Shib Willoughby

tea, please! a game of handcrafted life vignettes A short 30-minute game that explores the contrast between the drudgery and noise of office life and the surprising happiness and peace gained through remote work during lockdown.

Link for more game deets: teapleasegame.com

Tea, Please! A story by Siobhan Willoughby. An illustrated girl looks into a bathroom mirror. The mirror is divided down the middle and slightly askew. On one side of the mirror is her sad self. And on the other side of the mirror is her happy self.

Been working on some better key art for Tea, Please! this weekend. Kinda vibing it!

The death of a website The call came in after midnight. Another site down. Same pattern. Same rot. Somebody’s killing the web, and nobody’s talking.

I’ve been investigating dead websites for years.

Same symptoms every time - bloated code, missing structure, too many dependencies and not enough care.

It’s not murder. It’s neglect.

And it’s everywhere.

www.jonoalderson.com/misc/the-dea...

i hated nextjs and vercel before it was cool

Frosty is back to celebrate the coolest upcoming and recently released games made in Australia & Aotearoa, this December 🍦🥳

We’ll be featuring exclusive reveals, announcements, and updates. Developers can submit their games now until Sep 30! ⤵️

forms.gle/tt8y9N1dPweS...

My game, Tea, Please! received some more funding! This time from Screen NSW! 🎉

Big achievement! And this funding will put Tea, Please! in a really nice position for release next year!

Big thanks to Screen NSW for believing in and supporting my little game! 🥹

The return of Waypoint Constellations✨

🎫 events.humanitix.com/waypoint-con...

A close collaboration with @serenade.games to celebrate Sydney's games and creators.

🗓️On Oct 14th just before SXSW's games festival begins

Follow and sign up for more info as we tease out the secrets of this event.

Help us share this survey with more women! We are hoping to increase participation of women in the survey, and one approach we're trying (known as "snowball sampling") is asking women respondents such as yourself to share the link to this survey with other women developers. If you're able to help with this, here is a special share link you can use so we can track the success of this initiative: https://survey.devographics.com/survey/state-of-html/2025?source=referral_5n0w

Much like the State of CSS Survey - I've been given a special referral link to share to other women developers for the State of HTML survey!

Goals are to increase participation of women taking the survey!

If you're a woman developer - go and fill it in!

survey.devographics.com/survey/state...

It's time for modern CSS to kill the SPA Native CSS transitions have quietly killed the strongest argument for client-side routing. Yet people keep building terrible apps instead of performant websites.

Why are you shipping 3MB of JavaScript to animate a link?

Modern CSS now handles seamless page transitions - natively.

No routing hacks. No hydration tax. No excuse.

Why Semantic HTML Still Matters If you want to build for performance, accessibility, discoverability, or resilience, you must start with HTML that means something.

Modern HTML is a disaster.

It’s bloated, semantically meaningless, and hostile to browsers, bots, and users.

We’ve traded structure for utility, and performance is paying the price.

Semantic HTML still matters - and here’s why.

www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/w...

It's full steam ahead on Tea, Please! development! I've also just started up devlogs for it to keep me on track!

Here's Devlog 01!

(also on TikTok: www.tiktok.com/@shibcodes/v...)

This is your periodic reminder that I have the world’s longest ongoing list of accessibility tools for developers and I want more

Thank you carry on. Let me know if links die.

assisted.site/accessibility

it feels important to keep saying: SPA as an app framework default (and not an opt-in feature) was a mistake

My favourite read of the day!

"...they brought with them an architecture-first mindset: patterns, state management, dependency injection, abstracted logic."

I repeat, from my talk last month, men are really out here building JS frameworks so they don't have to learn HTML and CSS.

A screenshot reads: Help us share this survey with more women! We are hoping to increase women participation this year, and one approach we're trying (known as "snowball sampling") is asking women respondents such as yourself to share the link to this survey with other women developers. If you're able to help with this, here is a special share link you can use so we can track the success of this initiative:

Doing the State of CSS survey and this was interesting to see! One of my favourite (not really) parts of these surveys each year is seeing how horrible the woman:man ratio is lol

So, if you're a woman developer go and fill it out too with my ref link!

survey.devographics.com/survey/state...

What I don't understand with this method is are we not reading our HTML output afterwards? How are we debugging our HTML and not going completely mad when inspecting it afterwards and not seeing a legible structure?

I know it's driving me crazy, at least, when I have to work on code like this.

I still get mad that 'we' decided at some point to abandon IDs & element names in CSS, shove everything into hyphenated classes, and complain that "its a global namespace" and "naming things is hard". Then, with only source-order remaining, we let JS load our styles in random order.

A screenshot from MakeRoom. A isometric diorama of a cozily decorated bedroom. The background behind the bedroom and outside of the diorama is tan with silhouettes of trees and grass.

A screenshot from MakeRoom. A isometric diorama of a cozily decorated living room with a fireplace, TV, sofas, computer desk, and dining table. The interior wall is a dark green texture with a herringbone patterned wood floor. The background outside of the diorama is a lighter green with silhouettes of grass tufts.

A screenshot from MakeRoom. A isometric diorama of a cozily decorated camper van with a mini kitchen, sofa, and small tables. The interior wall is a purple texture with a herringbone patterned wood floor. The background outside of the diorama is a green with silhouettes of grass tufts and pine trees.

A screenshot from MakeRoom. A isometric diorama of a cozily decorated living room with a fireplace, sofa, chairs, and center coffee table. The interior wall is a dark red wallpaper with wood panels in the lower half. The floor texture is a herringbone patterned wood floor. The lighting is moody, as if the sun is setting outside. The background outside of the diorama is a grey-ish purple with tufts of grass and pine trees silhouetted.

Calling all content creators who want to flex their decorating muscles ~ MakeRoom's release is right around the corner!

Let us know if you're interested in covering the game's launch by filling out this interest form:

🔑 k1zwm815u8b.typeform.com/MakeRoom

Guarantee you this thing is being build in React lol

"It's not for a front end developer out right as they already have a number of talented front-end devs that want to focus on how features are built"

i.e: you won't be a REAL developer, just one who can fix our bad design 'cause our REAL developers can't do CSS 'cause they're focussing on REAL work

"5 days a week in office."

double lol, but dw they have DJ decks in house and free food!

"Raised $100 million and founded by a crypto billionaire"

lol

"An experienced designer that's moved onto front end engineering"

Actually fantastic! These roles are really rare but exactly what I do! There needs to be more of them.

A LinkedIn message from a recruiter that reads: Rare opportunity scale-up front-end Eng/ Designer/Ul Good morning, I hope this message finds you well. I'm recruiting for a start-up/scale-up company that are looking to bring onboard an experienced designer that has moved into front-end engineering to focus on the last 10% of the Ul (styling, polish etc...) for a rapidly growing consumer facing crypto business. It is a design led business having been founded due to the lack of a crypto wallet that focused on great design & experience for the consumer. The business just raised $100 million and was founded by a crypto billionaire based here in Sydney. It is 5 days a week in the office, but the office is amazing!! The best private gym I have ever seen, complete with personal trainer, free food/ drinks, DJ decks in house...Salary would be flex (and can go higher) but circa $160-190k base + super + package. You would be sat between the design and engineering teams attending design & Front-end Engineering meetings and they are looking for someone that is passionate about the really finer details on the front-end of how the web and mobile app look to the consumer. It's not for a front-end developer out right as they already have a number of talented front-end devs that want to focus on how features are built, interact and integrate. There is a great deal of interesting greenfield work to do as they build out a whole heap of new features on the web app, a mobile app and a...

lol what is this negging nonsense I just received?

I'm just telling it like it is 💅

A wild Shib appeared! So glad my talk resonated with a bunch of people!

A hero image for a game called Tea, Please! The logo is red with a tea cup and a milk jug above it. It's surrounded by a border of tea related items like mugs and kettles. The hero image is bordered by a blue frame with Frosty Game Fest branding. The blue frame says "Frosty Games Fest", "Cool Sh*t from ANZ", as well as the date "8th of June 2025".

Toot toot! 📣 Teaser trailer for my game Tea, Please! will be dropping at @frostygamesfest.com on 8th of June! 👀

✨ New article is live: CSS Spotlight Effect

I asked myself what we could do with just the mouse position, and got to this fun simple effect.

Hope you enjoy it, and maybe it will spark some new ideas for you too. 😊

🔗 Check it out on @frontendmasters.com: frontendmasters.com/blog/css-spo...

Just fucking use HTML Stop reinventing the wheel. The web was doing just fine before your bloated frameworks crawled out of the sewer.

"Just fucking use HTML"

justfuckingusehtml.com

I'll take it further and say many React devs would benefit from building a static website by hand.

Straight HTML/CSS/vanilla JS

No framework, no build step. Just raw dog the Platform.