When I pay using NFC I’m annoyed twice. First by Apple Pay, then again when my banking app catches up. Can’t they decide between themselves? I don’t need two reminders about the groceries I bought a minute ago. Maybe I can disable notifications for either one, but then I might miss real fraud alerts.

Notifications are a chore I could do without.

Restart required

Notifications are a core feature of needy programs. Every app wants to be the centre of attention. They can’t wait to tell you about their new features. Presumably in-app notifications are the new trend because OS level notifications are easily blocked.

Vivaldi ruined my browsing experience for a long time.

That annoying “toast” wasn’t dismissible. It crossed the line of death and looked suspicious. Eventually it was fixed by moving into the tab bar.

I recently returned to Sublime Text to avoid modern apps that were too needy. In response to my post, developers were keen to laud their command line supremacy. I don’t disagree but the CLI isn’t immune to notification nonsense. Every time I open Neovim I get stopped.

Guess what happens when I press enter? Nothing! How about telling me what the command is to update the damn plugin?! Dear devs, updates may be your life, they ain’t mine!

Noisy websites

The web platform demands that anything native apps can do, the web must copy. There are good arguments for this. The counterpoint is terrible implementation. Browser vendors have done a dismal job at designing the user experience around push notifications.

“This website wants to send you notifications, allow?”

Does this still pop up before a page has even loaded? I wouldn’t know. I blocked that years ago without thinking twice.

My advice, look for this:

— or this:

— and block wholesale without exception.

In all my years of building websites I’ve never had a single client request or even consider notifications. Not one project that scoped in such a requirement.

Apple held out for declarative web push in Safari citing their usual privacy theatre (lol). Apple aren’t fans of silent push with no visible UI. I reckon their actual trepidation is their unreliable cloud syncing infrastructure. When I tested it was 50/50 on whether a notification ever arrived via Apple.

Mozilla’s servers are rock solid. One rainy day I ran an experiment to send large data split across many hundred web push payloads. I was able to clock kilobytes per second. This is awful abuse of the API. Apple might be right about silent push…

Literal spam

Proton Mail was one of the few mobile app that I allowed notifications. My inbox is usually rather chill, except when Proton spam me themselves.

Alongside my public addresses I use [redacted]@ for important accounts. I configured a folder to send mobile notifications for this address only. It worked for years. Then one day the spam notifications began. Spam that had already been flagged and filtered into trash (sent to any address).

I reported this bug to Proton Support in May and was told:

If we have any relevant information to share with you, or if we have any questions, we will follow up on this support ticket.

I never heard back. Notifications remain disabled.

Today my phone is almost entirely notification free unless I get an SMS from family. Oh, and Apple pestering me about iOS 26 several times a week.

My iPhone will remain on iOS 18, thanks. Apple sure love their dark arts and deceptive patterns. There is no option to stop this constant nagging. If other apps tried it I bet Apple would delist them. This ain’t about security, I get iOS 18 updates.

Hot fires in your area

UK Government got trigger happy with their alert system.

As with all mobile alerts of this nature, we’re reminded that abuse victims are at risk. This one also led to fire departments across England and Wales having to remind people their neighbour’s barbecue is not an emergency.

As Robb Knight noted: “there is nothing actionable in the alert”. Unless you count “Search gov.uk”, so I did. The more information provided was:

Sent by the UK government at 7:01pm on Friday 14 August 2026

This alert was sent to England and Wales.

Surrounding areas might also have received the alert.

Emergency Alert - GOV.UK

Thanks, Government. That could have been an email.

Why don’t these alerts respect my volume setting? Scared me half to death! If they have to be all or nothing, reserve them for zombies or higher.

Can’t be trusted

And that’s the problem with notifications. There is rarely the granular control necessary to make them useful. Most senders cannot be trusted to used them responsibly. The temptation to abuse direct access to people is too much, especially for men with guns.

If I ever allow notifications to begin with I disable them indefinitely the first time an app cries wolf. Every app cries wolf eventually.

Life is so much better when I go seeking information at my own pace.

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Valley Fold is my new home for professional services… once I’ve finished the website. I’m not one for big splashy launches, I’ll probably just hit deploy and let people discover it.

Logo design

The brand and logo were designed by my very patient friend at Axia Create.

George and I worked on concepts for several names, all of which I pre-emptively bought domains for (…ouch). Following feedback from trusted peers a clear winner stood out. Valley Fold happened to be the only name we both independently scribbled down early.

For those unfamiliar, “valley fold” comes from origami, an art form that has partially defined my aesthetic since college days. (The website may have some spiel to explain.)

After the grueling task of my indecisiveness — we’ve been discussing this for a year — George is away on holiday. That leaves me guessing how he designed the logo.

Probably like this:

I’m joking, obviously. That’s nonsense. The logo fits on a square grid. It’s a custom logotype adapted from an existing font. We created a new “V” and “Y” and tightened the corners across all characters. The “L” were narrowed and kerning snaps neatly to the grid.

More importantly, I love it!

I’ve been secretly rocking the logo as a web button all month.

I had fun pixel aligning the logo at such a small size. The tail of the “Y” is offset to the left to avoid anti-aliasing. The web button side quest has delayed the actual website.

I’ll show more of the brand when version one of the website launches. I’m aiming for early September. I’d like to spend months designing the perfect site but client work takes precedence. Thankfully I’ve been busy. I have to get something online soon though. The nice thing about websites is that you can redesign them again and again.

Valley Fold is a big change but also a little one because my services remain the same. I’ve been making websites for coming on two decades now. Websites for real people! I plan to keep doing that for many years to come.

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I am finally at peace! Do you know how relaxing it is without the daily “update available” and “view release notes” ritual? There is nothing I dread more than release notes. Between VS Code and Zed, I must have glanced at a million lines of sloppy commit summaries. Can I remember seeing anything of value? Nothing comes to mind…

Modern software sucks. It’s built by self-proclaimed “engineers” who make their chat box addiction your problem and still use Twitter.

When I mentioned Sublime Text on the socials people went all nostalgic on me.

Sublime Text is still around. The last stable build was released May 2025. There are dev builds as recent as July this year. I don’t know who develops it and I don’t care. All I know is that I can place my text cursor and read the surrounding code without a bombardment of popovers, pop-unders, pop-left-and-rights, pop-inlines, pop-in-and-out-too-fast-to-sees.

It’s been a few weeks since I returned to Sublime Text. It does everything I need. There is not a single “feature” I’ve missed from VS Code or Zed. Many I’m glad to see the back of.

The perfect dev stack is a collection of software that each does one job and doesn’t suffer main character syndrome. I want to code, I’m not looking to make lifestyle choices. I don’t want a bloated everything app. Don’t get me started on the “unified toolchain” plague! Show me the latest VC-backed build tool and I’ll show you ten lines of PHP that does a better job.

If you’re fed up of the absolute state of things, Sublime Text still works.

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If you want to speak to me, send an email. My contact form is out of service indefinitely.

This is actually in lieu of moving my professional services to a yet to be announced limited company. But I can’t let opportunity for a dramatic blog post go to waste.

Also, I’ll probably skip the contact form on my company website. Is that a bad idea? I always got more spam via the form than the publicly visible address.

My contact form has been through a lot.

Previous entries in the saga:

• SMTP on the edge
• Email: the final form
• I shut the emails out
• I let the emails in
• Progressive dehancement
• PGP encrypted contact form

I quite enjoyed the week in September when I opened a port to a self-hosted SMTP server I coded in 100 lines of TypeScript. The final iteration of my form included true end-to-end encryption. Through trial and error heuristics, I successfully eliminated all spam. (How many false positives I rejected remains unknown…)

My privacy policy which was already simple is now entirely pointless.

Are contact forms just outdated in general? Everyone seems to embed a Calendly widget these days. That’s not my style. I like the tiny bit of additional friction required to send an email. If someone can’t be bothered their message probably wasn’t serious. I’m not looking to maximise meaningless engagement.

I look forward to moving business email to a separate domain. Biggest mistake I ever made was using @dbushell.com for personal and business. Nothing worse than seeing an “urgent” request only to find out on Monday it didn’t matter.

So long old contact form, it was fun!

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The final push was this Making Tax Digital thing from GOV.UK. It’s probably not complicated if I cared to look but I’m crawling back to FreeAgent anyway. My home-cooked accounting app served one whole tax year! I will have an accountant do everything now.

Another big reason to become Ltd is to face challenge and opportunity head on. A loud contingent of the web industry are giving themselves up to the borg. Mandated token servitude and knee-bending to grifters like Google is sending web dev back to the stone age.

I still care about making meaningful websites for real people. I have no desire to dump dead websites on the dead internet. I want to champion and preserve the knowledge and expertise being discarded at astonishing rates. This is not an “anti-AI” movement per se; I simply don’t compete with chat-box-driven development.

Trading under a limited company allows more opportunity to collaborate with other creative professionals. As a freelancer I’m hired personally. As a company I can offer the same services and assurances whilst expanding the team if specialists are needed. Who knows, maybe one day I’ll be in a position to hire full-time.

This does not mean I’m going back to LinkedIn. I deleted that account like ten years ago. Please don’t make me go back!

My income is modest. My freelance years have ranged from ~£20–60,000 annually. I work a four-day week with sensible hours and avoid overlapping projects. Working hard and working long hours are not the same thing. I expect my new business will remain shy of the VAT threshold but I’ll see what my accountant advises.

I’m not sure my rates have kept up with “inflation” and cost of living. According to the Bank of England inflation calculator:

What cost £1.00 in 2013 would cost £1.44 in June 2026.

Hmm, feels like I’m paying a lot more… probably the shrinkflation. One things for sure, the quality of my services will not shrink.

I’ve got a lovely new brand and website ready. That’s been in the works all year. Once the red tape is completed I can go live. August or September, maybe?

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When I redesigned my website earlier this year I removed dark mode. I never liked the colours, and the light switch toggle was so 2010’s.

Personally I prefer reading with a dark theme for long-form content. Dark is not my brand though and I don’t believe every website needs to support colour scheme preference automatically. A good browser has reader mode, I use that all the time.

An experiment

But what if I let my readers decide on a dark colour scheme?

Below is a colour picker doohickey that should let you experience dark mode (on this page only). I’m testing in production (for reasons) so if it’s broken come back in an hour, or update your browser. It uses the native colour input which sucks in every browser.

This is just an experiment so your colour choice will not persist. If you want to keep it, like and subscribe and @ me on the socials. Use your preferred hex code as a hashtag.

Here’s how my homepage looks with a dark blue scheme.

I reckon the duotone effect works much better than trying to invert my brand colours.

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This week was a side quest (soon to be main quest) to build my new company website. We’re talking proper business here so I can’t be messing about. I figured an off the shelf SSG would be most suitable.

I asked the socials, “11ty or Astro?” Both are popular but Astro had the edge. I gave Astro an early spin back in 2022 and found it slow. Maybe it’s good now?

The install

I ran pnpm create with minimum release age to avoid immediately getting pwned.

I selected Astro’s “Use minimal (empty) template” option and it generated both an AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md file — are you f — deep breaths, don’t fall for the rage bait.

I code in a modern editor so I installed the recommended Astro extension. At first I struggled with Zed recognising HTML.

I discovered a restart temporarily fixed the issue, but I guess I restarted one time too many because now the Astro LSP is completely broken.

No modern comforts for me then. At least I can look at HTML without the red squigglies.

I know what you’re going to say, “Dave bro, you’re inflicting this pain upon yourself! Just write HTML!” And I should. I just want native no-framework HTML includes, you know? Can you imagine the civilisation we’d live in if that could happen?

The docs are nice

I persevered and got my templates built with minimal fuss. I added a markdown collection and got the blog part blogging. It’s obvious that people use Astro to build real websites because all my “how do I” questions had an answer in the documentation.

I’ve been forced to deploy way too many “React spaces” in my templates because Astro’s whitespace treatment is a mystery. I don’t need many components so I haven’t gone deep on Astro vs JSX. My site has zero JavaScript on the front-end. I plan to keep it that way.

I’ll keep it around

Astro has got the job done, despite the developer experience being broken out of the box. I dread to think what graveyard of dotfiles is installed if I choose a non-minimal start. I can easily de-Astro my templates should I need to. Right now Astro is solving the right problems and the issues are but a nuisance.

Final conclusion: Astro is fine I guess. I’m not convinced Cloudflare’s acquisition is a good thing, considering their record for performative slop. I’ve lost my enthusiasm for DX and tooling to be honest. Even my own SSG experiments are collecting dust. I’d call the ecosystem a lost cause if I was being dramatic.

I just try to avoid the worst of it and care about the end product: shipping a damn fine website! Which I can’t do because I’ve got more businessing to business before this particular site sets sail. Maybe in a few months? It’s looking awesome on localhost though.

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At the risk of pissing on people’s chips I figured it’d be helpful to illustrate the three classes of AI user I’ve identified in the slopageddon. You might be thinking: “Hey, those personas are all negative!” — and you’re absolutely right!

Believe me, I’d love nothing more than to shut up about “AI”.

The thing is, not a week goes by without one of my peers crying out in abject despair. Until the grifters cease spitting in my face and threatening my career, please allow me to extend a middle finger their way.

I’m working on more positive plans that I hope to announce soon(-ish). Makes sense to be more proactive and spend energy where it matters. Not that this post didn’t! I enjoyed a few technical challenges artworking the page.

Images used with modifications:

Chalk Outline by Simon Child from Noun Project (CC BY 3.0)

Hand by Elisa Pintonello from Noun Project (CC BY 3.0)

Zombie by Hamstring from Noun Project (CC BY 3.0)

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I’m led to believe “Watch this space” is the latest propaganda piece from His Majesty’s Nanny State. I haven’t read past the title but according to gaming site Dexerto, YouTube lawyers read it and YouTube ain’t happy. Poor little YouTube.

The government is consulting on options, considering whether to make public service news easier to discover on sites like YouTube and TikTok, with greater prominence and with more visibility during periods of major public importance. It also seeks to discuss misinformation and online viewing habits.

YouTube urges creators to fight proposed UK algorithm changes - Matthew Benson, Dexerto

I glossed over the Dexerto article too. This whole thing is something about kids being hooked on Skibidi and not paying their racketeering license fee. Minecraft Let’s Plays will be spliced with a BBC impartiality report on what some fascist gammon thinks. Should the proposal become law, of course.

This is somewhat of a dilemma for a guy like me. If there’s one thing I hate more than a meddling GOV.UK, that might just be Big Tech. The thought of Google et al being ruffled warms my heart like a hot cup of tea on the summer solstice.

That was too many words on something I never read so I’ll get to the lede. I’m about to reveal the secret sauce that Big Tech has tried to suppress. The one true algorithm, which ironically might be their saviour.

SELECT p.* FROM posts p
JOIN follows f ON p.user_id = f.following_id
WHERE f.follower_id = ?
ORDER BY p.created_at DESC;

Only one parameter is required in the perfect algorithm: who I choose to follow.

I’m literally providing the exact data needed to curate my feed.

I know what defenders of the deceptive arts are thinking: but algorithms are proven to increase engagement! — I know, Sherlock. Do you enjoy your doomscrolling misery? Not every metric needs to be min-maxed at the expense of human health.

Modern apps sucks. Modern media sucks. Stick your “algorithm”.

^† It’s been decades since I studied SQL and database normalisation so please have mercy.

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I’m a front-end developer not a medical practitioner. If you’re bleeding IRL visit the hospital and stop googling medical issues!

The full-bleed layout — as described there by Josh Comeau — can be done with CSS grid (and subgrid). Sometimes you can’t grid the entire page.

That’s where Andy Bell’s utility class is useful.

.full-bleed {
  width: 100vw;
  margin-left: calc(50% - 50vw);
}

But it ain’t perfect. The issue is that viewport units don’t solve the classic scrollbar problem. If you’re on macOS or a fancy OS that has fancy scrollbars, test on Windows! 100vw can be wider than the viewport. Because why would browsers do anything sensible?

It’s hard to see in Andy’s CodePen but a few pixels can be cropped either side. Add something like a border or shadow and it’s easier to see.

.full-bleed {
  box-shadow: inset 0 0 0 10px yellow;
}

This is not always a problem but it can lead to subtle alignment issues. By the way, macOS has a scrollbar setting “Show scroll bars > Always” that’ll let you test the issue.

Andy solves this partially by hiding horizontal overflow on the <body> element.

body {
  overflow-x: hidden;
}

An alternative fix is to always reserve space for the classic scrollbar.

html {
  scrollbar-gutter: stable;
}

That can look weird if there is no vertical scroll necessary.

Modern solution

The “modern” approach is to use CSS containment. Turn the <body> element (or any 100% width child) into a container. Then replace the viewport units with container units.

body {
  container: body / inline-size;
  overflow-x: clip;
}

.full-bleed {
  inline-size: 100cqi;
  margin-inline-start: calc(50% - 50cqi);
}

Now hiding overflow is not strictly necessary. I prefer clip — see Overflow Clip guide by Ahmad Shadeed. I clip out of caution because I make dumb things. I also use logical properties and values to support right-to-left (RTL) text direction. Ahmad has an excellent RTL Styling 101 too.

But wait!

Using cqi units assumes body is the parent container of the .full-bleed element. What if we have nested containers? Check this out. I’ve forked Andy’s CodePen to add another .inside container that is not the full viewport width.

This alone would usually break the new .full-bleed class and ruin the fun.

But we can fix that!

@property --body-size {
  syntax: "<length> | <percentage>";
  inherits: true;
  initial-value: 100%;
}

body {
  container: body / inline-size;
}

.inside {
  --body-size: 100cqi;
  container: inside / inline-size;
}

.full-bleed {
  inline-size: var(--body-size);
  margin-inline-start: calc(50% - (0.5 * var(--body-size))); /* † */
}

What is that @property magic?

To be honest I struggle to wrap my smooth brain around this!

Let me try to explain it to myself. Without the at-rule the value of --body-size is calculated at the time of use, i.e. within .full-bleed and therefore relative to the inside container. By explicitly defining a @property the value is now calculated when it’s set within .inside. There 100cqi refers to the parent body container and .full-bleed inherits that value.

But what if you have more containers?

(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻

Gosh! Stop being so difficult!

I would have a direct child of <body> like <main> set the --body-size value.

<body>
  <main>
    <!-- blah -->
  </main>
</body>

^† I’m multiplying by 0.5 because division is for chumps.

Next-gen solution

What CSS needs is a way to reference a container when using container units.

Ideas have been proposed for example:

.full-bleed {
  inline-size: 100cqi(body);
  inline-size: calc(100 * cqi(body));
  inline-size: calc(100 * container(cqi, body));
}

Cancel Interop 2026 and make this happen!

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I rescued an animal today! Probably…

The UK has its fair share of canals. I like canals. They cut through urban life offering an escape back to nature and are teaming with wildlife.

Canal towpaths are perfect for running. They’re easy underfoot — until late spring when the goslings hatch and then I’m doing a ballet to avoid trouble. Canada goose are the most visible bird living here all year round. They gather in groups and are rather docile around humans until the little yellow fluffballs arrive and then it’s mayhem.

Mute swans are a less common sight on the routes I run. This year a pair chose to nest in a safe but visible spot which was wonderful to witness. Swan nests are huge mounds of dirt, twigs, and coke bottles, apparently.

This morning I found dad-swan charging back and forth across the water. He stopped to peer into an overflow trench around 2–3 feet deep aside the canal. As I ran closer I saw a young bird has fallen in. It was older than a fluffball but still covered in muddied down. Larger than a duck, for scale. It was still too young to fly out of its predicament. At first I thought it was one of the cygnets. Mum-swan was in the nest with the others not far away.

I don’t speak bird but dad-swan seemed more aggressive than concerned. As I got closer he paddled a short distance away to observe.

I went down on my stomach and slowly reach under the guard rails wondering how painful a finger-pecking would be. I kept my ears open for a charge attack. The young bird didn’t flinch. It allowed me to reach under its belly and lift it up.

Before I could place it safely on the ground it attempted a Loony Tunes escape by running in the air. This unbalanced and forced me to tip it sideways, thankfully onto the stones just below water level and not back into the trench. It then frantically hopped not into the water, but up onto the towpath and quickly waddled behind me into the grass.

As I got back to my feet dad-swan returned to investigate and looked satisfied the young bird was gone before returning to his nest. It took me a minute to find the young bird now resting deep in the brambles. It was only then did I realise this might not be a swan but a goose. It was large enough to have outgrown the distinct yellow colouring.

I left it where it was hiding. My presence would only cause further distress. It was not physically injured otherwise I might have called the RSPCA who can rescue wildlife (RSPB don’t; common misconception).

I don’t go running with my phone anyway so I returned later to check and take photos. The young bird had vanished from its hiding spot. I’m almost certain it was a goose now after seeing this family not far from the scene.

It’s funny, despite being so common I’ve never once seen an actual goose nest. I’ve no idea where they hide them.

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