From now on I’ll call you…; The State of devs in 2026; Viewer Discretion Is Advised
I had a list of 12 resources with notes to pick through for three topics, today, and only these three made the cut due to the Claude sphincter avatar being in the git repos. Truth be told, the HTML/JS source in the first resource does have some Claudeish in the comments, but that may be a human who has been programmed by the LLMs to use their speak (that is “a thing”).
NOTE: I may pick 2 from the remaining list for another Drop this week since they are pretty stupid cool and useful. I’ll note that they’re built with the help of AI so folks that feel emotionally compelled to avoid such content can do so.
And, yes, have stopped TL;DRs even though they were done with local models. It’s not worth arguing, muting, or blocking folks over.
From now on I’ll call you…
We’ve covered modern browser fingerprinting techniques before, but Roy Fish’s “Fingerprints are the new cookies” is such a good ’splainer + walkthrough that I felt compelled to feature it, especially as we are about to head into a time of even greater digital surveillance (at least in the U.S.).
The page itself cleverly demonstrates the insidious techniques used by the would-be trackers. It measures a handful of things your browser will happily answer without a permission prompt — OfflineAudioContext rendering an inaudible tone, WebGL reporting your GPU vendor and driver, canvas rasterizing text and emoji, Intl reading your time zone and number formatting, navigator counting cores, memory, and language. It hashes that pile with crypto.subtle.digest('SHA-256', …), and turns the digest into an animal, which was unique across all installed browsers save for both Safari and Safari Technical Preview resulting in the exact same name.
After refreshing, clearing cookies, and jumping on a VPN, each browser still carried the same spirit animal’s moniker. If you or I open it on a second device, there would be a different-and-stubbornly-stable animal guide.
I won’t steal any further thunder from the author. The sections are very grokable, and you may even be able to show it to friends and fam as we enter the end-of-year holiday season.
You can read the code that does all this at the bottom of the page in the “methods used on this page” section if you just want to jump to there.
The section header is one of my browser’s own fingerprint demo.
The State of Devs in 2026
State of Devs is a survey fousing on the human side of coding instead the tools. Devographics — The State of Devs in 2026 — runs it, and this year 5,463 developers answered. They talked about pay, job security, mental health, how they get treated at work, and AI. Researcher Miranda Heath wrote the summary.
The survey ran from July 5 to September 5, 2026. No sign-up needed, so anyone could answer (i.e., it’s not “science”, per-se), and most folks heard about it through Devographics mailing lists and social media. Every question was optional. Again, this is def not “science”.
I tried to pick three top nuggets from it worth sharing, and the first is that stable work is gone for many. Nearly half said they faced job insecurity and low pay, with 25% experiencing a layoff at some point (one in ten lost a job in the last 9 months). More than one in four expect to switch careers within 5 years, and not by choice. Ugh.
As one might expect the topic of AI is divisive with 49% feelin good about AI and 42% feeling bad about it. Almost half say AI tools made their mental state worse (I feel seen). Over 1,500 folks took the time to fill in the free-form box in this section, and their main worries: how to use AI safely, that it makes work less rewarding, and that bosses now expect impossible amounts of output.
Lastly (for my top three), 62% have faced burnout in their career, now, for two years straight. Unshockingly, women face discrimination much more than men by 26 points. LGBT+ developers and those with ADHD or autism said they feel pressure to hide who they are at work, which is most certainly a direct link to higher burnout risk.
There’s scads more info in the report, plus you can apply to get access to the raw data so you can draw your own conclusions.
Viewer Discretion Is Advised
I do not make a habit of linking to sites making prolific use of colorful metaphors (I usually find such use a sign of both a weak intellect and lack of creativity), but this one did produce a grin or two.
In 2013, a website called motherfuckingwebsite.com told developers their sites were overbuilt, and everyone LOLd, agreed, and then went back and made things much worse.
Today it takes Node, a package manager, over a thousand dependencies, a bundler, a compiler, a framework, and a build pipeline just to put a paragraph on a screen, and every blog now ships with a loading spinner.
The goal of this new site is to point out that the things developers think they need all that machinery for — accessible page structure, search engine data, social media preview cards, performance hints, modern image formats, dark mode, and fast page transitions — are all built into HTML and the browser already. They are just tags you type into a file.
So the site proves its own argument: it is a single HTML file, about 23 KB, with no dependencies and no build step, deployed by copying the file to a server.
If you, too, would like to further lean into modern HTML practices, you may also be interested in:
- Native HTML and CSS Features That Replaced JavaScript · Ronalds Vilciņš
- Modern Motherfucking Website
FIN
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