Engineering + Empathy
I’m a web developer and author, and I think great software comes from good engineering combined with empathy for the people using it. Clean, clever code doesn’t help much if the app still feels slow or hard to use. I’ve spent 25 years building for the web, on products used by hundreds of millions of people, and I write about what I’ve learned here and in three books.
— Den
I’ve worked with teams at Canva, Nike, Volvo Cars, AKQA, and more.
27 October 2026 · 18 min
If a design system’s components are slow to interact with, so are any apps built with them. I timed large dropdowns and checkbox lists in some popular design systems, worked out how to make the slow ones faster, and wrote tests that fail when they’re too slow.
Also in the Journal
29 July 2026 · 8 min
Some teams force-reload their single-page web apps (SPAs) every few hours just to clear the memory the app leaked. A frontend soak test finds the leak instead.
10 June 2026 · 8 min
Thousands of AI agent skills have flooded GitHub recently, most of them teaching models what they already know. The land grab is on.
14 May 2026 · 7 min
Safari and Firefox change how big sites render based on the domain. TikTok, Netflix, Instagram… even SeatGuru. Chrome doesn’t. Why is that?
Make your dynamic content accessible by default with the HTML tag that time forgot.
5 min
Pretext went viral for its beautiful canvas demos. But the community is showcasing the wrong feature.
6 min
We keep changing how we style the web, but the real problem isn’t CSS. It’s how we build around it.
3 min
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Monthly notes on engineering, writing, and the craft of building software. No fluff.
