January 2026 – Meetup

Thanks to everyone who joined us for the January meetup! A huge thank you to Tree Thunk for sponsoring the event—we really appreciate the support. Another big thank you to Codeweavers for hosting and supporting the meetup—their continued generosity makes these sessions possible.

Talk

Weaponised Liability with CSS

Adam Harding — Lead UX Designer, Instem

Adam kicked off the year with his talk “Weaponised Liability with CSS”, arguing that by writing highly specialised, esoteric code, developers could make themselves indispensable—turning advanced CSS knowledge into job security!

Adam followed with a series of demos showing how far modern CSS has come. He walked through advanced features like anchor positioning for tooltips, scroll-driven animations, and typed custom properties, highlighting how native CSS can now solve problems that once required JavaScript. He also compared his own concise 84-line implementation against AI-generated alternatives that ballooned to well over 300 lines whilst still managing to miss the mark, making a case for human judgement in code creation.

The real takeaway was clear: embrace the power of modern CSS, but do so thoughtfully, with clear documentation, readable code, and a commitment to sharing knowledge rather than hoarding it.

Thanks, Ed Barton, for photographing the event for us.