Nick Williams

Nick Williams

@wicky.nillia.ms

The world, the web, and the wide bit in between Based in South Wales. Budding pianist. Full stack product engineer with a frontend focus. A11y, design systems, components, OSS. Building things on the internet since the 90s

1.4K followers162 following2.8K posts

View full thread
Nick Williams
@wicky.nillia.ms

Do games have the equivalent of design systems? I'm working on a word game now and trying to add "juice" and there's a lot to consider. Haptics (length, pattern), animation (easing curves, staggers) sounds (timbre, notes, motifs)

Nick Williams
@wicky.nillia.ms

Atproto enjoyers: if I wanted an online multiplayer game to use atproto in some way, what might it look like? The most obvious/basic idea is login with atproto/bsky. What else might I consider? Ideally if scores are stored (for a leader board or something) they are tamper proof

View full thread
Nick Williams
@wicky.nillia.ms

I'll never understand why people recommend Brave as a good browser choice for the privacy minded. It's a Chromium fork, an ad platform in disguise, has crypto nonsense built in, and a history of shady practices like MiTM your session to inject affiliate links Gotta admire their PR machine, I guess

Nick Williams
@wicky.nillia.ms

Next up: Silver Pines which was released today. It's supposedly a survival horror metroidvania mashup. Sounds intriguing. I love both genres

Nick Williams
@wicky.nillia.ms

This was an absolute joy to play. Great visuals, rewarding exploration, charming characters, fun boss fights

Nick Williams@wicky.nillia.ms

Next up, Well Dweller, the new game from one of my favourite devs who always makes banger metroidvanias

Nick Williams
@wicky.nillia.ms

When Nikola Tesla said "you may live to see man-made horrors beyond your comprehension" I'm pretty certain he had these in mind

Nick Williams
@wicky.nillia.ms

Just finished Shinobi: Art of Vengeance. Great game. Super smooth movement and combat. Mostly linear and level-based, but with some satisfying backtracking as you gain new skills.

Nick Williams reposted

weeder
@weeder.bsky.social

God, grant me the courage to change the things I can and incredible new powers to change the things I can't.

Nick Williams
@wicky.nillia.ms

This has to be one of the most diabolically bad interfaces I've ever seen lol. No qwerty, both cases and numbers all in a single line, and you can't hold the button to repeat up/down

Nick Williams
@wicky.nillia.ms

One of the few proposals for funding OSS that feels like it could actually work

Laurie Voss@seldo.com

I have been writing this post about the economics of open source, on and off, for 13 years. I wasn't expecting to end up at "Microsoft should send corporations a huge bill" but nothing else we've tried has worked. https://seldo.com/posts/nobody-pays-for-open-source-we-can-force-them-to/

seldo.comNobody pays for open source. We can force them to. | Seldo.comThirty years of voluntary funding schemes haven't paid open source maintainers because asking doesn't scale. The real money already flows — to JFrog, Docker, Sonatype — at the registry layer. The fix: registries charge companies for supply (they already do), then route a slice automatically to the maintainers who make that supply worth having.
Nick Williams
@wicky.nillia.ms

Called it

Lea Verou, PhD@lea.verou.me

🔥 New blog post! My post on two-state dark mode toggles sparked a lot of discussion around what the optimal dark mode toggle design is. But should you have a (persistent) dark mode toggle *at all*? I have since been convinced that for most websites, the answer is NO. lea.verou.me/blog/2026/da...

lea.verou.meThe best dark mode toggle is probably none • Lea VerouMy post on two-state dark mode toggles convinced many. But should you have a persistent dark mode toggle at all? I have since been convinced that for most websites, the answer is no.

Nick Williams reposted

Nick Williams
@wicky.nillia.ms

When the license grants you free use of the software without restriction: haha fuck yes! When the license provides the software as-is, without warranty of any kind: what the fuck, this fucking sucks!!

Nick Williams
@wicky.nillia.ms

🤯 Just encountered one of the wildest bugs of my career: A html page, containing a script tag, containing a "<!--" in a string, alongside a JS comment containing "<script>" It puts the html parser into a weird state which swallows all subsequent html into an unclosed comment

Nick Williams
@wicky.nillia.ms

This an excellent piece. Wonderfully written and full of compelling arguments. Too much critique is weak and reflexive. Which is precisely the opposite of what is needed. I highly recommend setting aside some time to read it

Alice I Cecile@alice-i-cecile.bsky.social

AI: virtually no subject provokes such vitriol in my communities. I can grant the haters many of its harms, but their solutions leave much to be desired. I fear for the future even as I wonder at the future we are living. And so, dear hater, I must write: shaping.systems/blog/ai-suck...

shaping.systemsAI sucks. Hating it is not enough.A jeremiad on uninvention and bitter hope
Nick Williams
@wicky.nillia.ms

I've always disliked that the default for CSS animations is to specify in terms of time (transition-duration) and distance (translateX/Y). Since duration is typically fixed (eg 100ms), element dimensions change speed of movement. Doubling element size means doubling speed