Maddy Miller
Maddy Miller — Software engineer and open-source maintainer
I cover technology and programming topics with a more accessibility & user focused perspective. I aim to write about how things affect people, and the "people" side of tech. I mostly write from my own experience, and try to change the world a little.
madelinemiller.dev/blogIt's a choice between an altered experience or no experience, and when we don't have adequate accessibility settings, we're forced to take the 'no experience' option.
Maddy writes about technology through the lens of how it affects real people — accessibility in games, the state of the JavaScript ecosystem, the human side of open-source modding communities. The range is wide (whole genome sequencing, Minecraft server internals, VR motion sickness) but the thread is consistent: thoughtful, measured takes with a focus on the people side of tech.
Written by Maddy Miller.
Occasional
Publishes a few times per month
1
Independent Blog
English
How this blog's content is accessed through Blogs Are Back.
Full Content
RSS feed includes complete post content for reading in-app
Direct Access
Feed can be fetched directly from your browser
Direct Post Links
Post pages can be loaded directly in the reader
Embeddable
Posts can be displayed inline in the reader view
Recent posts from Maddy Miller's RSS feed.
10 Year Q & A
This article is a little bit of a weird one. It’s now been a whole decade since I published my first article on my site, about how VR was making body diversity an accessibility problem. While this isn’t something I would normally do, someone that I’ve known for a few years reached out and suggested I do a Q&A to commemorate it. He provided a few questions to start with but suggested I source more. I didn’t feel super comfortable doing this initially, as it honestly felt a bit pretentious to...
IPv4 exhaustion is now a UX problem
Discussions about the dwindling supply of IPv4 addresses have covered the internet for decades at this point, although always focusing on the technical problems this causes. At this point however, the technical impact and solutions are well known, we’re now dealing with a rarely discussed or acknowledged user experience problem. Most discussions online don’t touch on this topic because it’s something that mostly affects those in countries with poor IP allocation compared to population levels. Th...
Phone numbers are not life-long identifiers
Phones and phone numbers are pretty common these days. Most people have a mobile phone, and there’s a general expectation by most apps and services that a user will have a phone number available. It isn’t, however, safe to tie someone’s identity uniquely to that phone number. Phone numbers get reused, and people can have multiple phone numbers. Despite this, the tech industry treats phone numbers as if they are unique life-long identifiers. Phone numbers are recycledI’ve had my phone number for...
Have we decided that JavaScript is bad?
Something I’m sure everyone has noticed lately, is that for practically any aspect of JavaScript tooling, there’s an effort to rewrite it in a non-JS language. Vite is being rewritten to use a Rust-based bundler (Rolldown), TypeScript is being rewritten in Go, there’s Bun, Biome, OXC, etc. No matter where you look, the new tools aren’t written in JavaScript. It’s easy to wonder, like the few who’ve asked me recently, if this is a bad sign for JavaScript. That it’s an admission that the language...
Pride & Bug Reports
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that an unreported bug will never be fixed. Bug reports matter much more than you might think. A few years ago, I wrote an article about general etiquette when asking for help with open-source software projects. One thing I’ve always felt I failed to cover in that article, however, is the significant disconnect between issues discussed on social media and the issues actually reported to developers. When people ask for help with an issue on social media, i...
Follow Maddy Miller
If you want tech writing that remembers there are humans on the other end of every interface, Maddy's blog delivers exactly that.