iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 11/09/2026

Officially a Senior Staff Engineer at @discord.com now 📈

Reposted by Brandon Dail

Joan León @nucliweb.net · 24/07/2026

In my audits, reading the Performance profile is where people get stuck: the flame chart and waterfall look like noise at first I built an interactive guide to make them click, every figure is interactive, plus LCP, CLS, INP and the Insights panel perf.reviews/profile-guide #WebPerf #DevTools

perf.reviews

Reading a Performance Profile: Field Guide

An interactive field guide to the Chrome DevTools Performance panel: waterfall, flame chart, LCP, CLS, INP, and the Insights panel.

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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 20/07/2026

you tellin me a petard hoisted this?

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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 01/07/2026

It's a shame that generative image models have pursued realism so relentlessly. Reproducing training data is uninteresting and exploitative. The imperfections of early models were genuinely interesting, and will end up being the most artistically interesting artifact of all this in the long term

an image of a beach generated with the low-quality misua-diffusion-one model, which is trained exclusively on public domain/copyright free images

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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 23/06/2026

I’m on sabbatical this month, and I’ve been using some of my time to dust off my plotter and get back into my art. This is a CMYK print that’s using a custom algorithm based on waves and circles to layer the colors. Stopped half way through because I liked the vibes ✨

A top-down shot of a 9x12 CMYK plotter print. The print features abstract blue, red, green, and pink colors with a sharp cut-off about 60% down, where there's no blue or green. The top half looks kind of like cactuses that are flowering, and the bottom half kind of looks like lemonade.

The close-up shot of the CMK print showing the waves and circles composed together to make a green yellow pink abstract piece

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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 09/06/2026

Feels like strongly typed compile-to-JS languages like Reason deserve a resurgence with LLMs. Biggest barrier was learning the new language, which has been heavily reduced, and a fast and strict type system is very valuable for agents

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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 27/04/2026

I appreciate that @github.com wants to give me recognition for all this work, but I'd be reticent to take credit for all 21 million open pull requests

Screenshot of github.com/pulls/authored that says I have 21 million open pull requests and 147 million closed ones. You can see a couple PRs that are clearly not the users'

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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 18/03/2026

There are two main startup tasks for @discord.com: 1. Fetch and run all the JavaScript 2. Open a socket and get your data from the gateway Those were happening sequentially; now they are parallel! This improved P50 TTI by like 12%, over a second for many folks 📉 discord.com/blog/discord...

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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 17/02/2026

finally the justification I needed to get back to arguing with people on the internet

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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 30/01/2026

whoever at Google owns fanout-testing@google.com Google Group, I don't think you meant to send that message 🙈

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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 27/01/2026

Here's your friendly reminder that CSS selectors are global and evaluated RTL, so if you have selectors that are very broad like `.container > div` you might be impacting performance in a measurable way 🙈 Before and after profile of server switching after some selector optimizations in @discord.com

Two screenshots from Chrome DevTools side-by-side. On the left it says "Before" and shows that rendering took 1518 milliseconds. On the right it says "After" and shows that rendering took 610 milliseconds.

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Reposted by Brandon Dail

Sarah Taber @sarahtaber.bsky.social · 13/07/2025

Ex-farm worker here. We need to talk about this whole "But a living wage for farm workers would spike the cost of food!" thing. Not true AT ALL. Y'all don't understand how fast experienced farm workers are. The average tomato picker pulls 650lbs per hour. At $20/hr, that's $0.03/lb for labor.

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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 18/06/2025

If you’re a React Native expert and want to help us make @discord.com better, hit me up 🤙 we’re looking!

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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 15/04/2025

had a daughter the other day, we’re big fans ❤️

A newborn baby hand resting on top of a man’s middle finger, as if they were holding hands

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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 26/03/2025

we (@discord.com) rewrote our color token system to support these new themes, and its exciting 👀 in short: color tokens are defined using a constraint-based system where colors are defined with contrast ratios. change a base color and all affected tokens update in all themes, preserving contrast ✨

discord.com

Revamped Overlay & Refreshed Desktop Give Game Time a Boost

We’re releasing a new and improved version of the Game Overlay, along with a refreshed desktop app so you can further customize Discord to your style.

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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 12/02/2025

Whoever did the lighting in Kingdom Come II deserves whatever the award for really good lighting is

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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 10/02/2025

$500 pack of cards casually sitting on the shelf 🫣

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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 10/02/2025

Not the Canada commercial lmaoooooo

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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 10/02/2025

my wife said “I think they can make a comeback” two seconds before that last interception. Sorry about that (or you’re welcome)

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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 09/02/2025

long overdue, but I did it 🫡

screenshot of x.com showing the @aweary account; the page says "This account doesn't exist"

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Reposted by Brandon Dail

Jill Twiss @jilltwiss.bsky.social · 21/01/2025

Somehow "Elon Musk Is a Genius" and "Elon Musk Doesn't Know How Hands Work" are being said by a lot of the same people

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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 19/01/2025

hearing a lot of good things about TikTok recently, downloading it to see what all the fuss is about 🙏

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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 16/01/2025

[as the Xenomorph extends its inner jaw to kill me]: oooooo big stretch!

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Reposted by Brandon Dail

Sean Carroll @seanmcarroll.bsky.social · 27/12/2024

In the meantime, as a reader: don’t trust any articles attributed to “staff,” and don’t trust any articles that don’t include quotes from scientists completely uninvolved in the original publication. Science is a gradual, meandering, back and forth process; sometimes we have to let it play out.

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Reposted by Brandon Dail

Sean Carroll @seanmcarroll.bsky.social · 27/12/2024

Which brings us to the scicomm point: we gotta get better at distinguishing between “here’s someone’s speculative idea that they just published” and “here’s a new discovery.” This is the former.

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Reposted by Brandon Dail

Sam Rose @samwho.dev · 20/12/2024

What does it mean for something to be Turing complete? I answer this question, and more, through a series of fully interactive Turing machine simulations! Play, pause, step forwards and backwards, and even write your own Turing machine programs in my latest blog post. samwho.dev/turing-machi...

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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 20/12/2024

the worst part about being a parent is that even the most cookie-cutter, clichéd story can make you cry if it happens to be about kids or parenting it’s like a cheat code the world uses on you that you can’t disable

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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 19/12/2024

is there any existing research on what the best contrast ratio for readability is? WCAG gives a lower bound but there’s also such a thing as too much contrast so I’m curious if there’s been any formal studies on where the sweet spot is

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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 09/12/2024

I try to be as honest as I can with my kids, and sometimes that’s hard to reconcile with the fact that we as a society have decided to collectively lie about a magical, immortal old man who sees you when you’re sleeping and knows when you’re awake

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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 05/12/2024

opening our monorepo's VSCode workspace was totally killing my CPU with rg processes. It brought my M3 Max to a halt for like five minutes. Turns out it was the Tailwind extension I had installed for another project trying to find a tailwind.config.* file in our monorepo 🫠

screenshot of macOS' Activity Monitor showing a list of rg processes. At the bottom a CPU load graph shows near full utilization and the system CPU usage is reported at 94.44% utilization

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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 05/12/2024

can you guess what my favorite album was this year

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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 04/12/2024

One tension here is that current gen LLMs can have a ~high success rate for accurately predicting what a real answer would be (depending on your topic), so there’s undeniably some utility there but knowing when it’s NOT accurate is increasingly difficult which means you always need to be skeptical

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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 27/11/2024

Bluesky connections on Discord are live! 🦋

screenshot of Discord's connection list showing my bluesky account linked

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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 27/11/2024

Working on our color system and a novel approach we've started exploring for colors is to define them in terms of constraints: instead of picking colors for every token/theme, you specify a reference color and contrast ratio. The system does the rest. this has a few cool advantages 👀

a large directed graph showing a web of dependencies between color tokens like background-base-low, text-primary, and many more.

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Reposted by Brandon Dail

xirclebox @xirclebox.com · 23/11/2024

If you want a really good deep dive into testing with screen readers, I strongly advise reading this guide by @sarasoueidan.com www.sarasoueidan.com/blog/testing... #a11y #screenReaders #accessibility

sarasoueidan.com

Setting up a screen reader testing environment on your computer

– The personal website of Sara Soueidan, inclusive design engineer

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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 23/11/2024

one day at Disney World 😪

screenshot of Apple Fitness showing 17422 steps, 7.71 miles, 2 flights climbed

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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 14/11/2024

see what happens when you use React Native guys

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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 13/11/2024

It’s been years and Figma still doesn’t support publishing a branch of a library 😭 it makes it so difficult to explore and test changes in our Design System color token libraries, anyone here have an alt solution?

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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 08/11/2024

recently sewed a plushie based on a drawing my 5yo made as a birthday present for one of his close friends 🪡

A child's drawing of an orange monster with spiky features and legs drawn in purple ink sits next to a handmade plush toy that is based on the drawing. The plush toy is orange with white eyes, a black mouth with felt teeth, and navy blue legs or tentacles at the bottom. Both items are photographed on a wooden surface with visible grain patterns.

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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 07/11/2024

ConcernedApe preserving the sanity of millions of adults with that 1.6 update timing 🤘

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Reposted by Brandon Dail

🐴 Alex Trost @trost.codes · 07/11/2024

Shout out to @joshwcomeau.com's principles. He closed his 135K Twitter account, despite it being a major marketing tool for his content and courses. He spent his final days informing his followers about the election before closing it and moving here. Protest isn't always convenient.

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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 07/11/2024

A small thread on some of the small details we built into our mobile segmented control component at Discord. These are subtle details but I’m a strong believer that polish like this can make all the difference 🧵

Screenshot of the Discord segmented control component

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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 06/11/2024

I expect we’ll see even more tech leaders emboldened to drop the facade and make it clear they value their myopic vision of progress and self-interests over all else; there’s no stigma anymore in saying you’re voting for lower taxes or less regulation even if it means gutting basic human rights

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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 06/11/2024

I’m despondent and at this point I don’t see any practical path forward for protecting my family that doesn’t involve making every attempt to leave this country 😔 it seems like even the most liberal states won’t be able to protect people from the authoritative federal policies that are imminent

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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 05/11/2024

if you need a distraction, here’s a gorilla body slamming its siblings at the Atlanta Zoo today

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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 05/11/2024

oh hello everyone, I just got the memo that we’re apparently doomscrolling here now 🫡

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Reposted by Brandon Dail

Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 16/05/2023

yeah, my product has nine nines of availability. 0.999999999%

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Brandon Dail @brandondail.com · 06/02/2024

making my triumphant bsky return with some Pokemon card pics

Bulbasaur, Ivysaur, and Venusaur special illustration cards

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