I’m currently building my fourth software business. It’s called Codespeed and it’s a developer tools SaaS and platform that solves costly software development problems like tech debt, onboarding, security and other expensive, unmet issues in the architecture and development of code. We’re accomplishing this by better aligning the needs of a business among engineers through a collaborative layer of dev tooling.

Two of the largest cost centers in any engineering department revolve around continuous rewrites and refactors due to tech debt and the exceptional amount of time required to ramp up new developers to a codebase, let alone the time engineers who have already made significant contributions to a large application take in revisiting their work long into the future. Security is another area where costs can grow exponentially when collaboration in the code fails. Codespeed is a uniquely social developer tool, which means it also provides opportunities in emerging crypto, DAO and other web3 spaces as well.

Before the centralization of information to social media platforms people created content inside a wide array flourishing, nuanced communities on websites and blogs across the Internet. Social media was an important but not primary method for creating or even surfacing content.

Today, however the landscape is much different. A small number of social monoliths have centralized access to much of the world’s information. This centralization has had disastrous results on a global scale with previously unimaginable network effects. These include flat earth conspiracies, anti-vaccination crusades and their subsequent deadly measles outbreaks, ubiquitous hacking and online harassment campaigns, and ethnic cleansing to name a few.

The most noticeable difference in the Internet is the shift in discovery of content from decentralized, self-contained, and self-moderated systems controlled by technology creators owned and maintained to a reliance on placement and space rented from social media companies. As a result of this centralization, once vibrant and diverse Internet communities have been forced into precut molds to grow at a phenomenal scale.

Recently I walked through each part of the implementation for SVG navigation or UI dynamically colored with CSS using mix-blend-mode. That example includes progressive enhancement with a fallback for the versions of Microsoft IE & Edge that don’t support this property.

Because progressive enhancement can vary between one developer and another so much even on the same project or task, I wanted to share some of my own higher-level thinking about how I make these types of design changes during engineering. While polyfills typically imply the use of JavaScript, in this discussion I’ll be focusing on CSS and specifically support for older browsers.

Read the original post then jump back over here for more of an abstract look at progressive enhancement in general.

Modern CSS provides an incredible opportunity to create innovative, engaging user interfaces and experiences, but many well-supported properties are still rarely used to their full artistic and technical potential.

One of the most useful but still underutilized properties today is mix-blend-mode. This property allows elements to be blended together by dictating how blending should appear between stacked HTML elements by blending elements from layers above with those behind them.