Matthew Balaam

Fancy a FREE dance tonight in Brighton? Join us at The Rossi dice.fm/event/g5vd56...

A highly recommended course for all developers creating web pages.

Looking forward to playing at our yearly The Flex: Italoween party next week in Brighton for all you fans of italo disco, New Beat, EBM and much more 80s dance music. Join us on Friday from 9pm until 2am, fancy dress encouraged. www.instagram.com/p/DeKhTJ-x8HP/

Bethany wore a “Protect The Dolls” t-shirt during rehearsals. The BBC posted it on their socials then quietly deleted and reposted it without showing her from the front. On TV last night they actually blurred the message #Strictly

New working paper: the Norwegian wealth tax was a huge success. The "exodus" of wealthy people never happened (less than 100 individuals left). Tax revenue increased by 71.5%. No changes in business activity or investment. www.nber.org/papers/w35854

British people will walk past a Starbucks, Burger King, Costa Coffee, Taco Bell, Blank Street and not even notice. Then they'll see an independent shop called Al-Badr Supermarket and cry about how the UK is being taken over by foreigners.

never the wrong time for this classic

Had some road signs made to reflect the new average age of UK terror suspects under a Labour government

HERE IS A LOVELY STORY: a friend lost his wallet on his way home from work the other day. (that's not the lovely bit) 1/2

it is incredibly fucked up that the UK government and police consider it a much worse crime to wear a t-shirt or wave a placard with 'palestine action' on it than to block ports and attack lifeboats

This is as close to a cry for help that you'd see from me. I need work. I need money for shelter and food in the meantime. I've run out.

Remember: it could be someone you know.

Fifteen years ago I helped popularise the meta viewport width=device-width,initial-scale=1. Today I found out the second bit is no longer necessary. A retrospective. quirksmode.org/quirksblog/2...

Respected friends and acquaintances, initial-scale is dead! We are freed of its tyranny. You no longer need to include it in your HTML head. It is an obsolete part of your head's meta viewport declaration. The details: vale.rocks/micros/20260... #WebDev #HTML

AI Guy Asks AI To Help Him Read Difficult Books

paging through Adrian Frutiger's book Signs and Symbols (1978) and noticed he predicts these icons you now see variations of everywhere for save, load, share, external link, etc., explicitly calling out how bad they are

Absolutely unbelievable how solar power has taken off worldwide during the Hormuz oil crisis. You don't have to hand it to him, but Trump may have done more to finally kick off a global civilization of effete librul solar users than anyone else in the West

rip 😔

Glastonbury will return in 2027. Rod Liddle, won't

Michael McDonald FACT: he cannot sing the letter G

Another extremely dodgy new record store has popped up. Second one this week

Well I’ve spent the whole of #NorEng drawing the three English lions on a tote bag, time well spent even if we don’t win

The latest Special Treatment show is online to listen again: www.totallyradio.com/shows/specia...

lol Threads banned the new Infowars. Silenced for TRUTH. Everybody go yell at them.

And den hi go take dem to di bowling alley

Reform UK councillors have introduced a motion to rescind King's Lynn and West Norfolk's climate emergency declaration and deprioritise decarbonisation efforts The council were going to vote on it on Thursday But the meeting has been postponed due to extreme heat

Ever struggled to get heading tags right in includes/components? headingoffset could be the answer…

Has been a while since I wrote about agentic engineering, so this time around some learnings of maintaining Pi as a junior maintainer to @mariozechner.at lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/5/24/pi...

recently saw this TERRIBLE advice to “write more human”: - don't use “curly” quotes, use straight quotes ( " and ' ) - don't use en or em-dashes, use -- and --- - never use an ellipsis (…), use three dots (...) please for the love of god don't write worse because ai exists. good typography is cool!

"For 25 years, Google Search was built on a contract. The web provided the content – billions of pages, freely linked, freely crawled. In return, Google sent people back. The link was the unit of exchange. [...] That contract is now broken." @matthiasott.com matthiasott.com/notes/ad-inf...

Fancy a dance to darker sounds than our usual italo disco palette, come to The Rossi Bar in Brighton this Friday - 22nd May for EBM, dark disco, new beat and fisting anthems!

Happy to announce TSRX. Think of it as the spiritual successor to JSX. We extracted it from Ripple, and made it framework agnostic. It can compile to React, Ripple and Solid, other frameworks to come soon. tsrx.dev

Last week, a gentleman returned this rather dilapidated copy of this famous book to us after 50 years. He had found it in his attic! Presumably this means there is a pristine copy somewhere in our libraries....

The dream

Probably my favourite phone, expect for the under specced battery.

New work for GitHub: Monaspace. 🔤 A superfamily of 5 open-source typefaces for code. Full case study here: lettermatic.com/custom/monas...

blogged: Top ten Figma betrayals dbushell.com/2026/03/23/t...

Quite rare to see a chart that says quite so overtly that no one involved has the slightest clue what’s happening here

it used to be “here’s a thing I built that uses this framework and this database and this UI library” now it’s all “I’m running multiple agents on a thousand VMs bro” yes but what are you _making_ what are you _doing_ for the world what will your legacy be

Er, this is me right now. If anyone has any leads for frontend development roles either in Brighton or remote/hybrid I’m looking at the moment. Is everyone else finding the market super tough at the moment?

This is really well done.