Ariel Salminen

A new friend for the old bike just arrived
(…well, a part of it, anyway…)

Current status: fixing yet another bicycle (to sell it) 🤷🏻‍♀️

*I think the kids are getting slightly annoyed that I’ve turned our living room into a bike shop, basically*

Gathering parts for a new Raspberry Pi side project. The rest is still in transit 🤓

Anxiously waiting for a new bike frame to arrive today

(yeah… yet another side project 🤷🏻‍♀️)

Got completely soaked on this ride. Literally had to stop and pour water out of my shoes a couple of times 🌊

On a bit of a summer break from work and this is what I’m doing instead: *nerding out about these matching red disc brake lockrings that I just installed on my bike* 🤓

A random view from today’s bike ride. The piece on the underpass wall says “Girls are awesome” ❤️

Monday after work ride with 🧡.

(featuring a tiny friend who liked my bike 🐤)

Sold our car and somehow made profit doing that, at least compared to what I originally paid for it 🤷🚴🏻‍♀️

Working with these internet speeds over the past weeks have made me focus on improving the performance of everything I’ve touched at work.

Also, reminded me of something that I wrote in April 11 years ago which somehow feels even more relevant in 2026: https://arielsalminen.com/2015/the-many-faces-of-the-web/

Evenings like this 🧡

Just received two of these t-shirts in mail. 😍

https://shop.joinmastodon.org/products/mastodon-i-write-alt-text-unisex-t-shirt-copy

Letting that @DavidDarnes@mastodon.design get an early sneak peek of this thingy made me realize it needs proper docs website, even if I tried to resist it and dump it all onto .md files on GitHub. So yeah, here we are…

Just seen

Ok, figured I’ve been sitting on this project for a while now so decided to give test access to @DavidDarnes@mastodon.design to tell me if it’s all shit and I should just throw it away 🤷🏻‍♀️

Also: **Am I the only one who feels like this when getting close to publishing a big project _(like every single time)?!_** 🫠

It seems like all the random projects I ever build are born out of frustration. Elena started ~5 months ago because I wasn’t being taken seriously (probably since I am not a white male in this industry 🤷🏻‍♀️)

Got some great news this week and looks like I’m all booked until early 2027 for client work. *needs to update the availability on the website*

Has set up a tent in our living room because why not

Had fun this morning building this thing:

Been working on some usage examples this morning. While this is not gonna cover everything, it’s still missing a few (like e.g. @11ty@neighborhood.11ty.dev !)

Just published a new version of Elena, v1.0.0-rc.8, which adds performance improvements while making the minified bundle size ~12% smaller: https://github.com/getelena/elena/releases/tag/%40elenajs%2Fcore%401.0.0-rc.8

Happy to see the first community contribution (for docs!) land Elena and me not being the only person on the “contributors” list 🥹

https://github.com/getelena/elena

*has written some draft docs*

Been working on improving the test coverage (*still*), fixing the last remaining issues (*I know, I know*), and writing documentation for https://elenajs.com.

Things are starting to slowly stabilize. Maybe there will also be an *alpha* release out in the near-ish future… 🤞🏻

I also improved the Elena Playground and made it support external stylesheets and CSS Module Scripts which deserved a live example as well: https://elenajs.com/playground/#css-module-scripts

(and yeah, as the example suggests, https://design-system.club is built with Elena now 🧡)

Did some major performance improvements and bug fixes for Elena last week. Technically we’re now at v1.0.0-rc.12 already, but this was the most significant set of changes: https://github.com/getelena/elena/releases/tag/%40elenajs%2Fcore%401.0.0-rc.11

We’re getting close to stable v1.0.0 soon. ☺️

This week is turning better when I least expect it. 🧡

Built a Node.js + @11ty@neighborhood.11ty.dev based analytics dashboard for the client’s design system today to track the adoption rate across production apps.

Turned out to be useful already since we had no idea of some of the products already using the design system and/or still on pre-release versions. 😅

It’s going well when you haven’t slept in two nights and have been crying your eyes out during the following days. I’m such an emotional wreck this week 😭

Found a bug in Firefox with CSS @scope and [attr=value], but now checked out the pre-release build and seems to be fixed there. So perhaps this won't exist soon anymore (in v149?).

Minimal reproduction regardless:
https://codepen.io/arielsalminen/full/raMazZV

too zorb

One of (OVHCloud’s) network links in Stockholm has decided to stop carrying packets over 1480 bytes overnight for an unknown reason & also blocks the error that would normally tell a device to send smaller ones 🙃

So a bunch of websites have just been dead for me since yesterday (Bluesky, Mastodon…)