to it is powered by these two technologies, and not even once did I have an issue with this stack.
Introducing the HTML element
Not every day you read about new HTML elements. This is a result of a long-running experiment to provide better primitives on the web to improve the experience of obtaining user permission to access geolocation, camera and microphone access. It is a huge user experience improvement to the UX currently present on the web where prompts for permission pop up out of context, we deny it by default and then it is super confusing to recover from this state when we really need to grant this permission. The dedicated element for user media will follow this. The API seems to be super easy and there is a polyfill for impatient ones.
Explainer: Tree-sitter vs. LSP
As a Neovim user I have a good grasp of these two key technologies, but users of more conventional IDEs may benefit from understanding the basics of LSP and Treesitter. These two technologies make code editors so powerful, and knowing the capabilities of LSPs can speed your workflow up so much! Understanding how Treesitter works, its tree structure and how to perform basic queries enables so many great editing powers.
The "A Website To End All Websites" topic is something I have been thinking about a lot lately. Many times I feel like I am the only one left running and maintaining a hobby website (stevemasonexperience.info).
But visits have been steady over the past decade and small donations still keep coming. Everybody who donates writes something like "keep it going" or is grateful that this website exists outside of the usual social media madness.
I have come to accept that the original internet outside of social media has yet again become a niche for nerds. Sometimes I feel forgotten or ignored because the social media default is everywhere. But the occasional email full of praise or small donation keeps me and the website going. Not everything needs to have millions of followers or highly efficient monetization.