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Category: Responses

Re: Affordances and Lean CSS

Stephen Margheim (fractaledmind) wrote Affordances: The Missing Layer in Frontend Architecture this month. This quick post is my reply to his great article.

I hear the objection already: “Isn’t this just… semantic CSS classes? We tried that.”

You’re right that we tried it. But “it didn’t work” deserves unpacking.

I was indeed objecting that in my mind. But I was not thinking, “it didn’t work.” I was thinking, “and it has kept working for decades. Obviously the utility-only workflow described is terrible; it’s why I refuse to choose Tailwind. How are affordances better than what’s worked for a decade?”

Re: More Fluent Method Signatures in Ruby

Shane Becker

Is this a hare brained /#Rails thought?

What if we named `type` with adverbs?

adjective (typical):
user.sync :full
user.sync :incremental

adverbs:
user.sync :fully
user.sync :incrementally

It reads more like a proper sentence to my eyes.
Instead of a Programmering Sentence™

December 14, 2025, 4:57 am 2 boosts 3 favorites

My Reply

I like this a lot. It makes me want to go even harder:

Re: Emily Bache on Ward Cunningham’s Fearless Refactoring

When I was a younger developer, I thought I knew how to make code better by, as the kids would say today, following vibes. Much later, a coworker gave me a copy of Martin Fowler’s Refactoring. I regret how long I put off reading it. Even later, I read Sandi Metz’s 99 Bottles of OOP and learned just how safe refactoring could be. Fearless refactoring is a skill that must be learned, and it is almost a superpower!