Here’s my Junited entry for June 2026. I’ll aim to share one post each day in this note. You can find others who are participating this year in Robert’s Junited page.
June 1st
IndieWeb Carnival (June 2026): No way!? by Alex Hsu is an invitation for bloggers to write about something unexpected that they’ve learned.
Has anything ever happened in your life that felt like a movie plot twist? Something that made you go “No way!?” but turned out to be completely true?
I felt this was an appropriate kickoff to this year’s Junited: if we’re sharing blog posts by people, why not start with one that encourages you to write more blog posts.
If you’re interested in web development or games, you’ll find even more blog posts in Alex’s blog that will likely interest you.
June 2nd
Jodi’s The Curious About Everything Newsletter is always such a joy when a new issue finds its way to my RSS reader. Most of the blogs I follow, fall into one of maybe two or three categories and what I end up reading thus tends to be of a limited pool of topics.
This newsletter however, exposes me to wonderful stories from so many different topics that I would have never ran into otherwise. One of my favourites from the 63rd issue was this Ella Frances Sanders’ piece on weather that taught me words like gluggaveður (Icelandic) and hatsuyuki (Japanese) that I’ll try to incorporate into my day-to-day life.
June 3rd
This is not exactly a blog post and it’s 20 years old thing but I learned about it today and it’s a lot of fun so I’m using Junited as an excuse to tell you about it.
Rock-Paper-Scissors is a classic game. Rock beats Scissors, Scissors beat Paper and Paper beats Rock.
But how about Rock-Paper-Scissors 101 that has 101 different options instead of just the boring three.
Here it is… the largest creative project I’ve ever worked on, period. A 101-gesture version of Rock-Paper-Scissors. It is a game so complex, I highly doubt anyone will actually even want to attempt to play it. It’s not just remembering what beats what, but remembering how to actually say all 5,050 outcomes is something only a savant could manage.
My favourite is obviously number 39, a Train.
It
- requires Brains
- scares Duck
- reflects Rainbow
- intriques Alien
- amuses Devil
among other things.
If you want to learn more about to get from RPS to RPS-101, Fractal Philosophy has a nice video Rock Paper Scissors 2 that goes deeper into the math:
To do that we analyze Rock Paper Scissors from a mathematics and game design perspective, looking at the topological and mechanical properties that make it work. We then look at variants on the core rules, and how most of them make the game worse instead of better. After, we look at how larger video games use Rock Paper Scissors in different ways to get around those difficulties, and use that as the basis for introducing the two paradoxical RPS variant - something I think has a large amount of untapped potential as a game mechanic.
Today’s entry went a bit more towards TILvember than Junited but we can’t all be perfect all the time.
June 4th
Designing with Mustard by Anna E. Cook is a wonderful piece about design, design tools and prototyping.
It’s a really good read for anyone who works with any kind of product, whether physical or digital. She writes about the different goals of prototypes and how those drive your decisions for choosing the tools and approaches for building them.
The article also is a take on using generative AI for prototyping.
Models only know averages. And no human is average.
Design is the edges. It’s the human reasoning, strategy, empathy, and collaboration required to think within and beyond our own lived experiences.
AI cannot replace that.
and
One thing about designing that I didn’t fully appreciate earlier in my career: the act of making something is how you figure out what it is. It’s the process of taking role, look and feel, and implementation questions and finding answers until you integrate it together into one cohesive solution.
(I have similar ideas about AI with your notes and how thinking IS the important part of the process)
June 5th
Vim is a text/code editor that keeps giving. I’ve been using it since 2013 and yet I still keep learning new handy things. Today, I learned about set tildeop from R. L. Dane’s The Motion that Changed Everything.
With the tildeop set, you can use ~ in combination with the rest of vim’s motions to switch the casing between lower and upper case. A ~w changes the entire word, ~~ (double tilde) changes the entire line, ~2w changes next two words and so on.
Changing the case of words isn’t something that comes up all that often in my writing or coding but it’s good to know that there’s a better way for it than manually removing and replacing characters or words.
I’m also happy to learn about Vim Carnival and this month’s theme “The Motion That Changed Everything” that the post is an entry to inspired me to think about writing an entry of my own.
June 6th
I love Emma Goto’s blog. She writes about her hikes in Japan with stunning photos and stories. For this Junited entry, I picked Mt Asama (Mt Maekake): hiking Karuizawa’s active volcano from last week but there are so many nice ones to read.
When I was younger and in better physical fit, I enjoyed roaming in the forests. My only hike though was when I was 15 when we hiked for a couple of weeks in the Finnish wilderness. These days, I mostly live through other people’s hike stories. Another hiker who I follow is Aino Kallio who makes videos of her hikes in Youtube.
June 7th
Chad Whitacre’s I Am Retiring from Tech to Live Offline is a cool use of thematic medium and crossing digital with analogue.
He wrote a two-page letter to the internet with a typewriter and added annotations like red pen additions and stamps. The letter itself is about his decision to retire from tech.
One big downside though is that there’s no alt text for the images of the letters and no other way to read otherwise great letters.
June 8th
Of Dice and Meeples is a digital APA board game zine — a collection of other zines and articles on the topic — and their second issue just landed last weekend. The second issues’s theme was racing games and there are a bunch of great stuff to read in there! The June issue of my Roll the Zine was also part of this month’s publication.
The PDF is ~40 MB so I won’t link to it directly but you can find the link to the 2nd issue from the frontpage.
June 9th
Inclusive Android Apps #7: The Problem of Inacessible Inline Links is a brand new edition of Eevis’ newsletter about accessible Android apps. This specific issue focuses on inline links and how to use LinkAnnotation.Url to make them accessible.
If you’re interested in accessibility in general, their blog is a great place full of wonderful articles and insights.
June 10th
I used to use Plex as my media server in the past but their fall into the darkness of enshittification that started years ago made me first stop using it at all and then later I switched to Jellyfin. I’ve now been running it for a while as part of my homelab and I’m very satisfied.
The Unknown Universe’s article Plex, the Slow Creep of Enshittification is a very good article chronicling Plex’s downfall in the past years.
I can’t remember in which order these happened but there were two things especially that made me run away fast. One of them was when they decided that I need to pay them to watch my own movies with a software that I run in my server. Second was when they started sending emails about what I’ve been watching to other people who had access to some shares. It was creepy as fuck and it wasn’t opt-in.
June 11th
My experience with coaching is very limited but I’ve been mentoring (and being mentored) for quite a few years throughout my studies and career. I’ve also done a few workshops/small courses on coaching so it’s something I’m familiar with and interested in.
Neil Vass’s Coaching: When you’re asked for your own expertise is a really nice article exploring the balance between asking questions and providing answers or advice when coaching someone — especially when they specifically ask for advice.
June 12th
This week, I finally got to see Una Kravets talk about web development live in Future Frontend (you can check it too from the livestream). She’s such a great speaker whose talks and insights I’ve been enjoying for years.
For Junited, I wanna highlight Ten modern layouts in one line of CSS and its accompanying website 1-Line Layouts. There are ten cool and very useful layout snippets for CSS grid and flexbox based systems.
June 13th
I love how Jim Nielsen writes about software development as a craft and iterating over the UI similar to sanding in woodworking in Sanding UI.
It’s kind of a QA tactic in a sense, just click around and try to break stuff. But I like to think of it as being more akin to woodworking. You have a plank of wood and you run it through the belt sander to get all the big, coarse stuff smoothed down. Then you pull out the hand sander, sand a spot, run your hand over it, feel for splinters, sand it some more, over and over until you’re satisfied with the result.
His conclusion of
It’s a small thing, but lots of small splinters lead to an agonizing experience.
is a very important one. Especially since there’s a big difference between how an app is used by the person designing and developing it and a power user using it. Someone using a tool through its UI hundreds of times a day every day is going to run into very different issues and experiences than the designer or developer.