iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Bryan Robinson @brob.dev · 04/09/2026

Love that it really struggled with me. Southern born and bred, but mostly in Memphis where there's less southern accent and raised by a Jersey dad and Florida mom. True hodgepodge of dialects

Map claiming I'm from D.C. but also showing s trong Florida and Southwest dialects but very cool colors based around Memphis my hometown

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Bryan Robinson @brob.dev · 20/05/2026

I wanted to see if anything had obviously changed in search since I/O announcements (which I don't want to watch), so I searched "test" and this is the worst type of thing to spend billions on... This industry is devoid of meaning at this point. No one should support this technology

A google search screen with a search for "test"

The first result is Speedtest by Ookla. Then comes the "AI overview, which looks like a "definition" including the word, a pronunciation guide, and an audio button for the pronunciation. But then, it shows the "definition' and it says "It looks like your test was successful! I am online, awake, and ready to help. How can I assist you with your day?" where "online, awake, and ready to help" are highlighted like they're relevant to my search...

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Bryan Robinson @brob.dev · 18/05/2026

Very frustrating that Google "summarizes" my opinions when asked, and then mis-titles my YouTube series and doesn't provide a link to it even in the small "linked" area ... which, let's be honest, isn't incentivizing clicks

Highlighted text: "...his 'Second 11ty' YouTube series, which covers everything from basic collections to templating tricks

Full text of the google summary: Bryan Robinson's Core Opinions on the PlatformIntuitive and Thoughtful: He loves how simple and logical everything is, from the core philosophy to the fundamental basics of data files.Mind-Reading Features: He has famously noted that with every new feature the platform introduces, it feels like the creators "read my mind".Active Content Creation: As an active educator in the web community, Robinson created well-known video resources for the ecosystem, including his "Second 11ty" YouTube series, which covers everything from basic collections to templating tricks.Support for Ecosystem Growth: He is an advocate for sustainable open-source development, supporting the platform's alignment with Font Awesome to ensure long-term stability and continued feature growth for the community.

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Bryan Robinson @brob.dev · 20/04/2026

Even with something as simple as the auto Alt text on Bluesky apparently. I always hand write my alt text, but this is what Bluesky's generator wanted it to be... Either I rewrite it or the user doesn't actually get the correct information about the image

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Bryan Robinson @brob.dev · 17/04/2026

Easily in my top 3 focaccia loaves I've ever made. Light dusting of extra sharp cheddar on top; mix of a heritage flour with King Arthur flour; mix of commercial yeast and a bit of my sourdough starter. Really really good

Picture of 6 small slices of focaccia with golden tops and tall, fluffy, open crumb

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Bryan Robinson @brob.dev · 14/04/2026

My 20-year old girl says keep up the good work and that she’s a role model to ancient cats everywhere

A black cat with large green eyes staring at the camera from atop a two-tiered side table.

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Bryan Robinson @brob.dev · 06/04/2026

Just opened up Linear after a week away... The home screen is now a chatbot. Come on, y'all... I just want a list of tasks. I don't need this nonsense! Seriously, get ALL the way out of here with that

Screenshot of the main area of Linear. It reads "Welcome to Linear. Ask anything or tell Linear what you need"

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Bryan Robinson @brob.dev · 16/03/2026

To learn, to enjoy, and to create, this weekend I made a super simple zine. Inspired by my son learning algebra. Is it terrible? Yes Is it also amazing? Yes Did I learn some lessons? Oh yeah

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Bryan Robinson @brob.dev · 09/03/2026

Slack's "Marketplace" landing page is gross. This is gross. Slack is supposed to be about people collaborating together, but they're so thirsty for that AI money, that their CTA isn't about collaboration, but instead about a place for "AI" to call "home" Disgusting pivot

The slack marketplace homepage that says "The platform agents and AI call home" with a subhead of "The Slack platform brings your entire tech stack together. It’s scalable, secure, and purpose-built for bringing agents and AI to every business."

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Bryan Robinson @brob.dev · 06/02/2026

Oh my god! It's worse than I thought... the buttons on that interface that could be actual actions are instead things that fill out that text box for me... So instead of the action of "My open pull requests" taking me to a list of open PRs, it populates the agent chat box!!! I'm beyond incensed

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Bryan Robinson @brob.dev · 06/02/2026

Forgot the image I mean what is this nonsense. This is a garbage, metrics-chasing, unhelpful, "please use LLMs!!!!", unasked-for waste of space and focus and developer resources that could have been spent on improving infrastructure and usability

My home screen. On the left is a very short list of my repositories. on the right it says "Home" and then has a text box that says "Ask anything" and a selector for which LLM to use ...

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Bryan Robinson @brob.dev · 03/02/2026

What was the last thing you did for yourself? I’ll go first: Sunday, I baked 15 bagels. We had store bought bagels in the pantry, but I really wanted to make bagels. They turned out fantastic. And while working on them, I was in a GREAT headspace. Hobbies are good for your mental health

Picture of 8 bagels. 6 have everything bagel seasoning on them

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Bryan Robinson @brob.dev · 18/12/2025

I wonder if that feature was vibe coded. Just disabled and now the contents of that chat window are gone, but the window is still there! 🤣

The VS Code editor with the welcome/update window panes open, and a blank pane on the left with no content, just a close/expand button...

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Bryan Robinson @brob.dev · 02/12/2025

A "Truncation is not Content Strategy" story in 3 parts titled "YouTube doesn't want you to know the title"

A YouTube Shorts page showing 3 shorts, but the one that's in the center and featured says "Authentication vs. Authorization - What's ..."

After clicking on the Short from the Shorts feed, this is the screen. It has the Short on the right and the "Short details" on the left.

The left shows it's from FusionAuth, but then displays the title: "Authentication vs. Authorization - What's ..." and that's it...

Then if you know you can click the title, the page shifts. Now the video is on the left. Overlayed on the video is the channel and the full title: "Authentication vs. Authorization: What's the Difference?" and on the right is now more details including Likes, Views, publish date, the description, and in small text the full title

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Bryan Robinson @brob.dev · 20/10/2025

About to head to Toronto for Web Unleashed. If you can't make it to Toronto, you can still see me (2-3 times) with the virtual ticket! You can see my two slots about AI (A presentation on why AI might be bad for YOU, as well as a debate on AI), along with 10 other amazing talks. lnkd.in/gCrwsX8E

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Bryan Robinson @brob.dev · 11/10/2025

I really don't want this sort of crap from my host. Can I just have a static site host that has a solid build process, processes my forms, and does NOT push random unhelpful AI BS? This box pushes my most recent deploys below my scroll... I'm at my project screen for a reason. It ain't this.

"Build with an AI Agent" it says with a text box and lots of options... except there's no option to not show it.

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Bryan Robinson @brob.dev · 29/09/2025

That WAS scary. This is petrifying. The keys are SO interconnected

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Bryan Robinson @brob.dev · 29/09/2025

Thanks! Halfway through taking off the pads, but just getting to the complex mechanisms

Photo of left-pinky saxophone keys disassembled with the rest of the alto in the background

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Bryan Robinson @brob.dev · 29/07/2025

Trying to do a riff on the Connect4 logo for a t-shirt for @whenweplay.org... I feel like it's super close, but the Connect4 logo does stuff with the 4, but trying to do "MORE" is not working out... Wish I could figure something out for this. Anyone have any thoughts or ideas?

My riff. It says "Connect More" with the "More" in a red circle and above it, it says "When We Play, We"

Making the complete statement "When We Play, We Connect More"... the "More" in the red circle looks awkward...

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Bryan Robinson @brob.dev · 23/07/2025

I stopped adding Google Analytics to my sites ages ago, but when I see spikes like this in my Netlify metrics... it makes me question many things. My assumption here is that it's got to be bots scraping my content for LLMs, but I honestly don't know what to make of it...

Charts showing Pageviews for half a month being normal and flat and then in the second half spiking every few days from low hundreds to multi-thousands with a Unique users chart doing similar, but with fewer spikes.

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Bryan Robinson @brob.dev · 04/06/2025

Hey look... inventory items!

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Bryan Robinson @brob.dev · 07/05/2025

In the meantime, I'm building new functionality onto whenweplay.org so that my neighbors can check out games and "play materials" from me... First step toward where I may want to go for this organization...

Screenshot from When We Play showing "Livonia Materials for checkout" with a grid containing the game "Cat Lady" with a label saying "Checked out" and "Jenga" with a label saying "Available"

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Bryan Robinson @brob.dev · 20/03/2025

It's amazing how wide-ranging this is... even my book with it's DOZENS of purchasers is in this database

Search in LibGen for Bryan Robinson results in many items, but the second item is my book Eleveny by Example

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Bryan Robinson @brob.dev · 04/03/2025

In case you were wondering, this is why you shouldn't use GenAI code On a whim, I asked Copilot for a card style for tailwind with a heading and a paragraph... It interprets "heading" as a div. Partially on me for not specifying an h2 or something, but come on... take a guess

Code view with a div and styles. inside there's a div with content of "Card heading" and a paragraph with fake text

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Bryan Robinson @brob.dev · 27/02/2025

Playing with different camera angles... What if I didn't have to be tied to my desk and could be more mobile in my space? Gotta figure out making my lighting setup more mobile, but my mic boom arm kinda works with my stand-alone tripod, so that's a positive

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Bryan Robinson @brob.dev · 26/02/2025

Often my video stills are terrible, but this one... this one I kinda like...

Me looking at the camera with a half smile. I can't tell if I look disappointed in you or if I look caring... but it's something...

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Bryan Robinson @brob.dev · 21/02/2025

Hey, Google, I just wanted a picture of a toy Jack... I don't want to buy one... Why are you dumping me straight into your shopping interface (without even acknowledging it in the "active tab")? (I mean, i know why...)

Screenshot of Google search results for "jack toy" showing products for purchase an an interface designed for searching products. Despite it being a very definitive shopping interface, the tabs at the top show that "All" is selected, and not "Shopping"

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Bryan Robinson @brob.dev · 18/02/2025

I think this might be true and might be the quote of my mid-life crisis…

Quite at the beginning of “This book is overdue”

The quote reads: “Show me a computer expert who gives a damn and I’ll show you a librarian.” From Patricia Wilson Berger, former president, ALA

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Bryan Robinson @brob.dev · 11/02/2025

Specialties are nice, but ancillary skills will grow you as a human outside of the scope of your worth in a capitalist system. I’m nurturing a few other skills currently. Have some sketches as I work on my drawing/cartooning skills (that are almost non-existent)

Sketches of cartoon cats with a few cat figure sketches thrown in.

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Bryan Robinson @brob.dev · 31/01/2025

I was going to make a comment that just being wrapped in a :has probably suffices, since OBVIOUSLY initial-letter support should be better than :has... I'm wrong, though. :has is supported multiple versions further back than initial-letter... my mind is now officially blown 🤯

:has support showing further back support from caniuse https://caniuse.com/?search=%3Ahas

Initial-letter support showing worse than :has according to caniuse https://caniuse.com/css-initial-letter

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Bryan Robinson @brob.dev · 29/01/2025

There were some rough patches yesterday, but we made it! We got to a working game based on all that data.

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Bryan Robinson @brob.dev · 24/01/2025

In-progress from where I stopped this summer (with the supplies in the background) the drawer comes out and my plan was felt for that for a rolling tray

Partially stained balsa wood box with glass top showing a few sections and a drawer pulling out the bottom. In the background is a cabinet with felt and a drawer with stain and sealant

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Bryan Robinson @brob.dev · 17/01/2025

I've finally got one of my bigger dev "edutainment" ideas starting to take shape for a real proof of concept. Going from mildly excited to very excited in very short order

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Bryan Robinson @brob.dev · 07/01/2025

Not gonna lie, I cackled this morning when I remembered I now have a little CSS for my browser that hides AI "summaries" on google. Cackled, I tell you. I love that it shows the loading still so that I can watch it disappear into irrelevancy. Yarr harr harr.

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Bryan Robinson @brob.dev · 05/12/2024

Finally got around to adding my @astro.build Bluesky server island to my personal site. It pulls my latest post, but I cache it heavily (2 hour cache). bryanlrobinson.com

The widget on my site showing a Latest from Bluesky area with my last post about Affinity Designer

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Bryan Robinson @brob.dev · 05/12/2024

Among the many problems with AI is that it doesn't understand nuance or take into account a whole piece when "summarizing." Just discovered this from Google that takes a small snippet from an article of mine (and from @whitep4nth3r.com) and summarizes to say something somewhat against our points...

Google AI overview that says "Some say that the term Jamstack has become meaningless because it's been used to describe a marketing term for Netlify services. Netlify published a new definition of Jamstack in 2023 that focused on "flexibility, scalability, performance, and maintainability". " (amongst other things) and links to my blog post and Salma's as proof... despite the fact that both of us say that the Jamstack is alive, should be alive, and CAN have meaning in the articles

We both talk about the issues of that in our articles and I even say it's "meaningless" but there's a TON of nuance that's ignored

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Bryan Robinson @brob.dev · 21/11/2024

Ooooooh it's working! An @astro.build Server Island with a 30 minute cache using @netlify.com's durable caching. After that first cache storage it's super quick and doesn't even hit my Netlify functions (so no need to worry about costs). Quick for users, cheap for me, relatively fresh!

A website saying "Astro server component for bluesky" with the skeet from right 2 skeets before this one, because it's cached!

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Bryan Robinson @brob.dev · 18/11/2024

Need it for my work on doing an @astro.build Server Island for "latest Bluesky post"

Post showing my personal site sidebar with my description and my latest post showing right beneath it

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Bryan Robinson @brob.dev · 15/11/2024

It works with the content loader, it also works with a Server Island to pull the "latest" which is pretty cool. Took about 15 minutes and most of that was me trying to understand the Bluesky docs

Implementation showing my latest bluesky post directly beneath my "about" information on my site

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Bryan Robinson @brob.dev · 07/11/2024

This is Nancy. She’s 18 and has multiple beds that plug in and heat up

A tiny black cat in the middle of a heated bed

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