In the LLM era of SWE, development often moves at breakneck speeds at cost of quality, reliability and understanding. This post makes a case for learning and understanding difficult tasks and skills: to be the master- not the slave of our technologies. It reminds us to take joy in the learning process!

Styling selects is a huge annoyance. Making them look nice usually requires a weighty external JavaScript library and poorer accessibility. Thankfully, CSS now supports selectors for the picker and its contents! Now to wait for universal browser support....

Despite research showing Finnish dev firms being 20% slower vs Silicon Valley, their code lasts longer without rewrites. Burnout is also 60% lower. Focused dev time blocks, regular review and learning time, fixing root causes of problems and seasonal development cycles make for sustainable practice that I deeply admire!

This is an amazing postmortem on GitLab's 2023 database disaster. A really good example of what happens with multiple systems fail at once, and how careful you need to be when running commands on key infrastructure. Kevin Fang's videos provide a great resource for learning from others' mistakes!