Vintage VHS blank tapes ...

Going to show my age here with this vintage VHS tape inspired @codepen.io creation....!!! 😅 💜 📼

codepen.io/GemmaCroad/p...

Ownership without understanding Why putting a name against something isn’t the same as being responsible for it

Putting a name against an output isn't the same as being responsible for it.

Most organisations haven't noticed the difference yet...

medium.com/@gemma.croad...

The invisible phase AI didn’t remove the slow work, it just made skipping it easier

AI didn't remove the slow work. It just made skipping it easier.

The slow phase never produced commits or closed tickets. It just meant someone understood the problem before anyone opened a laptop. That's why it's the first thing to go...

medium.com/@gemma.croad...

Fast, functional, forgettable When everything is easy to build, nothing is easy to remember

Something's happening to the web. Not a quality problem exactly, the landing pages are competent, the copy is clear, the design is clean. But you can't remember any of them five minutes later...

medium.com/@gemma.croad...

The awareness problem in engineering Why some of your best engineers are leaving and you never saw it coming

She said fine. She meant functional within constraints you can't see. Most engineering managers have no idea their team members are running a calculation about whether this organisation can hold their life. By the time it becomes visible, she's already decided.

medium.com/@gemma.croad...

The diversity problem in engineering Why the broken rung isn’t an accident

The entry-level numbers have shifted. The leadership numbers mostly haven't.

That's not a pipeline problem. By mid-career, most women in engineering have enough data to know exactly what's happening...

medium.com/@gemma.croad...

Proof of humanity What gets lost when communication gets polished

The messy apology lands harder than the polished one.

Not because of the words. Because you can see the cost of sending it.

Once you know that, everything else looks different.

medium.com/@gemma.croad...

Do you need an agent for that? The question assumes someone is asking it.

The checklist for building agents assumes a human is in the room at every step. Evaluating the output. In agentic workflows that step gets optimised away. When something goes wrong in a chain of automated decisions, what does the trail look like? Who owns the output?

medium.com/@gemma.croad...

What your AI risk assessment didn’t cover AI providers aren’t neutral infrastructure and the last week has proved it.

You didn't build a dependency on an API. You built it on a company. Its ethics, its political exposure, its CEO's willingness to say no in public.

Most risk assessments didn't cover that.

medium.com/@gemma.croad...

The understanding problem in engineering Why understanding is becoming engineering’s most ignored risk

A contributor opens a PR. The code is clean, the tests pass. The reviewer asks a question. The author can't explain it because they didn't write it. The reviewer approves it anyway. One PR like this is a minor risk. A year of them is a codebase nobody actually owns...
medium.com/@gemma.croad...

The gap AI won’t close Why equal access to AI tools is creating unequal outcomes in engineering teams

If someone writes clean, well-structured code, AI can accelerate them. If someone writes spaghetti, AI just helps them write it faster.

AI doesn't fix fundamentals. It amplifies them. And that's widening the gap inside teams, not closing it.

medium.com/@gemma.croad...

The data you were delighted to give away How viral AI trends became the most successful data collection strategy ever invented

"Create a caricature based on everything you know about me." People are celebrating how accurately AI can profile them and nobody finds that strange...

medium.com/@gemma.croad...

AI is breaking the open web AI companies are consuming the open web while destroying the reasons people contribute to it

You write something useful, AI trains on it, six months later it gives someone your answer with zero attribution and zero traffic back. The open web ran on: create value, get found, benefit. AI runs on: create value, never get found again... medium.com/@gemma.croad...

Microsoft Inclusive Design Microsoft Inclusive Design is a practice that anyone who creates and manages products and services can use to build more inclusive experiences for everyone. Get the principles, guidebooks, workshop to...

Looks like Microsoft have just launched a new Inclusive Design website which has been built through co‑design with disabled and neurodivergent collaborators, the new experience focuses on adaptability, usability, and real‑world inclusion... 😍 inclusive.microsoft.design

The honesty problem in engineering Why the people around you have stopped telling you the truth

If you're leading a team or function: how do you know people are telling you the truth?

Not in theory. Not because you have an open-door policy.

In practice. In the actual moments when you propose something that won't work...

medium.com/@gemma.croad...

Sharing this because I think Buttered Crumpet is the best typeface name ever, and also because Wallace and Gromit are awesome.... 😊 jamieclarketype.com/case-study/w...

The Incredible Overcomplexity of the Shadcn Radio Button Radio buttons are built into web browsers. Why are we using a UI library that wraps another UI library that rebuilds radio buttons from scratch? Why does rendering a radio button require multiple depe...

Radio buttons are built into browsers. Why are we using a UI library that wraps another library to rebuild them? How did a native browser control become this complicated? 😢
paulmakeswebsites.com/writing/shad...

AI fatigue and the cost of keeping up Why the pace of AI change isn’t sustainable

Trying to keep up with AI is exhausting...

medium.com/@gemma.croad...

The technical leadership problem in engineering Why the people making your technical decisions are optimised for confidence, not competence

Why do we keep deferring to whoever sounds most certain in technical decisions? Why does admitting "I don't know" look like weakness instead of intellectual honesty? And what are we teaching every engineer who's watching this play out?

medium.com/@gemma.croad...

The Agile problem in engineering Why a methodology designed by one demographic doesn’t work for everyone

Seventeen men walk into a ski resort and write a manifesto about human-centred development. Twenty-five years later we're still blaming teams when it doesn't work. Still sending people on scrum master courses. Still pretending the problem is the people, not the framework.

medium.com/@gemma.croad...

CodePenChallenge: Cozy Winter ...

My creation for this weeks @codepen.io challenge, something that evokes a feeling of wintertime coziness.

There is nowhere I would rather be in the middle of Winter than curled up with a good book and a cup of tea...! 📖 🤎

codepen.io/GemmaCroad/p...

CSS Wrapped 2025 Sculpt dynamic interfaces, stretch your imagination, and play with these 22 powerful new CSS features that landed in Chrome this year.

CSS Wrapped 2025 has dropped! 🥳

It’s the annual recap of all things CSS and Web UI that landed in Chrome over the last year. This year was massive, 22 new features made it into the browser to help us build beautiful and better UIs…. 🫶

chrome.dev/css-wrapped-...

I did spot that shirt in the front row of the live stream 😁

The impact of AI nobody’s counting What clicking ‘generate’ costs the planet

We don't talk about the fact that every time you ask ChatGPT to write a poem about your cat, you're contributing to a climate crisis we all claim to care about solving.

medium.com/@gemma.croad...

The technical interview problem in engineering Why we keep using a hiring process we know doesn’t work

Technical interviews filter for people who are good at technical interviews, not people who are good at engineering.

We all know this, but we keep doing it anyway.

medium.com/@gemma.croad...

Layoutit Terra - CSS Terrain Generator An interactive CSS terrain generator. Define a grid and generate your terrain!

This is very cool!!! It's a CSS terrain generator that leverages stacked grids and 3D transforms. Apparently inspired by Transport Tycoon, Sim City and other '90s isometrics classics, it's built with Vue and Nuxt 😍 terra.layoutit.com

CodePen Challenge: CSS Shape ...

A little bit of fun for this weeks @codepen.io challenge using CSS shape() and corner-shape, a random kaleidoscope generator... 🥰 💠

codepen.io/GemmaCroad/p...

Are we adapting AI to humans, or humans to AI? Why we’re bending ourselves to fit the machine instead of the other way around

We tell ourselves we're optimising. Making things more efficient, more scalable. But what we're actually doing is quietly redesigning human work to fit AI's limitations one "optimisation" at a time.

medium.com/@gemma.croad...

The productivity problem in engineering Why measuring productivity makes everyone less productive

Measuring productivity makes everyone less productive. We optimise for what gets counted, and the work becomes producing metrics.

medium.com/@gemma.croad...

Why AI is a people problem, not a technical problem We keep looking for problems to fit our AI solutions into, then wondering why nobody uses what we build

When you start with "we need to use AI" and work backwards to find problems, you're not solving technical challenges. You're avoiding uncomfortable conversations about what you're actually trying to accomplish.

The hard part isn't building AI, it's knowing when not to.

medium.com/@gemma.croad...