Bryan Braun

bryanbraun.com · Personal blog · on HN since 2013

Bryan Braun, a web developer, writes about playful front-end projects like Checkboxland and CSS screensaver recreations, plus web development practices.

What HN saysCommenters enjoy his checkbox projects, calling Checkboxland a mad, brilliant idea with a remarkable look, and link his writing on ES modules.
64HN people shared it
28linked it in comments
67stories submitted
4.4Kstory points
6 months agolast shared
2013people per year2026

Most-shared posts

  1. 1
    Checkboxland
    14 people · 300 points · first shared 2020 · 39 comments on HN
  2. 2
  3. 3
    Visualizing the number of weeks in your Life
    4 people · 4 points · first shared 2020 · 2 comments on HN
  4. 4
    I keep making things out of checkboxes
    3 people · 923 points · first shared 2021 · 111 comments on HN
  5. 5
    ES modules in production: my experience so far
    3 people · 10 points · first shared 2020 · 1 comments on HN
  6. 6
    Let's Get Creative
    3 people · 7 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
  7. 7
    Flying Toasters
    3 people · 4 points · first shared 2023 · 1 comments on HN
  8. 8
  9. 9
    Unusual Git IDs
    2 people · 10 points · first shared 2024 · discussion on HN
  10. 10
    There's never going to be time
    2 people · 8 points · first shared 2024 · discussion on HN
  11. 11
  12. 12
    Daily Demos: a ritual for raising kids that create
    2 people · 4 points · first shared 2019 · 1 comments on HN
  13. 13
  14. 14
    SolidGoldMagikarp
    2 people · 2 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
  15. 15

What HN people wrote when they linked it

pininja · 2023-05-03
I had a lot of fun clicking through these links. One of my favorites to add here is drawing with the Checkbox. https://www.bryanbraun.com/checkboxland/
e12e · 2021-09-12
The rationale is fantastic: https://www.bryanbraun.com/2020/06/06/checkboxland/ Must be one of my favorite projects in a long while. Such a mad/brilliant idea, and the aestethic is remarkable for such an odd thing as a checkbox. Many thanks to the poster.
bryanbraun · 2019-02-22
https://www.bryanbraun.com It's been running for 9 years now and I'm getting close to blog post number 400. Looking forward to the next 400. :)
totetsu · 2026-05-14
The first part was an attempt at ironic humor, by repeating Gemini about the topic of offloading thinking to AI, not to be taken seriously as speculation or not. As for the name changes..That is a fact you can look up, aswell as much analysis. It is my opinion that the move from framing this area from one of "saftey" to one of "national security", is interesting, and related to geopolitical movements towards "great-power", and ideological points of view that elevate "personal responsibility" and "reduced regulation" and is similar to long ongoing discussion in society like that about automobiles. I don't know if you call analysis speculation? As for the part about Dimensionality. It is just my intuition — and so i suppose speculation — from some things like for instance the SolidGoldMagikarp glitch in early openai models.. How we understand all the way that there might be trigger certain outputs from a vastly large model? When those things can be completely opaque to human reason. Observability and Understandability are areas of research. I haven't seen anyone claiming that generative models outputs can be concretely controlled, thats why there is so many pre and post hoc work arounds. So when a risk cant be eliminated, the question is how to manage it, and who's responsibility is…
rektide · 2020-10-26
For the last half decade, almost all apps have been deployed with webpack/browserify/other bundles. All the assets get smashed together into a big custom bundle that doesn't get cached across sites. This has been really sad & a big loss for the web, in my opinion. And it's one that we were about to emerge from[1], it seems like. Alas, if we do go back to a more old-school CDN-based style of web scripting/javascripting, powered by our new ES Modules (& hopefully Import Maps) this new sharding-by-origin change will mean that we will never ever see the CDN hit-rate benefits we once saw. It seems like it is a necessary change, to protect the user from being tracked, but it still hurts my heart so much, that we are so near to getting back to sharing resources on the web, only to have all that sharing snatched away. Whatever metrics you are looking at today, know that they represent a very sad state of affairs, that brought great pain & suffering to the hearts of many webdevs who aspired for much much much higher hit rates. [1] https://www.bryanbraun.com/2020/10/23/es-modules-in-production-my-expe…
hadad · 2025-02-27
seem using this web lib/app https://www.bryanbraun.com/after-dark-css/
renegat0x0 · 2024-06-26
flanbiscuit · 2024-02-29
This is really cool! Also the cool thing about using <input type="checkbox"> is that updating the checked status of each input doesn't cause reflow (as far as I can tell according to: https://gist.github.com/paulirish/5d52fb081b3570c81e3a). And using JS to check/uncheck an input doesn't update the DOM. If you inspect the DOM of https://www.bryanbraun.com/checkboxland/ you see absolutely nothing changing as all of the animations are running. That helps keep things speedy.
dukeofdoom · 2024-02-06
There's a calendar that will show you how many months you have left. https://www.bryanbraun.com/your-life/months.html Making a plan to make each month count is something I thought about recently. Something to remember each month by. It's a big enough chunk that you could for example take a trip somewhere, lose 10 lbs, or learn a new skill. It's a bit of a change of perspective to think of your life in terms of months. Kind of like not to think of the world as countries, but inter connected cities.
capableweb · 2023-08-30
> I did not ask for this existential crisis this morning :( Personally I have https://www.bryanbraun.com/your-life/weeks.html printed and hanging on the wall next to me, and each week I fill another square. Having a real-time view of how long we have left to live have always filled me with energy and hope, somehow. But similarly to you, many people seem to think it's macabre/bizarre.
what-imright · 2022-08-07
Stop trying to make hardware last forever. Who here would like to use hardware from 2017? iPhone x anyone? The lifetime of these devices is defined by the reasonable update schedule of the consumer, which is based on moores law. 5 years is a reasonable update schedule. Then put one in a museum and live in the now. You get this much time forget the nostalgia https://www.bryanbraun.com/your-life/months.html
blinry · 2022-05-13
If you're into this, also check out @bryanbraun's "Checkboxland", which was a huge inspiration for this project! :) https://www.bryanbraun.com/checkboxland/
distalx · 2022-01-18
delosw · 2022-01-03
Toasters and more... https://www.bryanbraun.com/after-dark-css/ (Well, it mimics the old screensavers, anyway.)
_jstreet · 2021-10-11
The sidebar of checkboxland[1] has a checkbox made out of checkboxes. [1]: https://www.bryanbraun.com/checkboxland/
strken · 2021-10-11
Funnily enough, he's already done it: https://www.bryanbraun.com/checkboxland/
bscphil · 2021-10-11
Unless I missed them, a bunch of the demos aren't linked directly in the page. Here's Bad Apple: https://www.bryanbraun.com/checkboxland/docs/demos/bad-apple/
colejohnson66 · 2021-10-11
Consay’s Game of Life is Turing Complete. Could use Golly’s engine and render using checkboxes. Has anyone implemented MMIX in CGOL? https://www.bryanbraun.com/checkboxland/docs/demos/game-of-life/
oli-g · 2021-10-11
Alternatively, it's also already hosted online: https://www.bryanbraun.com/checkboxland/docs/demos/game-of-life/
rasz · 2021-07-30
On one hand super cool due to tricks employed, on the other CSS animations tend to be very power hungry https://www.bryanbraun.com/after-dark-css/all/rainstorm.html takes <40% of idle low range gaming GPU = nothing, but 30% of one gaming 4GHz CPU thread, what is going on there? Chrome GPU process jumps between 20 an 40% while sliding 6 bitmaps around, something you could even do on a Virge in 1996. Some time ago I noticed an older 3GHz i5 laptop, otherwise perfectly usable, would start to struggle decoding h264 webcam stream because webmaster decided to use CSS animation for a scrolling title bar superimposed over video feed.
auroranil · 2021-05-08
Interesting. It is using iframes behind the scenes. According to W3C it should limit the recursion depth to one, but it seems that you can get around that. Relevant: https://www.bryanbraun.com/2021/03/24/infinitely-nested-iframes/
0wis · 2019-07-21
Good laugh and a good summary of FT branding ! Any other ideas to create fun easter eggs ? First lazy search for a good starter : https://www.bryanbraun.com/2018/04/01/several-ways-to-hide-easter-eggs…
UncleSlacky · 2017-05-27
There's an in-browser CSS recreation of some of the After Dark screensavers here: https://www.bryanbraun.com/after-dark-css/

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