Weeknotes 25:28

July 13, 2025

Week of July 6–12

A Dao of CSS

I took time on Thursday to watch A Dao of CSS, one of the talks I had missed from the CSS Day 2025 livestream. John Allsopp challenges us to find our way back to the essence of the Web that we lost during the age of apps. Buy access to the talks for $99. A great talk that I want to think about and implement in my own craft.

Sketchnote by Artem Pendiurin

Contributing an idea

After our chapel service on Tuesday, I had an idea. Our main speaker mentioned having a heavy heart about the flooding in Texas and the many young girls who were missing or lost their lives. I reached out to my team leader to suggest highlighting a collection of resources on the Revive Our Hearts site to help address the questions that many people were grappling with in response to the tragedy. I had created special sections on a ministry website I had worked with in the past and thought of that.

My team leader took the idea to the leadership. They decided not to do anything on the site but it did spark the idea to address it in social media post. On Thursday, I saw one of the posts on Facebook. It gave me joy to know that I had played a small part in making that happen.

Social media post that linked to When Her Suffering Shakes Your Faith on Revive Our Hearts site

Things I wrote

• Things I would like to learn (Q3 2025) – I address three of these items by watching A Dao of CSS, working through lesson 1 of Bramus’ scroll driven animation course, and I completed the first lesson in Oddbird’s email-based course on anchor positioning.
• RWD on The Big Web Show 15 years ago – I remember knowing that this technique Ethan coined as “responsive web design” was going to change our industry.
• My first trip to Budapest, 35 years ago – I explored one of my favorite cities for the first time 35 years ago this week. I share some photos and stories from that day.

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“I am deeply concerned that this entire industry is built on sand. Large Language Models at the scale of ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Llama are unsustainable, and do not appear to have a path to profitability due to the compute-intensive nature of generative AI. Training them necessitates spending hundreds of millions — if not billions — of dollars, and requires such a large amount of training data that these companies have effectively stolen from millions of artists and writers and hoped they’d get away with it.”

The Subprime AI Crisis by Edward Zitron

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Articles I read

• What Bodysurfing Taught Me About Life Away From The Water (Joe Crawford)
• People who act like machines (Chris Ferdinandi)
• Pray Until You Feel Like It (Tim Challies)
• New York’s Medical Aid in Dying Act, and the Worth of Each Human Being (Randy Alcorn quoting an article by Dovie Eistner)
• New York’s euthanasia bill targets me (Dovie Eistner) – Worth the read
• Do You Even Personalize, Bro? (Jim Nielsen)
• How I Deploy This Site (Tyler Sticka)
• View Transition List Reordering (with a Kick Flip) (Chris Coyier, Frontend Masters Blog)
• Better Anchor Positioning with position-area (James Stuckey Weber on Oddbird)
• Who were the Anabaptists? (Christianity Today)
• The Solution for Church Decline is Not Mega Church (Paul O’Brien)
• The lesbian seagulls that weren’t (World Magazine)
• Computers Are a Feeling (Jim Nielsen)
• Tattoos as Confession: How one pastor engages a culture that speaks in ink (Ed Stych)
• Studio Notes #40 (Dan Cederholm)
• Fast, flexible, and powerful: Why we’re a Craft CMS agency (Engage Interactive)
• ‘I’m being paid to fix issues caused by AI’ (BBC)
• @property (HTML & CSS Tip of the Week, Kevin Powell) – I need to start using this.
• The Subprime AI Crisis (Edward Zitron) – Some things I have not considered about this industry.
• How Field Notes went from side project to cult notebook (Fast Company)
• Spreading Joy (Chris Ferdinandi) – Glad for Chris. Things are never all good or all bad. We all need this reminder from time to time.
• Keith Green: The Christian Singer Who Changed the Course of My Life (Angie Velasquez Thornton, The Gospel Coalition, Canada) – I read the biography the author refers to. Keith’s music is convicting. I enjoyed this reflection.

What I watched

The Stranger (YouTube)

• A Dao of CSS (CSS Day)
• NCIS (Netflix)
• Mad About You (Samsung Plus TV)

Books I am reading

• Everyday Gospel (Paul David Tripp) – Reading through the Bible this year with this devotional.
• Universal Principles of UX Design (Irene Pereyra) – I have not read it in a couple of weeks.
• The Basketball 100 (David Aldridge & John Hollinger)
• On Tyranny (Timothy Synder)
• All That Jesus Commanded (John Piper) – I started this on Saturday.
• Five Mere Christians (Jordan Raynor) – I finished this one.
• Keep Going (Austin Kleon)

What I listened to

Revive Our Hearts podcast – Are You a Proud Person or a Broken …, Fallen on the Rock, and Radical Repentance. The podcast is remembering a life-changing message that Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth gave 30 years ago at a Campus Crusade for Christ staff conference. I attended that conference and that message has had a significant impact on my life. I enjoyed getting to revisit this and think about the personal impact it has had on my Christian walk. I listened to all 3 episodes on my Sunday night walk.

Walking

• Sunday – 4.72 miles in 1 hour 32 minutes

What I played

• MLB The Show 20 (Twins) – I went 3-1 this week. My one loss was a heartbreaker that I lost in extra innings. In the bottom of the 10th, my leadoff batter doubled. I tried to bunt him over but failed. And then I failed to score. The Yankees scored in the top of the 11th and I could not answer.
• **NBA2K25 **(Nuggets) – I won a close one with the Nuggets and then played the AllStar game and won with the Western Allstars.