Friends! The new year is upon us! This is Robin Rendle here, and you likely subscribed to this, my very infrequent personal newsletter, from my website (although you can unsubscribe at any time). But first up: a naval-gazing roundup of what happened on the blog this year. Then: oh, that’s it? Well, okay! Fine!
i.
In January I wrote about container queries, typography, and how all our dreams of responsive typesetting is now possible:
Container queries makes decades of typographic hacks irrelevant and so this kinda feels like the end of an era for me. I’m sure there are ten thousand other problems with CSS that I’m not aware of and a hundred amazing features coming in the near future but now my CSS bucket list is complete.
Chris Coyier mentioned that every container queries demo is a card which is definitely true. But also: typography, typography, typography.
ii.
At the end the month I made some notes on hypertext and what a blog should be:
I want my website to feel like the world in Bloodborne or Sekiro, where you’re thrown into this fully-fledged universe and have no idea what the hell is going on and you have to read the description of a boot in your inventory to see the world clearly. I fear losing that feeling, or letting my website become paved-over or civilized or any less wild than it once used to be.
I want my website to permanently feel like the wilderness.
Yes! I agree with me!
iii.
In early February I chatted with Marcin about Shift Happens on a livestream and perhaps the most exciting part was talking about all the artifacts that came out of the book; the spreadsheets, the photographs, and, of course, the enormous database packed to the rafters with typewriter ephemera.
I’d like to do more events like this! Talking about books in front of an audience is exciting but also very hard! It’s difficult to be charming on command, to be a good host, to guide the conversation without it just being a boring question-answer-question-answer. And there’s a few moments there where I goofed things up but this discussion is still one of the highlights of 2023.
iv.
In February I read a fantastic piece by Justin Duke about his “vibes-based development” of Buttondown, the service that powers this newsletter under the hood, and this sparked a rant from me about how I make decisions in my day job, too:
It comes down to this annoying, upsetting, stupid fact: the only way to build a great product is to use it every day, to stare at it, to hold it in your hands, to feel its lumps. The data and customers will lie to you but the product never will.
Reading this one back, I dislike the tone and the snarky I-know-best attitude on display here. But! This piece still captures my frustrations well.
v.
That same month I finished Edward Dolnick’s lovely book called The Writing of the Gods that looks into the race to decipher the hieroglyphics found on the Rosetta Stone. This book perhaps has my favorite sentence of the year:
The word snake consists of five signs, and three of them are snakes.
Dolnick’s book also marked the moment where I stopped reading fiction and became obsessed with pop history and non-fiction-written-more-like-a-novel. That led me to excellent podcasts like Empire, Behind the Bastards, and The Rest is History. So if you like real life adventures then I couldn’t possibly recommend these enough. They’re great!
vi.
In June I quit my job and made some notes about why. But reading through it now is pretty intense since I was struggling making that decision for months until it began to affect my health:
I stopped taking care of myself as the toxic, work-related daymares hijacked my attention whenever I was alone. Everywhere I went I was in a trance, forming arguments with people who only existed in Slack for me. The debates, the designs, the confrontation! Every time I closed my eyes I would start a stupid fight, until eventually a simple thing like an invite in my calendar became a tangible menace; a small needle, poking in the same sore spot as the last one.
Oof. Reading this back it’s easy to forget how bad things had become, how tangible the stress was over the summer.
vii.
In July, I started prepping for interviews after taking a month off. I jotted down some notes about what kind of gig I was looking for next:
With big companies there’s more stability but you and your team can get lost in the yearly re-org. There’s more politics. Decisions are so much harder to make. But then there’s this opportunity to build something enormous and slap your name on it. You get to unfurl the curtain and reveal how this enormous software factory works, and that’s always exciting. Big companies also open doors by connecting you with so many people. Then again, they also attract middle managers like a family of hungry bears to a river.
The anxiety here is palpable and I feel bad for the guy writing this. What I didn’t know back then was that it would take more than three months to find another gig — the economy, the layoffs, my bad interviews, etc. — that I couldn’t have predicted. I never wrote about this because of the shame and embarrassment of not being able to provide for my lil family but I did land on my feet eventually.
But, and I repeat: oof.
viii.
Back in August I wrote about a few polishing tweaks that I made to my blog but hit upon this bit right at the end that I think about often:
This is the way to build a personal site, I realize now; slowly, small-ly, iteratively.
This reshuffle was inspired by the NYC metro signs and Helvetica signage that looked something like this:
At some point I should archive all these designs like the way Simon Collison archived v4 of his website.
ix.
Later that month, I asked why are websites embarrassing?
I truly want every website to be worthy of our browsers.
But modern websites are not worthy. They’re slow, hard to navigate, and plagued with visual crap; pop-ups, bad typography, newsletter modals, and everything else imaginable. And that’s just the baseline. When I use a website on my phone I likely won’t trust it to show me the same information, I won’t trust interactions when I click buttons or fill in forms or even when I try to navigate elsewhere.
This piece holds up but I’m noticing a distinct pattern of moaning on my website that isn’t great. I think it’s relatively easy to garner attention as a writer by being a contrarian and I want to push back against those incentives in 2024. More jokes! More lightness!
x.
In September I blew up my website, redesigned everything, and then released v13. This is the version you see today where it’s visually inspired by Hypercard and old versions of macOS...
I still like it a lot! There’s perhaps ten million improvements to be made—visual polish, UX-things that still bug me—but it feels like this version will stick around for quite a while. I want to take another crack at making it even more fun next though and have some ideas for what’s next...
xi.
In October I started The Cascade, a newsletter about CSS and in the introductory blog post I described how “loving CSS in 2023 feels lonely.” The task was simple then: make CSS exciting, thrilling even, and level up my coding chops before they atrophy.
Perhaps the best series of posts was the work I did banging my head against the wall trying to understand web components. At first I didn’t understand why they even existed...
Well, I think my confusion was with the name “web components.” See, after reading up on them I don’t think we should see web components like the ones you might find in a huge monolithic React app: your Button or Table or Input components. Instead, I’ve started to come around and see Web Components as filling in the blanks of what we can do with hypertext: they’re really just small, reusable chunks of code that extends the language of HTML.
Jeremy Keith replied with the perfect term: HTML web components. That’s when things started to click for me and it helped contribute to the front-end community raving about web components for a few months and how they’re actually extremely neat if you don’t look too closely at the Shadow DOM.
But this feeling — of contributing back to a community and shaping it brick by tiny brick with my writing — is what I missed so much when I stopped writing for the CSS-Tricks newsletter.
Hopefully The Cascade can give me that feeling more often in the new year.
xii.
In November, a flurry of things: I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Manuel Moreale for People and Blogs where I talked a bit about the history behind my blog and how I think about money, too:
Income is a strange way to measure the success of a blog though. For example, I make $0 a year. There’s no ads or merch on my website. But then again my website has given me opportunities that even a huge paycheck never could. My blog has connected me with friends, future employers, and nifty freelance gigs. My blog has led to money in my pocket, eventually, through some weird roundabout way. But I fear that if I focused on the money then all those other things would disappear.
xii.
In November I also wrote about asking for help when it comes to mental health:
The doc prescribed an anti-depressant, low dosage, and warned me of the side affects but was very confident it would help. We’ll see. It’s going to be at least a good couple of months until I’ll be able to spot any changes. But what am I hoping for? Less anxiety. I want to be able to hold someone’s gaze. I want the paranoia to steady down a bit. I want to go to bed and read and read and read and then sleep and wake up without feeling like I’ve just fought a wildebeest.
Things are better now, I’m off the meds since they made me seasick and drunk-dazed which started to impact my work and life too much. But I’ve thankfully found other ways to cope.
xiii.
That same month I joined the amazing design team at Retool. You might have seen some of their essays floating around the web like Pipe Dreams by Glenn Fleishman or the history of visual basic by my boss Ryan Lucas.
Right now the work is real exciting and a distinct change from the kind of stuff I was working on for the last few years. There’s so many tough problems that I can’t wait to work on!
xiv.
Finally, in December, C and I got hitched. It was a beautiful ceremony and it couldn’t have been better, as I wrote a few weeks ago:
It was a Friday afternoon—bright and cold, with a cloudless blue sky—when our small group headed to San Francisco City Hall...
We’re real happy with how it all went and we haven’t yet planned a honeymoon or anything but that’s likely something to figure out in 2025.
Okay, so my conclusions from the year in words:
- I complain too much in a lot of these posts and play the contrarian card too frequently in my writing. Criticism is helpful sometimes and pushing back against bureaucracy or injustice is important but also take it easy, bud. This is a blog.
- I made no progress on the book. I let it sit for a few months and each time I walked passed the drafts that sit on my shelf I measured how I feel. Last week something clicked and I started to have feelings and thoughts and ideas about where to take it, so perhaps I have another crack at it in 2024? No pressure, but we’ll see.
- The intimate and maybe-too-personal posts are the ones that feel best, most like me and are far more interesting now to read than the tech-culture stuff that I sometimes let myself get looped into. I’ll do better.
That’s it! Thanks for reading! Go away! ✌️ Robin