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)
Forgive me, Reader. It’s been five months since my last vibe check. That’s a lot of ground to cover and it’s not possible to get into everything that happened. Like in real life conversations, instead of telling you how I’m doing, I’ll tell you what I’ve been doing these past few months. A trip to Seattle An...
I have complex feelings about Generative AI but one area I find myself weirdly bullish on is small language models (SLMs) in the browser which are available in Chrome and Edge behind an experimental flag. I know, I know. I know. AI in the browser reeks of a product manager trying to hit a KPI to shoehorn AI into...
The use of AI is leading to burnout among its greatest advocates as they hit the limit of their meta-cognitive abilities: “I end each day exhausted—not from the work itself, but from the managing of the work. Six worktrees open, four half-written features, two ‘quick fixes’ that spawned rabbit holes, and a growing...
The number of screenshots of Claude conversations is going up in my life and it’s beginning to have an impact on my general mood. Most of the time it’s well-intended; coworkers working through a problem with a chatbot before bothering me or someone exploring unconventional ideas before bringing it to a broader...
When you make speed and “moving fast” the biggest priority on a project or in an organization, the first thing to breakdown is talking to each other. Talking takes time. Consensus is expensive and slow. In a pressurized environment there’s no time to schedule calls, get input from subject matter experts, or resolve...
We rolled out adaptive light-dark() support on our design system themes and it’s been a delightful upgrade. Creating light and dark variable sets isn’t difficult, but delivery has trade-offs. Most apps that do this probably ship both sets of token values in a single stylesheet. That’s fine until you have multiple...
It’s a secret to everyone! This post is for RSS subscribers only. Read more about RSS Club. I’ve heard the term “Ozempic face” for awhile. People have opinions about that one, but I tend to feel like we should be comfortable with bodies changing. There’s also “Ozempic butt” and there’s even “Ozempic penis”. I’ll let...
I’ve watched a billion hours of YouTube and I’ve noticed a common trend: Whether that’s a drawing, a video game, a song, a cake, or a whole-ass off-grid house; I’ve learned that it’s fun to watch people make something. Since the beginning of humanity, the act of slapping two rocks together to make an arrowhead or a...
The Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect of AI is a pretty well documented phenomenon: The Gell-Mann amnesia effect is a cognitive bias describing the tendency of individuals to critically assess media reports in a domain they are knowledgeable about, yet continue to trust reporting in other areas despite recognizing similar...
If I can make it smaller, I should. If I can make it dumber, I should. Smaller, dumber things have more applications, go more places, and require less maintenance.
I had a small, intrusive realization the other day that computers and the internet are probably bad for me. I mean that beyond the general advice to touch grass. From an ADHD and generalized anxiety perspective, computers and the internet have become an endless supply of poison pills for my brain; feeds full of...
Skills are the newest hype commodity in the world of agentic AI. Skills are text files that optionally get stapled onto the context window by the agent. You can have skills like “frontend design” or “design tokens” and if the LLM “thinks” it needs more context about that topic, it can import the contents of those...
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