Hacker News: seanwilson

New comment by seanwilson in "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (October 2026)"

seanwilson — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 13:33:17 +0000

Location: Edinburgh, UK

Remote: Yes (I’m used to time zone differences and async work)

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Figma, Sketch, TypeScript, JavaScript, Vue, Hugo, Jekyll, WordPress, Django, HTML/CSS, Bootstrap, Tailwind, OCaml, Java, Python, C, analytics, WCAG accessibility, website SEO/speed optimisation.

Résumé/CV: See https://seanw.org/ for portfolio, and https://checkbot.io/ and https://inclusivecolors.com/ for live example projects

Email: sw@seanw.org

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SEEKING FREELANCE WORK | UX/UI & web design

I help startups with the UX/UI and web design of their products. This includes web apps, websites, landing pages, copywriting, and I can assist with frontend development where needed. My background of launching my own products and being a full stack developer helps me create practical designs that balance usability, aesthetics, development effort, and performance. I work to fixed price quotes for self-contained projects.

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The best live example of my work is Checkbot (https://checkbot.io/), a browser extension that tests websites for SEO/speed/security problems. The entire project is my own work including coding the extension itself, UX/UI design, website design (the homepage is optimised to load in 0.7 seconds, 0.3MB data transferred), marketing, website copy, and website articles on web best practices.

[ Rated 4.9/5, 80K+ active users, 100s of paying subscribers ]

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I have 10+ years of experience, including a PhD in software verification and 5+ years working for myself helping over 25 companies including Just Eat, Triumph Motorcycles and Fogbender (YC W22). See my website for testimonials, portfolio and more: https://seanw.org

New comment by seanwilson in "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (September 2026)"

seanwilson — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 15:30:26 +0000

Location: Edinburgh, UK

Remote: Yes (I’m used to time zone differences and async work)

Willing to relocate: No

Résumé/CV: See https://seanw.org/ for portfolio, and https://checkbot.io/ and https://inclusivecolors.com/ for live example projects

Email: sw@seanw.org

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SEEKING FREELANCE WORK | UX/UI & web design

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[ Rated 4.9/5, 80K+ active users, 100s of paying subscribers ]

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New comment by seanwilson in "Composable Tests"

seanwilson — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 15:00:40 +0000

What's the problem of only keeping test 3 if it depends on test 2 and 1 passing anyway?

The article mentions not to do this because "Deleting test1 loses us another property from the Test Desiderata—tests should be specific. That’s the property of tests where, when one fails, you know exactly where the problem is." but you'll know what line it failed on. And some test runners let you break a test into steps, where groups of lines are given a description.

Or put each step + assert in a helper function (e.g. `doStep1AndAssert()`), and each test only calls these helper functions?

Nothing is perfect, but copy/pasting chunks between tests like this isn't great when you want to refactor and it's repetitive to read.

New comment by seanwilson in "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (August 2026)"

seanwilson — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 15:00:49 +0000

Location: Edinburgh, UK

Remote: Yes (I’m used to time zone differences and async work)

Willing to relocate: No

Résumé/CV: See https://seanw.org/ for portfolio, and https://checkbot.io/ and https://inclusivecolors.com/ for live example projects

Email: sw@seanw.org

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SEEKING FREELANCE WORK | UX/UI & web design

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[ Rated 4.9/5, 80K+ active users, 100s of paying subscribers ]

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New comment by seanwilson in "Some more things about Django I've been enjoying"

seanwilson — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 10:36:34 +0000

Thanks! Any noticeable downsides?

New comment by seanwilson in "Some more things about Django I've been enjoying"

seanwilson — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:45:34 +0000

> over time decided the Django model was actually more effective as your cue to ask whether you should have been writing a Python function instead and calling it

I get the motivation, but is disallowing brackets and proper variables really the right way to do this? These make code clearer to read and reduce duplication more than they introduce complexity so this is going too far in my opinion and feels arbitrary.

New comment by seanwilson in "Some more things about Django I've been enjoying"

seanwilson — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 12:41:36 +0000

For Django's default template language, does it still have these limitations?

1. Brackets aren't allowed to help with boolean expressions like {% if a and (b or c) %}

2. You can't do basic arithmetic like {{ x * 2 }}, but you're allowed to do {{ x | add:"2" }}. There's hacks to multiply using {% widthratio a 1 b %} or division with {% widthratio a b 1 %} though (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18350630/multiplication-...).

3. You can't assign expressions to variables like {% with x = a or b %}, so you have to repeat yourself.

4. You can't capture HTML generated from template code in a variable to pass into a partial template to write slots-style HTML components e.g. {% capture x %}Hello {{ username }}{% endcapture %}{{ include "partials/header.html" with body_html=x }}.

5. You can't pass variables to model methods.

I understand there's a philosophy that templates shouldn't contain complex logic, but I find the above pretty arbitrary and leads to code that's harder to maintain. Addition is okay but not multiplication? Boolean logic is okay but not with brackets? I often have to puzzle out some way to get my code to work that goes against what I'd normally want to do, some I'm forced to duplicate template code because you can't put expressions in variables or move basic one-off logic into views (which has poor locality https://htmx.org/essays/locality-of-behaviour/ and makes it harder to move template snippets between pages).

It's like hiding the kitchen knives because they might be misused.

Is Jinja2 a practical alternative or there's friction to using it?

New comment by seanwilson in "Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time"

seanwilson — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 15:30:35 +0000

> Instead of failing gracefully if the resources it asked for weren’t available, it would simply allocate them, and cause a guru meditation, the Amiga equivalent of a blue screen of death or kernel panic.

Hadn't seen this before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guru_Meditation

New comment by seanwilson in "After 7 years in production, Scarf has reluctantly moved away from Haskell"

seanwilson — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 10:53:21 +0000

> The important metric: how long does your entire development feedback cycle take, and what portion of that time is spent waiting on your compiler?

> So far, we haven’t lost much in the switch. The type safety we gave up hasn’t been noticeable in any concrete way yet, especially considering our test coverage has never been better.

Moving to Python means you'll have quicker compile times but now you'll need a bigger test suite which will take longer to run to get feedback after code edits? In TypeScript, you can compile and execute without waiting on type checking, an option like that would help?

New comment by seanwilson in "Dark mode with web standards"

seanwilson — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 13:17:44 +0000

Some recommendations based on studies here https://www.nngroup.com/articles/dark-mode/

> In people with normal vision (or corrected-to-normal vision), visual performance tends to be better with light mode, whereas some people with cataract and related disorders may perform better with dark mode. On the flip side, long-term reading in light mode may be associated with myopia.

> we strongly recommend that designers allow users to switch to dark mode if they want to — for three reasons: (1) there may be long-term effects associated with light mode; (2) some people with visual impairments will do better with dark mode; and (3) some users simply like dark mode better.

New comment by seanwilson in "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (July 2026)"

seanwilson — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 19:53:47 +0000

Location: Edinburgh, UK

Remote: Yes (I’m used to time zone differences and async work)

Willing to relocate: No

Résumé/CV: See https://seanw.org/ for portfolio, and https://checkbot.io/ and https://inclusivecolors.com/ for live example projects

Email: sw@seanw.org

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SEEKING FREELANCE WORK | UX/UI & web design

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[ Rated 4.9/5, 80K+ active users, 100s of paying subscribers ]

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New comment by seanwilson in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (June 2026)"

seanwilson — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 10:51:57 +0000

Tweaks to my accessible color palette editor that helps you create Tailwind style palettes for web/UI design:

https://www.inclusivecolors.com/

Most tools only let you enter a single color and then attempt to autogenerate or use AI to create the other tints/shades, which often don't do a great job and are really limiting when you're creating branded palettes.

The focus on this tool is to let you tweak every tint/shade while keeping an eye on accessible contrast. The curve based editor shows you how the H/S/L values of your colors vary across a color scale and is meant to make the editing process quick and intuitive enough that you won't want to give up control to autogeneration.

New comment by seanwilson in "CSS: Unavoidable Bad Parts"

seanwilson — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 12:47:55 +0000

This is still adding wrapper elements to get the layout you want. Even if you can force yourself to come up with some vague semantics behind the wrapper elements (that you wouldn't have otherwise added), I don't see how it's much better than using a generic tag and it shows you need to modify HTML to modify the presentation in practice.

Visual design involves a lot of grouping and aligning elements, and there isn't always semantic reasons for it. Grouping is usually best done in the HTML, so it's hard keep this part of the visual design out of your HTML.

New comment by seanwilson in "CSS: Unavoidable Bad Parts"

seanwilson — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 12:06:43 +0000

I was thinking more of a document with multiple paragraphs and images, where some paragraphs are grouped with images and some aren't.

In the code from the link, the element is serving as the wrapper element, that gives you a hook to get the layout you want. But when you're not lucky enough to have a semantic wrapper tag like that, you've usually got to add a generic tag help. Or write CSS that's closely coupled with the HTML, so they aren't really separate anyway.

New comment by seanwilson in "CSS: Unavoidable Bad Parts"

seanwilson — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 11:40:11 +0000

The concept makes more sense for styling simple document style pages from 20 years ago, but it hasn't scaled to modern designs, complex web UIs and responsive pages that we want to code now, which isn't that surprising.

> we would all be writing purely semantic html with completely orthogonal and swappable css. And today literally no one designs web sites that way - html today is mostly specific to presentation

I think of HTML + CSS as the presentation layer now, and the data lives in your e.g. database and Markdown files, so the data and its presentation are still separate enough.

The idea of just swapping out the CSS to completely restyle a complex site is nice, but people need to accept this hasn't worked out (and not because devs are bad at CSS) and move on.

New comment by seanwilson in "CSS: Unavoidable Bad Parts"

seanwilson — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 10:37:46 +0000

> If you “View Source” on any “real” website, you’ll notice that everything has layers and layers of wrapper elements, so you might be tricked into thinking that wrappers are how you solve layout problems. I can’t really agree or disagree here, as I never wrote “production” CSS, but, in my experience, it’s much easier to understand if you do the opposite — restrict yourself to using only markup-meaningful semantic tags, and then figure out CSS which works with the markup you have.

CSS isn't powerful enough by itself to create any layout you want without modifying the HTML. You almost always need wrapper elements to group elements you want to align together for presentation purposes only (e.g. "a vertically centered row containing one paragraph next to two vertically stacked images"), so there often aren't semantic HTML tags that would make sense.

It's similar to how you use numerous groups/frames in design apps like Inkscape and Figma to help align elements, where nobody would suggest you were a bad designer for using groups that don't have semantic meaning.

You can only really avoid wrapper elements for simple Markdown style pages with simple designs, where the CSS for that is straightforward.

I think in these discussions, it needs to be clearer how complex the page designs being discussed are. The CSS advice that makes sense for simple Markdown style pages is very different to what makes sense for a complex web app UI or a highly designed marketing page.

New comment by seanwilson in "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (June 2026)"

seanwilson — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 15:43:53 +0000

Location: Edinburgh, UK

Remote: Yes (I’m used to time zone differences and async work)

Willing to relocate: No

Résumé/CV: See https://seanw.org/ for portfolio, and https://checkbot.io/ and https://inclusivecolors.com/ for live example projects

Email: sw@seanw.org

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SEEKING FREELANCE WORK | UX/UI & web design

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[ Rated 4.9/5, 80K+ active users, 100s of paying subscribers ]

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New comment by seanwilson in "Programmers will document for Claude, but not for each other"

seanwilson — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 13:53:44 +0000

> I keep seeing programmers say how angry it makes them that people are willing to write detailed CLAUDE.md and PROJECT.md files for Claude to use, but they weren't willing to write them for their coworkers.

Similar for adding static type checking, which makes it easier for AI and coworkers to understand the code, catch mistakes, and to refactor. And now there's coders willing to add static type checking to help AI but didn't see the benefit before for some reason.

The end of seats: pricing Netlify for 3B builders

seanwilson — Mon, 04 May 2026 12:51:31 +0000

Article URL: https://www.netlify.com/blog/pricing-netlify-for-3-billion-builders/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48008054

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by seanwilson in "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (May 2026)"

seanwilson — Fri, 01 May 2026 18:09:47 +0000

Location: Edinburgh, UK

Remote: Yes (I’m used to time zone differences and async work)

Willing to relocate: No

Résumé/CV: See https://seanw.org/ for portfolio, and https://checkbot.io/ and https://inclusivecolors.com/ for live example projects

Email: sw@seanw.org

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SEEKING FREELANCE WORK | UX/UI & web design

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[ Rated 4.9/5, 80K+ active users, 100s of paying subscribers ]

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