bradbice.com

A month of housekeeping

brad@bradbice.com (Brad Bice) — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 12:00:00 -0400

Twenty-six days, 115 commits, and 70 closed issues later, this site is faster, more accessible, and depends on almost nothing.

A little over a year ago I wrote about vibe coding some improvements to this place after years of neglect. That was a handful of features over a few evenings. This was something else: I pointed Claude Code at the whole site and worked through it from top to bottom in some free time throughout July.

Also, I can’t really call this vibe coding. Vibe coding is accepting output you haven’t read. This was closer to directing a very fast engineer who needed a spec.

Time spent on this website has been limited lately. I have children to play with and raise, a wife to enjoy the world with, time to spend with friends and family, and (very importantly) time to just do something other than look at a screen. So sitting down and figuring out how to restore a URL sanitizer in the markdown render hooks (just as an example) wasn’t really high on my list.

But I’ve also been doing some other work on my computer lately, and sitting at a car dealership a few times, and relocating to a library on some days… all times when I can run Claude in parallel to my current situation (either waiting for something or doing my day job) to do some of these more tedious tasks. So off we went, hand in (AI-simulated) hand.

The short version: 115 commits, 70 issues closed, July 1 to July 26. Here’s roughly what came out of it. (Sorry, this gets a bit nerdy from here.)

Accessibility

This is the part I care most about, so I spent a lot of time here getting things right.

Unlabeled icons, missing alt text, and a few broken ARIA relationships, all fixed
The mobile menu is now fully keyboard operable
Added a skip link, and an actual h1 to detail pages that were missing one
Form labels and tab semantics on the contact page and ratings lists
Link colors now meet WCAG AA contrast

Accessibility is at a 100 Lighthouse score now, which I’m happy about.

Performance

The movies ratings page went from 1.13 MB to about 594 KB
The games page went from about 560 KB to 373 KB, because it had been rendering every poster twice
Images are now cropped at the CDN to the size they actually display, instead of shipping a full frame to be cropped away by CSS
Fonts, scripts, and stylesheets got the usual treatment: subsetting, font-display, deferring, bundling, fingerprinting
The search filter on an 800 item list no longer re-renders on every keystroke

Lighthouse performance went from the low 80s to 94. First paint dropped from 2.6s to 1.0s.

Security

I barely know what “security headers” are, and didn’t know I needed them on a personal website. Turns out they don’t fix anything that’s already broken. They just limit what a bad script could do if one ever got in, which mattered more than I thought, since I was loading three scripts I didn’t control. I had none of them.

Added a content security policy, HSTS, nosniff, referrer and permissions policies
Fixed a real XSS hole in the Twitter archive, where tweet text went into innerHTML unescaped
Restored Hugo’s URL sanitizer in the markdown render hooks, which had been switched off, so a javascript: link in a post can no longer produce a live href
The build now verifies the checksum of the Sass binary it downloads before putting it on the path
Deleted a service worker that had not been registered since 2018 and a dead publishing endpoint that was still advertised in every page’s head

Getting rid of dependencies

The site was loading three third-party scripts. All three are gone.

A dialog library, replaced by the browser’s native <dialog> element
A search library, replaced by about twenty lines of plain JavaScript, because 813 tweets do not need a search engine
A live CodePen embed, replaced by static syntax-highlighted code

The site now loads zero third-party JavaScript apart from analytics, and has no npm dependency at all. No node_modules, anywhere, ever. That is now written down as a rule. (And if you have ever created a website with Node, then you know how freeing this can be.)

Design and everything else

This is my favorite part.

New nav pills and a rebuilt mobile menu
The theme toggle cycles light, dark, and system, and each one finally has its own icon
Typography moved to Source Serif 4 for the blog posts and Source Sans 3 for the interface
The ratings pages got a shared search, sort, and filter, plus a real build-time scoring engine and an Airtable database sync
The library index, blog sidebar, ratings cards, and my resume all got reworked

So, Claude Code

Here’s the honest accounting. I am a designer. I am comfortable in CSS. I am not comfortable writing Go templates, reasoning about content security policies, or thinking about how Hugo’s URL sanitizer interacts with a Cloudinary transform string.

Most of this list is work I’d have done slowly, if at all. It’s work I would simply never have gotten to, because between a job and a family, time is at a premium.

What actually changed the game for me was that Claude Code held context from session to session and I could run that work while I worked elsewhere. Kind of like having my own software developer on staff.

The part I’m still careful about

I said something similar last year and it still holds. There’s a real risk of ending up with a site I don’t understand. Though, again, a lot of this work was scripting and security fixes and tedious behind-the-scenes stuff that I know very little about. Before last year I had written every line of this site by hand. I’m ok with giving some of that up now to make these huge leaps in efficiency and organization.

A few things helped. I asked for the reasoning behind changes, not just the changes. I pushed back when something seemed off, and it was sometimes right to hold its ground and sometimes wrong. Every change went through a branch, a build, and a look in the browser before it went anywhere near production. The security and accessibility work in particular got checked by measurement rather than by eye.

Anyway. The site is in better shape than it has ever been, and most of the work was the boring, unglamorous kind I have been avoiding for a decade. There’s a logo redesign and a music ratings section still on the list. We’ll see how those go.

Vibe improvements

brad@bradbice.com (Brad Bice) — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 00:40:04 -0700

Using AI to “vibe code” some improvements to this place after a good number of years of neglect.

Here are some of the projects that GitHub Copilot and Anthropic Claude have helped me accomplish, with no more than an hour devoted to each:

Added a light/dark theme switcher to the entire site, that respects a user’s system setting and allows them to override it
Added micro blog posts into the main blog posting feed
Added top 5 directors list to the Movies rating page
Added top 5 years and top 5 systems to the Video Games page

(I also restyled the ratings items, but I didn’t need - or want - AI help for that.)

So… AI.

It’s been fun using these crazy tools. Seeing what they can do with so little given to them in terms of prompts, watching them learn from the files I upload to them - it’s all really fascinating.

A case study

Also, a file that I usually work on annually for my playoffsbracket site is one that usually takes me hours to complete by manually referencing and copying and pasting NBA scores into a custom format I established several years ago. I also needed to copy and paste the URLs for each game I reference in the playoffs from nba.com to that file. This is a slog for me that I was actually planning on putting off this year.

Instead, I decided to show Anthropic Claude my file from last year, and my empty file from this year, and gave it this prompt:

Using 2024.json as an example, add all of the games from the 2025 NBA Playoffs to 2025.json, with links to nba.com and scores.

…and it created the entire file in 5 seconds. It actually scoured the internet for the NBA Playoffs results and the appropriate nba.com links to the games, looked at and learned from my custom format (which likely doesn’t make any sense since I don’t know what I’m doing writing JSON), and wrote the complete file. I saved it and ran it, and it ran perfectly. I didn’t need to make one change. It saved me hours.

Well, ok then

So if it can do that, what else can it do? Apparently a lot, as the above list demonstrates. I’m not a programmer. I’m not a frontend web developer. I’m a practiced web designer and design systems specialist, which has nothing to do with writing code in Go or figuring out how to traverse complex JSON data files and return data from them. I just want to make that data look cool on the way out.

Happiness, for now

So, I’m very happy for now to allow AI to take over the heavy lifting of the “complex” programming aspects of my private projects while I move on to the parts I like to do, like styling with CSS, figuring out what else I want to add, and what features I can make better or more accessible. Though I do want to be careful about having AI do a bit too much, and getting lazy with it, to the point where I’m not really internalizing how something works in CSS or how to apply new features. That’s why I’m writing my CSS manually still.

Anyway, this has been pretty fun for the past few days that I’ve been able to implement it. I have some ideas to run through these tools soon that should push them a bit further, so we’ll see how far we can go.

Concerts I've Attended

brad@bradbice.com (Brad Bice) — Thu, 23 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve collected concert and tour posters from all of the concerts I’ve ever attended - a remarkably pitiful list!

As a part of my recent efforts to expand my Library, I’ve added all of the concerts I’ve ever attended, and also collected tour posters from many of them to display as well. Some didn’t exist or couldn’t be found, so the next best things were included instead.

I’m using my Library to help collect information that I can refer to as a personal wiki of sorts. It’s been a fun personal project.

Winter Cleaning, 2022

brad@bradbice.com (Brad Bice) — Sat, 05 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

It was time for some cleanup around these parts, so here’s a list of what was fixed.

I spent some time this winter diving deep into this website and cleaning up what was initially a lot of add-on, messy, and less-than-optimally organized code. I also made some design updates and basically rounded off a lot of sharp edges. Here’s a roundup, for posterity:

Design changes

Standardized link hover states
Removed sunruise lines from homnepage
Fixed heading sizes in article-stubs
Changed up and fixed some dark mode colors and styles
Standardized button and form specs across the site
Fixed some movie rating layout issues
New menu button location and fixed header
Tweaked the Blog header to use a less-repeating image of the Chicago skyline

Code cleanup

Moved seasonal styles to date-conditional class
Restructured articles layout, and basically re-wrote the entire structure of every page
Changed colors to use hsl()
Converted all font-size px values to rem
Fixed some broken links across the site
Converted all modals to the new <dialog> element
Changed the primary branch from master to main

Content

Added new work post about Figma
Added a goodbye blog post for Tom
Added more movie, video game, and TV ratings
Switched from a Google Form to a custom form on the Contact page
Updated some Work posts with larger images and up-to-date content

What’s next

This was a clean-up and bug-fix phase, and now I have a list of some enhancement, performance, accessibility, and usability fixes to come next. Not to mention that it’s about time for a design refresh soon. This is a 2018 special that’s been going strong, and I’m happy with it still, but the itch is forming.

Core Web Vitals work
Lazy loading ratings images
Performance! ~~Currently scoring a 60 (94 on desktop) on the homepage. Embarrassing.~~ Edit: That was actually some adblocking scripts getting picked up. All good with 100 now!

My Favorite Holiday Movies, Ranked

brad@bradbice.com (Brad Bice) — Thu, 12 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Here are my favorite holiday movies, and how I’ve rated them.

The criteria for the rating system is explained here, and does not necessarily take into account which is the best holiday movie. This list is fairly accurate however. As you can see, guilty pleasures like “The Holiday” and “Love Actually” represent the corny – yet necessary – side of the holidays.

How the Grinch Stole Christmas

87%

Four Christmases

81%

The Nightmare Before Christmas

84%

How the Grinch Stole Christmas!

It's a Wonderful Life

69%

Introducing Dark Mode

brad@bradbice.com (Brad Bice) — Thu, 10 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve added a dark mode to bradbice.com, as well as some quick and simple ratings comparisons.

Dark mode

My website has been a little too bright lately, so I’ve implemented a dark mode which will activate according to your OS settings. Thanks to CSS custom properties and the (prefers-color-scheme: dark) media query, this was really simple to do and was completed in about 30 minutes and around 20 lines of CSS. Most of the time was coming up with alternative colors (granted mostly shades of black, gray, and white at this point) and checking color contrast ratios.

I hope it’s a little easier on your eyes if you’re viewing the site at night or if you’ve turned the rest of your computer dark.

Movie comparisons

My other side project is rating movies. Here I’m collecting every movie I’ve ever watched in my entire life, documenting them, and rating them. My wife will join in when we watch the same movie together.

At times, I may want to compare movies of a certain run, certain eras, that have similar actors, etc. Now I’ve created a simple shortcode in Hugo that allows me to do that by passing in a list of movies like so:

blog-movies "batmanbegins:thedarkknight:thedarkknightrises"

The Dark Knight Rises

61%

Now I can compare any types of movies, and as many as I can list (as long as I’ve already rated them).

Back to the Future

94%

Back to the Future Part II

90%

Back to the Future Part III

91%

However, as of this writing I’ve only rated 153 of 737 movies (21%), so I’ve got a ways to go before I can fully utilize this feature.

And Now... The Movies

brad@bradbice.com (Brad Bice) — Sun, 29 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000

A lot can happen when you’re sick and the wife and child are away. Movie ratings are here.

I’ve had a bit of an upper-respiratory infection (undiagnosed) this weekend, and the wife and child are away for a couple of days, so I’ve had a lot of time to sit around the house. This also has meant watching a few movies I normally wouldn’t have.

I’ve long wanted to add movie ratings to my site and so now I’ve done it. Now Natalie and I can both rate movies as we watch them and tally our scores. Check it out at the Movies page.

It’s sparse for now, but we’ll be adding more as we have the time. I’ll also want to redesign the Movies home page a bit to better show our top rated movies, as well as being able to sort by criteria such as rating, genre and date. All in due time.

Enjoy!

Twitter Alternative: Micro.blog

brad@bradbice.com (Brad Bice) — Wed, 17 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I’m a daily user of Twitter, but it has some problems. Luckily, there’s hope in an alternative: Micro.blog.

I love using Twitter on a daily basis for my topic-specific news and to follow interesting people on the web. I make the most of the mess that is Twitter by sticking to a few specific methods:

Follow people, not companies — I’ve had much more “success” on Twitter following specific individuals (not celebrities) of whom I respect their opinion, mostly without too much of an agenda.
Use lists — My main Twitter timeline is an ever-updating mess waterfall that upsets my compulsiveness. Lists are focused, topic-based groupings that allow me to catch up on specific categories one at a time.
Stay away from Twitter.com — I can’t stand promoted tweets or non-linear timelines. I use Tweetbot on iOS and macOS to prevent this and also for the vital synced timeline position between devices.

Sticking to those points helps me actually enjoy reading the content on Twitter. However, the company itself has proven to be pretty horrible in how they organize and conduct their business. They don’t really seem to respect their users, they don’t utilize a logical business model, and they won’t ban hate groups or other offensive content.

Unfortunately there aren’t many or any alternatives. Definitely none as popular. App.net was a promising venture that acted as an ad-free Twitter alternative. It ultimately failed due to low engagement and a failed business model.

Micro.blog is the latest player in the space, and the simplicity and model of it has me excited. It’s a free micro-blogging service, that encourages users to feed content from their own blogs to their timelines. Users can also pay nominal fees to host a micro-blog or to cross-post content to Twitter and Facebook (I’m paying the $2/month for this).

I’m hoping that this will take off and that the owner has some higher standards for rules around content, and that he maintains the simple business model.

Newwwyear Grand Re-Opening

brad@bradbice.com (Brad Bice) — Mon, 08 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve redesigned and re-launched my website multiple times. Let’s go again!

Inspired by years of frustration of having my content fragmented across multiple websites and social networks, and the timely tweet above, I’ve spent the last few months pulling together this new project.

I’ve finally come to a place where I’m happy enough (but still embarrassed) to deploy my work-in-progress redesign and reorganization of my website. However, I can’t release my baby into the wild without some caveats:

Perfection is the enemy of done

This is a work-in-progress, and it’s meant to be. There is a lot going on in this simple personal website that I’m not happy with, and a lot I want to improve and add on to. However, if I wait until I’m absolutely happy with what I have, I won’t ever publish it. This includes:

The color scheme - After experimenting with a bunch of color palettes, stripping it all and going with black & white was the quickest and allowed me to focus more on the content and layout.
The typography - I generally like my selections here, but am not completely sold on them. Plus I’m using 3 separate font-families – Roboto Slab, Montserrat and system fonts – so I’ll need to reconcile those for performance and aesthetics at some point.
Work portfolio - I’ve added most of my examples of work, but no actual visuals like screen grabs or images just yet. I’m still looking for the best way to present those in a gallery-type fashion.
Resume - The information is there, but it’s not too aesthetically pleasing. I need to spice that up, and add in some print styles as well.

Other stuff

Contact form (currently using Wufoo)
Tag/category page list styles
The logo - It’s version 0.5, for sure.

With that said, I’m happy enough to push this live and start publishing content to it. Any Twitter posts will hopefully be mirrored here, except Retweets. If you don’t know what that is or don’t read Twitter, then you’re missing a lot and nothing all at once.

One point of all of this is to combine my personal and professional-facing websites into one. I don’t need two, no need to put on a business face or anything like that. Might as well push everything together and make it simpler on myself.

Thank you for reading, please stop by again (or add my feed to your device or feed service), and follow me on Twitter for update notifications and other stuff. Yay!

(Also, if you’re wondering about the “After Hours” title of my blog, it’s a name I’ve wanted to do something with for a long time. I’ve always been a night owl, and have historically stayed up late and worked late and actually do most of my best thinking and work at night. I’d like to parlay it into a brand of sorts maybe, given the right ventures and opportunities. If not, it’s a fun blog title that gives a little spice to my thoughts and ramblings.)