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Dave Rupert

Dave Rupert — Web developer at Microsoft, co-host of ShopTalk

Web development, accessibility, and ShopTalk Show co-host reflections.

Spells that work sometimes. Spells that we cast with no practical way to measure their effectiveness. They are prayers as much as they are instructions.
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daverupert.com

A veteran web developer's notebook on building for the web with care. Dave writes about CSS, web components, and accessibility with the pragmatic voice of someone who's been through the hype cycles and come out the other side still believing in craft. He's also refreshingly honest about the messy parts — side projects that go nowhere, ADHD, and the limits of the tools we're sold.

Written by Dave Rupert since 2009.

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Web Development

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Web Development Essentials

Master the craft of building for the web

Smaller and dumber

February 23, 2026

If I can make it smaller, I should. If I can make it dumber, I should. Smaller, dumber things have more applications, go more places, and require less maintenance.

Priority of idle hands

February 23, 2026

I had a small, intrusive realization the other day that computers and the internet are probably bad for me. I mean that beyond the general advice to touch grass. From an ADHD and generalized anxiety perspective, computers and the internet have become an endless supply of poison pills for my brain; feeds full of constant dopamine hits with doom at every turn. This is hard to accept because a lot of my work, hobbies, education, entertainment, news, communities, and curiosities are all on the inter...

Magic Words

February 9, 2026

Skills are the newest hype commodity in the world of agentic AI. Skills are text files that optionally get stapled onto the context window by the agent. You can have skills like “frontend design” or “design tokens” and if the LLM “thinks” it needs more context about that topic, it can import the contents of those files into the context to help generate a response. Generally speaking, skills do an okay job at providing on-demand context. Assuming the AI model is always 12-to-18 months behind in i...

Write about the future you want

February 4, 2026

There’s a lot that’s not going well; politics, tech bubbles, the economy, and so on. I spend most of my day reading angry tweets and blog posts. There’s a lot to be upset about, so that’s understandable. But in the interest of fostering better discourse, I’d like to offer a challenge that I think the world desperately needs right now: It’s cheap and easy to complain and say “[Thing] is bad”, but it’s also free to share what you think would be better. If complaining worked, we would have won the...

I'm swearing off APIs entirely

January 26, 2026

I got a lot of ideas for side projects rattling around in the old tin can. As part of my “No new projects” initiative, I’m trying to jump on building prototypes so I can decide if I want to explore ideas more or call it quits. A handful of my ideas are riffs or twists on existing app categories: A tennis ranking app… but modern and performant A nearby historical marker app… but with CarPlay support A nearby real estate listing app… but with CarPlay support All three of those have ended uncerem...

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