HTML All The Things - Web Development, AI, and Developer Careers

Do you actually own the digital games you buy?

An Xbox player in Brazil successfully sued Microsoft after a hacked account left him locked out of his entire digital game library - and his other Microsoft services. The court ordered Microsoft to restore his account and compensate him, raising some interesting questions about the rights consumers have over their digital purchases.

In this Web News, Matt and Mike discuss digital ownership, game preservation, account bans, DRM-free alternatives like GOG, and whether buying a digital game is really ownership - or just an indefinite rental.

Show Notes: https://www.htmlallthethings.com/podcast/do-you-actually-own-your-digital-games

AI coding tools can make developers faster, remove tedious work, and help us build things that once felt out of reach. So why can using them still leave us feeling drained? In this episode, Matt and Mike explore the complicated relationship between AI coding and developer burnout. They discuss losing the satisfaction of solving difficult problems, the mental cost of managing multiple AI workflows, whether AI-generated work still feels like your own, and why reviewing code can be more exhausting than writing it. They also share ways developers can build a healthier relationship with AI - from finding meaningful personal projects to testing strategically and creating a workflow that doesn’t require reviewing every generated line.

‍Show Notes: https://www.htmlallthethings.com/podcast/ai-coding-makes-development-easier-so-why-are-we-burning-out

Use our Scrimba affiliate link (https://scrimba.com/?via=htmlallthethings) for a 20% discount!! Full details in show notes.

Kimi K3 is a massive new open AI model with 2.8 trillion parameters, native vision and a one-million-token context window. Its creator claims it can compete near the frontier of coding, reasoning and knowledge work - but its potential goes far beyond benchmark scores. In this Web News, Matt and Mike discuss what happens when companies can operate powerful AI without depending entirely on OpenAI, Anthropic or another hosted provider. Could open models lower costs and unlock better AI products, or will their customizable guardrails create new safety and regulatory concerns?

Show Notes: https://www.htmlallthethings.com/podcast/kimi-k3-brings-frontier-ai-into-the-open

Modern browsers have evolved dramatically over the past two decades, quietly absorbing many features that once required custom JavaScript or third-party libraries. In this episode, Matt and Mike explore native browser capabilities including form validation, accordions, dialogs, popovers, lazy loading, and responsive images. Along the way, they discuss why letting the browser handle more of the work can improve accessibility, performance, maintainability, and the overall developer experience - without becoming dogmatic about JavaScript.

Show Notes: https://www.htmlallthethings.com/podcast/javascript-isnt-always-the-answer-native-browser-features-every-developer-should-know

Use our Scrimba affiliate link (https://scrimba.com/?via=htmlallthethings) for a 20% discount!! Full details in show notes.

Should you ship your app as soon as it's functional, or keep building until users love it?

In this episode, Matt and Mike explore the difference between a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and a Minimum Lovable Product (MLP), and why that distinction matters more than ever in the age of AI-assisted development. We discuss feature creep, validating ideas with real users, trusting your instincts as a founder, and how to balance shipping quickly with building something people genuinely want to use.

Whether you're creating an app, SaaS, game, or startup, this conversation is packed with practical lessons on building products that solve real problems and keep users coming back.

Show Notes: https://www.htmlallthethings.com/podcast/growing-your-app-from-mvp-to-mlp