@LucP

For my “Ditch your Framework” talk I’ve created the basic outline of a three-step design system that will specifically allow you to use modern CSS standards like CSS Grid to their fullest extend. It’s a simple way to bring progressive enhancement into practise.

Recently I came across this article by Sophie Shepherd on dealing with context switching. I’m a bit late to the game as she wrote this in June of last year, but I recognize a lot in her story. If you haven’t read it yet, please do. It’s one of my favorites from last year.

Illustration: Hawkins, Arthur, ca. 1940

So last week I tweeted this:

It’s been half a year since I started freelancing again. In that time I’ve been working on a few client projects ranging from pretty small (fixing an already build WordPress plugin) to pretty big (creating a full and custom webshop).

The last couple of weeks I’ve been working on a deployment tool for a client. It’s quite a doozy and -as far as I know- there isn’t anything out there like this (and I looked!). I wanted to talk about what it is, how it works and what I ran into.

It’s been a long time since I did a workshop outside of a conference-scope. So last week felt a bit new to me, as I participated in an Inclusive Design workshop given by Peter van Grieken.

Yesterday I came across an article shared by Katherine May on twitter. It was from a New Zealand news website which I would normally never read, but this article was different. The article mentioned that the language of the indigenous peoples of New Zealand (The Māori) was including new words for fairly recent disabilities. The big difference with other languages was that The Māori didn’t want to focus on the negative aspects of those disabilities; something that I really love.

Let me start with a harsh sounding statement and work my way back from there:

The past few days have been filled with a lot of friends, laughs, talks, ideas and yeah, a lot of beers as well. WordCamp Europe 2017 in Paris was a blast, but it’s not over for me until I blog about it (although I forgot to blog about WordCamp Europe 2014). So here goes… after last year it seems appropriate to, once again, start with a yawning selfie of me getting up way to early for the trip:

So as you might have read in a previous blog post, my son, Nero, needs some extra attention in the medical department. He has a form of autism (which form we’re not completely sure on) which is currently grinding his early development to a halt. He’s about 4,5 years old but doesn’t talk (not even words like daddy or mommy). And apart from the autism there’s another factor at play. I’d like to talk about that today since I get asked a lot of questions about this and…

Last week I watched a fantastic talk by Una Kravets about creating a CSS game. She hacked together a demo, live on stage, during CSS Conf EU. The thing that got me hooked on the talk was the first part: creating pixelart in CSS by (mis)using box-shadow.

The past few days you may have seen this image floating around the tweetosphere of Apple’s Planet of the Apps, where a developer is boasting about not seeing his kids and giving it his all.

Chris Lema had an interesting post this week on the power of networking, especially for product developers. Since i’ve recently annouced I will be quitting my former company Chef du Web in favor of a mix of freelancing (with an hours-a-week cap) and product development, the title sang to me like a siren. Also; knowing Chris, his blogs and his talks, I knew it was going to be a good one.

The last 4,5 years I’ve been working as the technical lead in a company that I co-founded; Chef du Web. It’s a digital agency with a strong focus on marketing-communication and WordPress. And after this time, where my responsibilities have constantly shifted between making sure everything works to working on our internal tools, I’m ready to say goodbye to it.

Today I finished reading “Je hebt wel iets te verbergen” - translated: You DO have something to hide. A dutch book about Privacy in the age of the Internet and the way big companies and governments deal with our data in a rapidly changing technological landscape.

So here we go; a new blog on a new domain. I’m trying to write more this year, so a personal blog felt like a proper solution. There is, however, a big difference in how I created this blog compared to my previous personal sites. It’s running on Jekyll instead of WordPress.

I’ve been an avid Mac user for over ten years now. I really loved OSX back in it’s Tiger & Leopard phase; it was so futuristic compared to what as already out there. Lately though, apple has been leaving the pro market behind a bit and have been focussing on the consumer market. Not too weird if you look at the sales of iPhones and iPads, but sadly I’m a pro-user and I want pro features. One simple thing that has been bugging me for years is the fact that the file-system gets moved more and…