iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Simon W @simonw.xyz · 19/02/2026

A few of years ago I started migrating away from Outlook email. In the last year or so especially I've started getting a lot of spam in my old outlook inbox, but given that Microsoft is a company with near limitless resources it's probably just some really sophisticated spam filter avoidance, right?

A series of emails with extremely dodgy looking sender names, each with a very dodgy looking pdf attachment, using non-latin characters in English phrases like "Final Warning" and "Payment RequireD".

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Simon W @simonw.xyz · 29/12/2025

Me: My new year's resolution is to drink loads of water. AI server farms: Me too 😂

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Simon W @simonw.xyz · 11/12/2025

Going live on twitch: #laravel dev learning #symfony - how hard could it be? www.twitch.tv/mister_simon

twitch.tv

mister_simon - Twitch

Dustforks

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Simon W @simonw.xyz · 26/11/2025

Thinking about how AI is not a hammer making every problem look like a nail. But a hammer which people say works like all the other tools while the hammer desperately smiles and nods.

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Simon W @simonw.xyz · 07/11/2025

Spent some time fixing a #css issue which bugs me with most implementations of sticky stacking cards; Scrolling is often imprecise or jumpy, so you usually end up with cards unsatisfyingly overlapped... Unless you add a little "wiggle room": svelte.dev/playground/7...

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Simon W @simonw.xyz · 29/10/2025

I followed a creative itch and learnt about SVG paths. It was hard to find the motivation today, but I'm pleased to have done *something*. Take a look :) #svelte #webdev svelte.dev/playground/a... Also shout out to @joshwcomeau.com. Their exceptional SVG articles inspired me out of the day's funk.

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Simon W @simonw.xyz · 24/10/2025

Tiny #php tip: Swap `array|Traversable` type-hints for `iterable`. Arrays, a primitive type, can't inherit or implement interfaces. So to type-hint something you can pass to a `foreach` you would otherwise need to accept arrays and traversable objects. The iterable alias handles that for you!

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Simon W @simonw.xyz · 30/09/2025

How does Bigfoot protect his data? It's all in cryptid

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Simon W @simonw.xyz · 04/09/2025

Typescript feels like an uphill struggle and I'm either going to push through and get stronger or end up with arthritic knees.

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Maggie Appleton @maggieappleton.com · 06/08/2025

I've been trying to articulate why the fawning, complimentary responses from AI chatbots feel so insidious to me. I've finally figured out how to explain it. Wrote a long piece on how current model training and design choices threaten our critical thinking skills: maggieappleton.com/ai-enlighten...

maggieappleton.com

A Treatise on AI Chatbots Undermining the Enlightenment

On chatbot sycophancy, passivity, and the case for more intellectually challenging companions

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Simon W @simonw.xyz · 30/07/2025

Inspired by a recent Posy video - I wondered what would happen if you Gaussian Splatted a selfie video. Seems that @jawset.bsky.social Postshot seems to get quite confused, tries it's best, and creates something wonderfully trippy as a result.

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Simon W @simonw.xyz · 24/06/2025

Just started tinkering with @astro.build. Had been considering rewriting my Nuxt based personal site with Svelte, but maybe I just go for Astro instead. No need to throw away *all* the old code - just islandify all the things. We shall see. In any case, very intriguing.

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Simon W @simonw.xyz · 11/06/2025

Working on a menu system and I'd like to compose the it as a heirarchy of Component classes. Sadly, instantiating them yourself causes errors to be thrown on render, due to no $attributes being set. Maybe Laravel is telling me I should be handling more of this logic in the view...

An example Navbar component, the constructor sets the items property to a collection of Link and Dropdown components (Home, About, Services Dropdown, etc).

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Simon W @simonw.xyz · 22/05/2025

Just saw an issue on an open-source project where someone had passive aggressively posted a full convo from an LLM on how to fix the problem. Including a suggested schedule of sprints. It took so long to scroll past, oh my god. Why are people like this?

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Simon W @simonw.xyz · 11/05/2025

I think there are parallels between learning a new keyboard layout and gaining fluency in sign language finger spelling. I want to reach a point where I stop thinking of letters and develop muscle memory for common patterns. Maybe it's time for me to start drilling diagrams and trigrams in BSL. 🤔

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Simon W @simonw.xyz · 23/04/2025

#laravel people, do you use the Context system much? I've not found myself reaching for it since it's addition, but maybe I'm just missing a trick.

A screenshot of code taken from the laravel docs, showing how middleware can be used to add the current URL and a trace ID to the request's Context.

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CSS by T. Afif @css-only.dev · 16/04/2025

💡 CSS Tip! Shapes with rounded corners are a nightmare in CSS but it's now easy with the new shape() function! 🥳 Let's start with a classic: The Hexagon css-tip.com/rounded-hexa... Yes, you can animate the radius and rotate the shape. Modern CSS is cool!

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Simon W @simonw.xyz · 24/03/2025

Every time I read the words "vibe coding" I lose a few brain cells

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CSS by T. Afif @css-only.dev · 13/03/2025

An infinite logos animation? Here is the real infinite logos animations! ♾️ css-tip.com/infinite-log... #CSS

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Simon W @simonw.xyz · 11/03/2025

This Unorthodox Eloquent post I read ages ago by @muhammedsari.me is great. Found it again today while trying to remember Tappable Scopes - a clever way around magic method local scopes. There's a bunch of really fascinating ideas in this post alone, and there's a follow up post with more! #laravel

muhammedsari.me

Unorthodox Eloquent - Muhammed Sarı

I've been working with Eloquent for over half a decade now, and it's time to share my bag of tricks. Buckle up, it'll be a good ride!

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Simon W @simonw.xyz · 18/02/2025

Spotted the CSS Painting API draft spec. The idea that using a little CSS and JS you could turn any element into a <canvas> via background-image is wild. They have an example rendering an image placeholder, but imagine passing your paint worklet a blurhash variable, rendering an lqip while loading.

drafts.css-houdini.org

CSS Painting API Level 1

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Simon W @simonw.xyz · 14/02/2025

I improved this weird clock! It has a different colour for pm, hours and minutes move gradually, and nothing animates backwards on minute / hour changes, much nicer. That happened because css animating from 1 turn to 0 turn doesn't take the "shortest path". The solution... Only ever increase!

A hard to read clock face, as shown in the quoted post using conical gradients and masks to create 3 main segments around a donut shape, but now the colours are different to indicate am or pm.

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Simon W @simonw.xyz · 11/02/2025

The time is 3:27:49, as you can clearly see by this clock I just made with a few stacked conical gradients and a mask. I've always enjoyed abstract and hard to read clocks. svelte.dev/playground/3...

A clockface represented by a donut shape. There are three clear segments, where conical gradients have overlapped. The "reset point" in each gradient creates lines denoting the seconds, minutes, and hours... Though, it's unclear from the screenshot which gradient line is which.

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Simon W @simonw.xyz · 31/01/2025

#Laravel people. When using "create" policies in your views, do you do anything to avoid fully qualified classes? E.g. `@can('create', \App\Models\User::class)`

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Simon W @simonw.xyz · 24/01/2025

git switch -c "update-$(date +%Y%m%d)" Why would I take 1 minute to write the current date, when I can spend 10 minutes working out how to properly interpolate a formatted date into my branch name.

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Simon W @simonw.xyz · 15/01/2025

Looking back at old code, I think I used to lean into imperative solutions for problems a lot more than I do now. As an example, years ago, formatting a model's attributes for output I wrote a system which format based on the attribute name, ending "diameter" (append mm), or "volume" (ml), etc.

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Simon W @simonw.xyz · 10/01/2025

I passed my BSL 203 (conversation) assessment with full marks! Absolutely stoked. Proud of my fiancée for passing hers too. Next up, the presentation assessment 😬. #BSL

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Simon W @simonw.xyz · 08/01/2025

Starting off my year learning how to type again. I've modelled my layout on my 60 key ortho's, and I'm tweaking things every day still until I can iron out the little snags from losing another row of keys. Still, enjoying the process! Beautiful little keyboard. #zsa

A messy desk with a zsa voyager split keyboard at the front, the RGB lighting is red on the left hand half and blue on the right hand half. Towards the back of the desk is a matrix layout 60 key keyboard, and to the back right a keychron keyboard.

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Simon W @simonw.xyz · 19/12/2024

If you've got a custom domain handle and created a bsky.social account to reserve your old one. Here's what you need to do: Delete that reserved account. Claim it on your main account by switching your handle to it. Move back over to your custom domain. That'll reserve the account.

The "Create Account" screen, trying to register for the account name I had previously used before setting up a custom domain name, shows an error message "Reserved handle". Success!

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Simon W @simonw.xyz · 18/12/2024

I recently posted that you can easily translate PHP Enums for the UI, like select boxes, etc. Nice to see something similar in the Nova 5 docs, allowing Enum use in their Select Field builder directly. I'll probably use their conventions for consistency now when adding enum helper methods.

nova.laravel.com

Fields - Laravel Nova

Nova ships with a variety of fields out of the box, including fields for text inputs, booleans, dates, file uploads, Markdown, and more.

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Simon W @simonw.xyz · 11/12/2024

You can avoid acquiring a bsky addiction by simply not downloading the app. Use the webapp instead only when you feel like it rather than chasing push notifications all day.

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Simon W @simonw.xyz · 10/12/2024

Last week I ran into nixos issues. My laptop wouldn't open apps, it didn't recognise hardware. I figured the best way to fix it would be to go back to the initial install state and work my way forwards again. Lo and behold that worked. No sweat.

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isabel @isabelroses.com · 25/11/2024

Nix doesn't have a docs problem it has a discovery problem! So let me fix that by giving you all my favorite docs, youtubers, blogs and nix projects. (also no personal config have been listed) Make sure to reply if you think i missed any. (1/5)

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Simon W @simonw.xyz · 10/12/2024

Everything that @everydaylouie.bsky.social makes is brilliant. The range of their creativity is so impressive. The music is always uniquely such a bop, the animations and presentation is varied and full of vibe. This latest is no exception, love it. 🐍 www.youtube.com/watch?v=7aFe...

youtube.com

serpentmancer theme

YouTube video by Louie Zong

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Simon Holmes @srsholmes.com · 09/12/2024

Hey all, I just shared my project on reddit. If you have an account and like using blueview, please could you upvote and share www.reddit.com/r/SideProjec... I don't really know reddit very well, so would really appreciate any help with the post 🙂 Thanks in advance you lovely people!

reddit.com

Blueview is a free bluesky analytics app

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Simon W @simonw.xyz · 07/12/2024

Sure, mate! Here's some example Translatable enum traits, how they might be used, and a bit of a writeup in the readme! github.com/mister-simon... Should be of interest for any #laravel people, or generally anyone who uses a lot of PHP Enums. Enjoy!

Examples of using backed enums with the addition of trans, options, trans choice, and options choice methods. The output below displays a translated string, and a collection of translated cases. Magic!

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Simon W @simonw.xyz · 05/12/2024

Wondering how many #laravel devs out there are still using Homestead for local development?

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patak @patak.cat · 30/11/2024

So much this. Bluesky loves links. As @hankgreen.bsky.social says "people click on stuff and they leave the site, they leave! and they read articles!". I love how excited we all are about the open web. Our timeline is healing. Click on the video, and enjoy it on hankschannel! youtu.be/D4ghgVq9z4M

youtu.be

Twitter (and Threads) Have Made a HUGE Mistake

YouTube video by hankschannel

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Simon W @simonw.xyz · 30/11/2024

It's maybe not the best idea to free up a bsky.social account name when you switch to using a custom domain instead. Maybe there's some valid reasons, but it feels pretty weird that we'll need to go back and squat account names to ensure our identity doesn't get spoofed.

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Simon W @simonw.xyz · 30/11/2024

Reminder, make dumb joke projects too. Not everything needs to change the world. troobnsloobtoob.surge.sh

This post's text content, in a text area input on the left has been translated into the following, on the right: Roobmoobndoobr, moobkoob doobmb joobkoob proobjoobcts tooboob. Noobt oobvoobrythoobng nooboobds toob choobngoob thoob woobrld. A button below says "click to copy".

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Simon W @simonw.xyz · 26/11/2024

Began prototyping some little clay frog friends to give away as wedding favours. Also, my first time experimenting with DAS air dry clay. Do you have a favourite or any suggestions? #art #clay #frogs

The squad of 7 prototype frogs from the front. They range in size and shape. One is particularly round and lacking in froglike features but we love them anyway.

The squad of 7 frogs viewed from above. They range in size, but they're all slightly haunted.

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Nicolò Ribaudo @nicr.dev · 23/11/2024

Developers, do you want to verify yourself here but don't have a personal domain? You can use your GitHub account! 🦋🐱 I temporarily renamed myself to @nicolo-ribaudo.github.io :)

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Simon W @simonw.xyz · 21/11/2024

Is your email address or phone number on your personal site as a "contact me" option and have you seen a massive amount of spam since? 🤔

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Benn Jordan @bennjordan.bsky.social · 17/11/2024

Enjoy the premiere with me tomorrow morning while a script slowly deletes every single thing I've posted on X in the last 15 years. The Really Dark Truth About Bots www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZ5X...

youtube.com

The Really Dark Truth About Bots

YouTube video by Benn Jordan

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Simon W @simonw.xyz · 17/11/2024

I made lil animations every day in September for #septembit #art challenge, and a svelte site to showcase them septembit24.simonw.xyz. Feels good to learn a new skill and prove to yourself you can commit to a big project and see it through.

My completed septembit template. 30 pixel art animations with a 4 colour pallete. 27 small canvases and 3 large ones. Each day had a different theme, with the overarching theme of Monster Maker (Pokémon inspired pieces).

This final large canvas pixel animation shows mountains in the distance. A valley between them in the midground. In the foreground silhouetted trees sway. A small silhouetted creature appears in the foreground and watches as a giant albino rabbit hops between the mountains off in the distance scarcely visible between the peaks.

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Jessica Elgot @jessicaelgot.bsky.social · 17/11/2024

By popular demand… the Guardian is officially on BlueSky @theguardian.com

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Simon W @simonw.xyz · 12/11/2024

Bouncing between "I truly have the ability to make anything I can imagine" and imposter syndrome every day can be exhausting.

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