COBOL, short for Common Business-Oriented Language, is the most widely adopted computer language in history. Of the 300 billion lines of code that had been written by the year 2000, 80 percent of them were in COBOL. It's still in widespread use and supports a large number of government systems, such as motor vehicle records and unemployment insurance; on any given day, it can handle something on the order of 3 trillion dollars' worth of financial transactions.
One of the reasons I've been digging Astro so much is that it nicely straddles the SSG world and Node.js server worlds. When building your app, you can make logical decisions about what should be done at build time versus what should be done dynamically. It's like having Express and Eleventy rolled into one solution.
Modern web applications are no longer just "sites." They are long-lived, highly interactive systems that span multiple runtimes, global content delivery networks, edge caches, background workers, and increasingly complex data pipelines. They are expected to load instantly, remain responsive under poor network conditions, and degrade gracefully when something goes wrong.
Browser cache - Sometimes the browser is still loading the old CSS file. A hard refresh (Ctrl + F5) usually fixes it. Wrong file linked - Double-check if your HTML is actually linked to the correct CSS file. Specificity issues - Another CSS rule might be overriding your changes.
Google credits security researcher Shaheen Fazim with reporting the exploit to Google. The dude's LinkedIn says he's a professional bug hunter, and I'd say he deserves the highest possible bug bounty for finding something that a government agency is saying "in CSS in Google Chrome before 145.0.7632.75 allowed a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code inside a sandbox via a crafted HTML page."
I thought I'd package up my previous wrapper for Mastodon support, port over my BoxLang Bluesky module, and properly release the code on GitHub for folks who want it. Right now I'm using one repo for both Bluesky and Mastodon. Usually I'd separate them, but with the support being a grand total of one file each, I figured no one would mind getting the extra code if they only care about one.
I began by creating a soft link locally from my blog's repo of posts to the src/pages/posts of a new Astro site. My blog currently has 6742 posts (all high quality I assure you). Each one looks like so: --- layout: post title: "Creating Reddit Summaries with URL Context and Gemini" date: "2026-02-09T18:00:00" categories: ["development"] tags: ["python","generative ai"] banner_image: /images/banners/cat_on_papers2.jpg permalink: /2026/02/09/creating-reddit-summaries-with-gemini description: Using Gemini APIs to create a summary of a subreddit. --- Interesting content no one will probably read here...
Just learn to vibe code recently, last week I manage to make a small e-com website for pet shop. After adding tons of new product onto website, I notice my vibe agent been shovel out more error. Whenever I fix one things, my vibe gave out like 3 new bugs. I feel exhausted have to manually checking everything and test this check out button working or not.
Using AI to help download photos so we can consolidate all our images into one place. Over the years, [Audrey](https://audrey.feldroy.com) and I have accumulated photos across a variety of services. Flickr, SmugMug, and others all have chunks of our memories sitting on their servers. Some of these services we haven't touched in years, others we pay for but rarely use. It was time to bring everything home.
Speed is critical to the way users interact with websites. Google research shows that bounce rate increases dramatically the longer a site takes to load on mobile. Those that have a 3-second delay risk an increase of 32%, while those that take up to 10 seconds can expect to see it increase by 123%. When we were hired by investment firm Aston Darby to help with their digital marketing, the slowness of their site was one of the first issues we identified. When we first started with them, the site took around seven seconds to load. By the time we'd implemented our optimisations, that figure dropped to just three seconds.
I've always found traditional visual HTML editors frustrating because they force you into rigid grid systems. To solve this, I spent the last 1,800 hours building HtmlDrag ( https://htmldrag.com/). It's a "freeform" editor that feels more like Figma or Photoshop but outputs production-ready HTML. Key Features: True Drag-and-Drop: Move elements anywhere on the canvas without grid constraints. URL Import: Import any live website via URL and edit its layout visually. Clean Code Export: No proprietary tags, just clean HTML/CSS.
Dear JS ecosystem, I love you, but you have a dependency management problem when it comes to the Web, and the time has come for an intervention. No, this is not another rant about npm's security issues. Abstraction is the cornerstone of modern software engineering. Reusing logic and building higher-level solutions from lower-level building blocks is what makes all the technological wonders around us possible. Imagine if every time anyone wrote a calculator they also had to reinvent floating-point arithmetic and string encoding!
React tutorial: Get started with the React libraryDespite the endless churn of new frameworks, React remains the quintessential reactive engine. This updated guide walks you through the fundamentals of React development, including a This is Spinal Tap variant on the canonical counter application. Sometimes, your components just need to go to 11.
Software development used to be simpler, with fewer choices about which platforms and languages to learn. You were either a Java, .NET, or LAMP developer. You focused on AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud. Full-stack developers learned the intricacies of selected JavaScript frameworks, relational databases, and CI/CD tools. In the best of times, developers advanced their technology skills with their employer's funding and time to experiment. They attended conferences, took courses, and learned the low-code development platforms their employers invested in.
OpenAI has introduced ChatGPT Health, a dedicated section inside ChatGPT focused entirely on personal health. It's more than a themed chat - users can discuss symptoms, interpret lab results, track metrics over time, and get clear explanations of medical terms. A key feature is integration with health and fitness services. Users can connect Apple Health, MyFitnessPal, and similar apps so the AI can analyze sleep, activity, nutrition, and wellness trends.
As a contracting front-end developer and Design Systems consultant, I don't always get to work on new things. Sometimes I work within codebases. Sometimes alongside them. Sometimes these codebases are years and years old. When you dive into these projects, you're not just reading code, you're excavating years of decisions, technological limitations, and creative workarounds from days gone by. Over the last decade, I've called this Front-End Archaeology.
One of my oldest open-source projects - Bob - has celebrated 15 a couple of months ago. Bob is a suite of implementations of the Scheme programming language in Python, including an interpreter, a compiler and a VM. Back then I was doing some hacking on CPython internals and was very curious about how CPython-like bytecode VMs work; Bob was an experiment to find out, by implementing one from scratch for R5RS Scheme.
One thing I always do when I prompt a coding agent is to tell it to ask me any questions that it might have about what I've asked it to do. (I need to add this to my default system prompt...) And, holy mackerel, if it doesn't ask good questions. It almost always asks me things that I should have thought of myself.
The web is full of AI assistants that appear to understand application UIs, user data, and intent. In practice, however, most of these systems operate outside the application itself. When you try to build one from scratch, you quickly run into a core limitation: large language models have no native understanding of your React state, component hierarchy, or business logic.
When building or optimizing a website from scratch, performance can easily be overlooked until problems start showing up-slow load times, poor user experience, and lower search rankings. There are many ways to improve website speed, such as image optimization, code minification, caching, choosing better hosting, or using a CDN. For developers and site owners starting fresh, it's often unclear which step delivers the biggest impact
