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
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October 2026
Top Words
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All posts (66)
I have a love-hate relationship with “the MVP car”, that classic illustration that shows us the RIGHT and WRONG way to build a product. To be fair, I don’t think its creator Henrik Kniberg would want it called “the MVP car” at all. According to his post the whole point of the illustration is to replace “MVP” with...
I’m coming up on 20 years of professional web development and I still don’t get it sometimes. I tend to measure myself or view work productivity through the lens of “How much code did I write?” and that does a great disservice to myself and what I do. There’s a lot more to the job: Checking email Scheduling calls...
Nilay Patel sat down for a Decoder interview with Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott to talk about NLWeb, an open source effort to allow an LLM-style indexing of small websites and provide local search. Instead of having large centralized search indexes like Google or Bing, the indexing shifts to sites having their own local...
We all know the current US President is one hell of an orator and often assures us that he has “the best words”: I went to an Ivy League school. I’m very highly educated. I know words. I have the best words. The man knows words. Says so right there. While some might view his non-sequitur ramblings as the nascent...
This week I decided to go nuclear on my bad YouTube habit. I installed a plugin called Tab Limiter that lets me limit youtube.com to one tab at a time. Clicking links that open in new tabs will now auto-close the tab. Why do this? I talked about it before but when I’m bored I open tabs. Adding friction here prevents...
I’ve been playing around with Midjourney for work and the one thing that makes Stable Diffusion cool and useful to me is the --sref flag to summon results in a specific visual style or “style reference” (e.g. Celestial Swirlscape is --sref 2566192150). They differ a bit from traditional or “artist” styles (e.g. “In...
In the middle of the night on the morning of July 4th, a storm parked over the Texas Hill Country and caused the Guadalupe river to rise more than 25 feet in two hours. 135 dead, including dozens of children from summer camps along the river. As a parent, this is the greatest tragedy you could imagine. My heart goes...
I was thinking this morning about how once you understand that your technology choices have security, performance, and accessibility considerations you become a much more boring developer. Acknowledging those obligations can sort of strips the fun out of programming, but we’re better for it. I decided to pull on...
I saw this summer’s Marvel movie in the theater on Sunday. A bit of a last minute idea so we ended up going to the “legacy” movie theater across the highway. Before I continue, It’s important to understand my local cinema dynamics. We have two theaters here in Austin: The Alamo Drafthouse and All Other Cinemas. The...
The cost of being online is getting too damn high and I’m tired of pretending it’s possible to fit these tasks into a normal life. That’s why I’d like to share a modest proposal for a new set of holidays to manage our digital lives: (Ahem.) A day to clear out your inboxes A day to reset your passwords and delete old...
After all our summer trips I buckled down last weekend and did some budgetting and I’ve realized I have to update the spreadsheet in my head. Here’s how much things cost in my outdated DaveBrain 2000 operating system: Fast food -$5/person = $20/family Snacks - $2.50/person = $10/family That –as my bank account is...
I hold a conspiracy theory the global economy died five years ago during Covid. It’s been on life support through stimulus checks and flash tech hype cycles ever since trying to keep the dormant heart beating. You sense it too. There’s no beating heart. There’s no thumping energy. No vein of excitement. Tech and...
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