Cool Links Vol. 15: September, 2025

Hi there! As of today, Cool Links has been officially written from both sides of the Atlantic! Last month I mentioned how tired my wife and I were of packing and now we're still tired, but we're finally in Italy!

This move has been a huge undertaking and honestly we still haven't gotten used to it. We're staying at my brother's and looking for a place of our own. Hopefully, we'll find one soon!

This doesn't mean I couldn't grab some cool stuff from around the web, though. I even discovered Chris Ferdinandi's blog which is amazing. There's 3 links from him here and I had to try real hard to not put even more. Definitely worth a follow/subscription/whatever if you like what he writes!

Fun

🌟 Every Noise at Once, by Glenn McDonald

Grab your headphones and get ready to lose some hours. This website compiles every subgenre of music and algorithmically sorts them out in relation to one another. It's great to learn about new genres you might like or to find something similar to what you already know!

Adrift

Adrift is a quiet space where doubts become paper boats and drift together across a shared sea.

What a neat lil' website. You can write your own doubts or self-care notes and let them float out in a virtual sea, alongside the notes of many others. There's some background music too.

Deep Reads

The meaning of life..., by Chris Ferdinandi

... is just to be alive.

Beautiful reminder of why chasing goals and meaning only leads us away from them. A bit related to my longterm goals post from last year.

Means of Production, by Chris Ferdinandi

One of capitalism’s greatest successes is that it’s robbed us of imagination.

(...)

We struggle to imagine what life could look like under a different system. How it would be better. How it would be worse. How it would be different.

(...)

Utopias don’t exist. They never will. But I refuse to accept this system we toil under—while better than monarchies and fiefdoms—is as good as it gets.

Wallet voting, by Cory Doctorow

Make individual choices that make your life better. Take collective action to make society better.

Cory has such a nice way with words — he can express complex thoughts so simply.

This one is a banger. It's both encouragement to do more against evil and reassurance for when you feel like giving up.

Dev

Accented, by Pavel Pomerantsev

This tool looks pretty cool! It's a two-liner solution for web apps that automatically highlights accessibility issues on whatever you're working on.

I haven't tested it myself yet (busy month), but will definitely look into it soon.

npm: How did we get here?, by Kevin Roleke

I think it's widely known that the JS dev community relies too much on dependencies, especially through npm packages, and that it's really hard to avoid this problem (I use as few packages as possible, but each dependency has its own hundreds of dependencies which also have hundreds more...).

But I think I never stopped to think of how easy it is to publish a package there. Which also means, it's too easy to publish a malicious or compromised package, that gets downloaded and executed on our computers with no proper vetting. Scary.

Why I still prefer ems over rems, by Chris Ferdinandi

Neat short article that goes over a bit of the differences between ems and rems in CSS, with nice examples.

Wrapping up

Thanks for reading it all the way here! Hope to see you next month as well! ;)