Daniel D. Beck

screenshot of the one-pager version of the servo readiness report

How do we get to more than just three web engines owned by three US companies?

It's a gargantuan question, with no easy or right answer.

I've put together a draft report, thinking about it through a very specific approach - please enjoy:

Servo Readiness Report

webtransitions.org/servo-readin...

Slop’s ancestor Ten years ago, Kate Compton wrote “So you want to build a generator….” Nothing better prepared me for a world where text and image generati…

Why a 10-year-old Tumblr post by @galaxykate.bsky.social is still the most important thing I've read about generating text

GitHub - ddbeck/readme-checklist: A checklist for writing READMEs A checklist for writing READMEs. Contribute to ddbeck/readme-checklist development by creating an account on GitHub.

Today's the first Monday of the month, which is a great time to document the undocumented with a README

Pandoc for the people Pandoc for the people runs pandoc in your web browser. You can use it to convert documents without a command line.

Notes on pandoc for the people, the pandoc that runs in your web browser

writing code should not be the primary way of contributing to free open source software

“Tall Man” lettering Tall Man lettering seeks to avoid medication errors by using casing to make look-alike names look less alike.

You might know camelCase or snake_case or kebab-case, but do you know Tall Man?

Faster Git fetch with parallel jobs If you work with many Git remotes, then commands like git fetch --all or git fetch --multiple can be slow. You can save time with an option or one-line configuration change.

If you work with many Git remotes or submodules, you can save time on fetches with parallel jobs

new post from Daniel on OSS docs! Always worth reading :)

Hey, web specification authors: I dare you to title a spec without a Pascal case "Web" prefix. I bet you can't do it!

I always try to use examples from docs I actually read, as a user. The Astro docs are so tidy. Y'all are doing good work.

Cool to see @astro.build used as an example of what a larger project does to organize ALL THE VARIOUS DOCS OMG. Even our meta Astro Docs Docs (AD^2) gets a mention.

All you really need to get started is Daniel's excellent README checklist. (Then a Starlight site when you need more "breathing room")

Where do open source docs go? To start publishing open source docs, you need somewhere to put them. Here are some common approaches.

A reader recently wrote to me asking about where to put docs, especially planning and design docs, in a new open source project. I blogged my response. #documentation

Stop chopping onions and extend Markdown without tears at FOSDEM 2026 A tour of Markdown's hidden extension points.

If you came to my talk at FOSDEM, "Stop chopping onions and extend Markdown without tears," thank you! My talk page has credits, slides, and further links. (This page works now, if you tried to go to it earlier.)

that xkcd comic where there are a bunch of dependencies stacked perilously on that one project maintained by one person

xkcd 2347 is the unofficial logo of FOSDEM

Oh yeah, I've got a stable of video game soundtracks for this sort of thing:

- Donut County (+ Bonuts)
- SHENZHEN I/O
- Sunshine Heavy Industries
- Bugsnax
- Paradise Killer

We've talked about SomaFM, right?

Think habitat, not ecosystem, when you choose a static site generator If a static site generator’s ecosystem is an ocean, then you might join a happy school of fish or become chum for the sharks. Think about your niche before diving in.

When I give clients advice about this, I preface myself with something like "choose familiar over good" (I have a whole essay about it: ddbeck.com/static-site-...). So now that I've said it: Astro (or Starlight). Eleventy if I'm doing something very small or weird. But they're familiar to me already

To exploit Cunningham's Law is a core tech writing skill “Assert your way to stronger technical writing” by Jason McIntosh describes how to use an “assertions document” to coax subject matter expe…

A note on "assertions documents," Cunningham's Law, and a skill development pattern in tech writing

No other word has done more damage to the craft of writing in recent years than “content”. Even if you’re using the word “content” ironically, or as a cute little joke, don’t. When someone calls writing “content” they’re pissing on someone’s hard work & passion. “Content” is Technosatan’s henchword.

If you regularly get a Knowledge Management bee in your bonnet, as I do, then look at this piece (and @emckean.bsky.social 's talk). It's absolutely packed with useful concepts and tips from people who've been there, done that, and compressed it all into tiny shiny diamonds.

Against Access “Against Access” by DeafBlind poet and author John Lee Clark is an arresting essay about the often one-way street of accessibility.

A brief note on alt text and John Lee Clark's essay, "Against Access"

GitHub - ddbeck/readme-checklist: A checklist for writing READMEs A checklist for writing READMEs. Contribute to ddbeck/readme-checklist development by creating an account on GitHub.

Today's my first workday of the year and some things are slightly unfamiliar again. The new year great time to document something undocumented with a README, while it's still "new"

There's a very nice writeup of my talk at OSS Tokyo in LWN! lwn.net/SubscriberLi... (gift link) Thanks again to the wonderful @kissane.myatproto.social and @ddbeck.com who created the Docs Advisor and Docs Archetypes (github.com/google/opendocs)!

docs: fix typo in `dependabot-execution` rule description by ddbeck · Pull Request #1428 · zizmorcore/zizmor Pre-submission checks Please check these boxes: Mandatory: This PR corresponds to an issue (if not, please create one first). I hereby disclose the use of an LLM or other AI coding assistant ...

It's so satisfying to get a tiny typo fix merged into a project that I like. I'm doing my part—even if it's just a couple bytes.

GitHub - ddbeck/readme-checklist: A checklist for writing READMEs A checklist for writing READMEs. Contribute to ddbeck/readme-checklist development by creating an account on GitHub.

At #WriteTheDocs Berlin in October, a few people told me, unprompted, that my README checklist helped them document something. Maybe it can help you document something too!

10000 Bowls of Oatmeal But One Of Them Killed My Father by Verbante ongoing murder investigation

10000 Bowls of Oatmeal But One Of Them Killed My Father, is an ongoing murder investigation and I need your help to solve it? Read the progress here and submit your own descriptions of oatmeal to help me get my revenge.

verbante.itch.io/10000-bowls

I was contemplating my working life recently and how all the nerdy work is plain text (more or less) but every business record, contract, tax document, and government correspondence has paper as its canonical form. If plain text is god, then PDF is king.

It's possible HTTP keys might be overrepresented in the set of unmapped keys, so something to watch out for in web-features

I'm just a simpleton with a humanities education but I'm almost in this camp. The contemporary programmer enjoys fewer avenues for emphasis than Gutenberg. Why does authoring code mostly lack the sophistication of headings, boldface, footnotes, endnotes, appendices, and so on?

Berlin 2025 Recap - Talk Videos, Photos, CoC Report Hi everyone, Our team is slowly emerging from the post-conference recovery period, and we wanted to send out a quick message to thank everyone for helping to make Write the Docs Berlin 2025 such a ...

📹 We've published videos and photos of Write the Docs Berlin, and this is your last chance to get a conference t-shirt. Thanks to all participants of the conference, in-person and online! Read more in our recap: