Dave Rupert
Dave Rupert
I'm Dave Rupert, I write web components at Microsoft and am co-host of ShopTalk, a podcast about front-end web design and development. Previously, I co-founded a startup called Luro and an agency called Paravel with two of my best friends. I'm married to the drummer of a mid-2000s indie rock band, I'm a dad to two wonderful kids, and I live in Austin, TX where I work out of my backyard office.
August 2026
September 2026
October 2026
Top Words
- vibe
- check
- contrast
- color
- before
- people
- many
- years
- five
- text
- twenty
- watt
All posts (66)
There’s a lot that’s not going well; politics, tech bubbles, the economy, and so on. I spend most of my day reading angry tweets and blog posts. There’s a lot to be upset about, so that’s understandable. But in the interest of fostering better discourse, I’d like to offer a challenge that I think the world...
I got a lot of ideas for side projects rattling around in the old tin can. As part of my “No new projects” initiative, I’m trying to jump on building prototypes so I can decide if I want to explore ideas more or call it quits. A handful of my ideas are riffs or twists on existing app categories: A tennis ranking...
It’s a secret to everyone! This post is for RSS subscribers only. Read more about RSS Club. It’s expected to freeze this evening in Austin and we may even see snow, which is exciting and novel for us Texans. But as we’ve learned in 2021 and 2023, cold snaps can lead to disaster. In those years the ice dealt untold...
You might have noticed that I did a big design refresh on my entire site… unless you’re on RSS I guess. I’ll talk about aspects in detail, but at a high level there’s been three big changes: A monospace font Named CSS grid lines Juicier multi-page view transitions But my most favorite part is that today (when you...
As I was playing around with contrast-color(), I got a wild idea that you could use contrast-color() to invert its return value by nesting it: contrast-color(contrast-color(var(--some-color)). When would this be useful? Uh… Good question. I couldn’t come up with an example right away but after a bit I found one...
In my first post on contrast-color() I demo’d using color-mix() to change a background-color on hover, but I will be honest… mixing black and white isn’t always what you want. It would be cool and helpful to coerce contrast-color() to return either 1 or -1 so that we could adjust lightness in a color function on...
One predictable pain point with contrast-color() is that it only returns black and white named colors. From a design systems perspective, that’s not ideal because you want your colors. You want your harmonious brand and the colors you and your team spent thousands of man hours in meetings deciding on. Those colors....
Firefox 146 added support for contrast-color() joining Safari 26 in the First Implementor’s Club. For those unfamiliar, contrast-color(<color>) is a new CSS function that will take a <color> as input and returns either white or black depending on which has the most contrast. The quintessential example is choosing a...
2025 was… a year. And I made it to the end of that year. If you’re reading this, I imagine you did too and let’s celebrate that. But also not one without loss; of loved ones, of health, of relationships, of jobs, of liberties, of pursuits of happiness. Let’s mourn those. My year was mundane by most accounts. I...
🎵 Christmas time is here. Happiness and cheer. Fun for all… that children call… their favorite time of year. School’s out. The work laptop’s closed. Now is a good time to recount the vibes. I wanted to get out this vibecheck before embarking on the annual recap that way it’s less moodier than years prior. Fixing my...
Two friends of mine (brothers, actually) got laid off from their job at a megachurch here in Austin. We met through a mutual friend that started attending their church. Our kids hang out on Roblox, so we’re connected through dadship and games. They oversaw a lot of the music and arts work that went into the weekly...
Try Grid Paper I’ve been getting into drawing dungeons on isomorphic grids. It’s fun but I was a little frustrated with the process of sourcing and printing out graph paper with an isomorphic grid on it. You have two bad options, basically: Download a low-res JPG you found on Google Image search where the grid sizes...
Page 3 of 6