If you travel abroad for work, you may have some concerns about border crossings, based on recent news coverage. I know I do. I’m not a lawyer, but I’ve been researching quite a bit and asking for opinions and recommendations. Below is a summary of the advice I’ve been given. I’m providing it here in case it might be of use to you.

Next Tuesday I’m planning to take the day to do a little refresh on this site. The largest part of that effort will be moving this project off of Octopress to Jekyll. I’m not expecting it to be a huge challenge—Jekyll underpins Octopress anyway—but I’m sure there are some gotchas I should look out for. If you’ve made the leap yourself in the past and have any advice or recommended reading, please leave a comment or Web Mention.

I didn’t get to where I am in my life and career on my own.

In the work that we do on the Web (as well as in our daily lives), we’re often confronted, informed, or judged based on averages. I never really stopped to think about it, beyond being bugged by the fact that averages aren’t truly representative of reality. Then I listened to 99% Invisible’s episode “On Average”. It was incredibly enlightening and the stories shared in that episode provide sage wisdom that is very relevant to the work that we do.

Late last week, Josh Korr, a project manager at Viget, posted at length about what he sees as a fundamental flaw with the argument for progressive enhancement. In reading the post, it became clear to me that Josh really doesn’t have a good grasp on progressive enhancement or the reasons its proponents think it’s a good philosophy to follow. Despite claiming to be “an expert at spotting fuzzy rhetoric and teasing out what’s really being said”, Josh makes a lot of false assumptions and inferences. My response would not have fit in a comment, so here it is…

Ten years ago today:

Wow. It’s hard to believe it’s been that long. User #12,028 (back when they were still sequential).

I am a bit of a geek for proper punctuation: Em dashes… en dashes… curly quotes… ellipses… I love them all! Prior to 2007, I was a long-time Windows user and was a master of the Alt + numeric code system of entering special characters on that operating system.¹ For nearly a decade, however, I’ve been writing and developing on a Mac and I absolutely love how much easier it is to use special characters. When I started setting up my new Surface Book, I began searching for a way to bring Mac-like special character entry to Windows 10.

The Web Bloat Score Calculator has been making the rounds on Twitter and I wanted to share my immediate thoughts on it.

Last week, my colleague¹ Nolan Lawson wrote a lengthy post about his struggles with progressive enhancement. In it, he identified a key tension between the JavaScript community and the progressive enhancement community that has, frankly, existed since the term “progressive enhancement” was coined some 13 years ago. I wanted to take a few minutes to tuck into that tension and assure Nolan and other folks within the JS community that neither progressive enhancement nor the folks who advocate it (like me) is at odds with them or their work.

This is my son Oscar. In case you can’t see the picture, he looks nothing like me because he’s adopted. He’s also friggin’ adorable, but that’s not why I’m writing this. I’m writing this because my son is black and despite the fact that he will grow up in a family that has the means to provide him with a good education and far more opportunity than a lot of children in America—including me—the sheer fact that his skin is dark means he will grow up in a far different America than I did.