我在 DEV 社羣七年間的 27 篇熱門開發文章

I have been thinking about not publishing my posts anymore, to prevent commercial companies profiting from other people's creativity and findings without giving them credit and compensation.

But I trust the internet more than my own backups, and I need to do marketing. Lucky you, dear readers, I will probably continue to write and publish in 2027.

The reason for looking back on my publication history at the end of 2026 is a double anniversary. 2026 marks the seventh year of me contributing as an author to the DEV community, and it's for at least fifteen years that I keep blogging at Open Mind Culture blog as well.

Technological Topics

My case study about Pure CSS parallax perspective beyond landscape images tops all of my dashboards. It is both my most-viewed post and the one with the most reactions. I researched tutorials and best practices to understand which different animation effects qualify as parallax scrolling and how to implement them with accessibility and web performance in mind.

After (pre-AI-) aberrations and overthinking, I came up with a relatively simple solution that I then used for the website kleiderordnung.berlin.

Two other of my CSS-based deep dives include Responsive background images with image-set, the srcset for background-image, exploring what might be one of the least-known and least-useful CSS feature, and CSS :has(.parent-selectors) 👪, perhaps one the most important breaktroughs in recent years.

Should web designers learn JavaScript or CSS? is another one of my top posts, and I think that's still a valid question.

Emotion-Driven Development and Productive Procrastination

My idea of emotion-driven development started as a wordplay with test-driven development, mocking half-hearted attempts of "happiness engineering" in corporate culture in contrast to constant frustration in daily dev life.

So, there is a serious aspect about emotion-driven development, and it might as well belong into my series about productivity and [constructive criticism].

Colorful Coding

In IDEA themes for emotion-driven development, I presented various colorful – light and dark – editor themes, mostly for JetBrains IDE(A)s, including my own work. In 2026, I added Orange Peach Light Theme for VS Code and Codium.

Temporarily switching from Jetbrains to VSCodium and back made me publish a VS Code variation of my Orange Rain Light theme for Jetbrains IDEs. Both versions are similar enough to share the same silly name which hints at the third-best Orange Rain Dark theme with its pale blue areas closer to the original idea.

My original inspiration came from remembering the song "The Rain" by an artist called Oran' (Juice) Jones, similar music from the 1980s, and vintage and retro design, vinyl record covers, and fashion. Last but not least, The Commodores band with their name reminding every Generation X nerd of Commodore computers.

My Name is not Al

Funnily, the European Union's official icon to mark certain AI-generated and AI-assisted content according to their AI Act legislation uses the same sans-serif typography that makes "AI" look similar to the name Al(fred) mostly everywhere.

My impromptu post, Who's Al and Where's webfont legibility? was even reposted on LinkedIn by the DEV team!

"Who's Al and Where's Webfont Legibility?" comes right next to "What AI can do for you as a client, vs. where it fails" (formerly titled "Leverage AI as a customer", but I guess nobody got the irony of "leverage" as a telltale AI-generated wording that has already become passé) and "An Unfiltered Slop Era?!" in this screenshot of my post list of Spring 2026.

AI is also responsible for the cliché poster images above and below. One of the characters is based on a picture of mine, the other one is completely AI-generated using a text prompt.

So much for my recurring resolution to stop talking and writing about AI before the hype cycle trends downwards again. On the contrary, I wrote much more about AI in 2026, adding to my series of constructive criticism.

Don't Hit Submit: Alternatives to AI ...

8 Alternatives to AI for Coding and Creativity is among the most viewed DEV posts that I have written, together with StackOverflow alternatives for web developers.

I'd prefer to publish more about accessibility, usability and ecological efficiency in web development and web design.

DevUX !important /* ?! */

Vocal DevUX-focused web developers like me, as well as designers, consultants, and various experts for accessibility, usability and ecological efficience, have been writing, consulting and contributing for years. Simply said, in 2025, the EU's EAA legislation practically implemented the WCAG accessibility criteria, and so did the German BFSG (Barrierefreiheitsstärkungsgesetz, law for strengthening accessibilty). Viewed with more nerdy precision, the European accessibility standards draw on WCAG, but the legislation and the technical standards are not interchangeable. Does that even matter?

If only people cared. Unlike with data protection, there was no wave of warning letters this time. Just "eye-able" overlays adding to cookie banners and newsletter subscription popovers obsuring the actual website content, turning a good idea into a "disimprovement" (thus making it actually worse).

So, what did catch my readers' attention apart from the obvious hype topics?

My 27 most Interesting DEV Posts before 2027

I have already presented most of my most popular posts, and I have stopped counting, but "27 before 2027" still looks nice. But I wonder how we should count what is popular after all?

Web 2.0 vanguard photo community Flickr provides a search ordering by "most interesting" contributions, combining various signals like views and likes to combined insights.

DEV doesn't provide a "most interesting" list, but what's quantity in the age of dead internet bots making up at least half of the internet traffic according to several studies, like Imperva's Bad Bot Report 2026.

I already started my "top posts" lists with a subjective selection of recently trending topics instead of counting likes and reaction, not to mention backlinks, meaningful comments or other metrics that might change over time.

Seven Years of Publishing here, 15 Years there...

Looking back on seven years of active contribution to the DEV community, I noticed that my most notable publications focus on three main aspects: technology, psychology, and creativity.

Writing and publishing helps me organize my ideas, share my experience and preserve it online in a way that at least I can find it later, and get inspiration and feedback by other developers.

Insights over time are biased in favor of older articles that had more time to attract viewers and reactions. Outstanding recent posts from 2025 still defied some of my all-time classics.

Twenty Twenty-Seven

Looking ahead to the future: what will we write about in 2027 and beyond? My contribution to a New Year Writing Challenge predicting upcoming trends got decent views and reactions, but failed to predict the future. Later attempts didn't even get much attention.

We can make conjectures, quote release roadmaps and conference schedules, but we can't predict the future!

Still, looking back to what made a difference in the past seven years may help us anticipate what will still make sense in 2027

Dead Internet: In 2027, Ducks Rule!

If we stop thinking, stop acting, and stop being creative, then the Dead Internet will take over. Machines will be talking to machines, and our world will slowly transform into The Matrix.

Community Comments

Counting the comments, my top post so far was about Online Community Demise and why DEV is Different (at least a little bit, I hope).

As a meta post about this very community, that comes as little surprise.

Different Metrics, Different Top Posts

Counting what I've mentioned as my top DEV posts so far, are those still too few? According to my dashboard, I have published over one hundred articles that attracted nearly four hundred thousand views and over three thousand reactions altogether.

As you might have guessed when you're still reading, I wasn't really making an effort to share my 27 top posts. I couldn't, even if I wanted to. My DEV dashboard offers different sorting metrics, including views and reactions. So, what qualifies as a top post?

Delivering what I promised, let me list eighteen other posts that ranked highly in one or more of my insights' metrics to sum it up to twenty-seven altogether.

Top Ten

The following ten posts were among the top ten in different categories when I started writing this overview:

Alternative Metrics

As an alternative analytics approach, what happens when I google for ingosteinke site:dev.to? Google seems to prioritize recent material and comments over what DEV considers my most successful publications. Articles that Google ranks higher than my DEV insights:

Hand-crafted creative counter-culture against toxic digitization

Has writing CSS become all but a nerdy hobby?

CSS: only a nerdy hobby?

Lessons learned from gaming

Learning lessons from gaming

The gaming post is among my most unlikely successful articles, as I don't even consider myself a gamer. Apart from card and board games at family events, freeciv in the browser is the only gaming that I eventually did. Enough to inspire me to use it as an analogy for explaining Astro's Islands Architecture, but I dropped most of the gaming references from my original Astro draft before publishing.

The later gaming spin-off was a spontaneous quick writeup reusing leftover notes and follow-up thoughts. The writing process was an experiment of allowing AI to intervene much more in my writing process. I followed up with two more in a mini-series dropping engagement with rising AI sloppiness, before I decided to rewrite half of the third post, again with the help of AI, after Claude discovered a lost link that I had failed to Google, so that I could quote a tumbleweed freeciv forum post written by my younger self in 2009.

Contradicting and Self-Fulfilling Metrics

Publishing insights can have a paradox effect much like Schroedinger's cat. Even when we try to judge objectively based on "numbers that don't lie," we still can't rule out effects of backlinks, accidentally matching trends, pure coincidence, or an intransparent algorithmic feed deciding which posts to boost or hide.

Content creation insights feel more and more like a raffle.

Even with significant traffic and professional, paid campaigns, it's hard to work against those external factors. Trying to use articles like this one to make up self-fulfilling metrics for marketing feels like a drop in the ocean.

Least Interesting

Still, what are my most popular posts, anyway? I tried to consider numbers with my gut feeling to decide that the ones mentioned before probably belong in my top list for a good reason.

Wouldn't we expect technological progress, creative combination and guesswork, together with diligent fanned-out research beyond what classic search engines offer us users, will finally be able to resolve all of our open issues after all?

I recently commented on my tumbleweed post and linked several issues, including my erratic black screen described in a dedicated DEV post last year, a seemingly simple Twig/Vue/Symfony/Shopware customization issue, and two StackOverflow questions formally answered but still lacking satisfactory solutions meeting my usability expectations.

You can guess how many views my comment got so far.

Boosting Meaningful Content / Reading Recommendations

If I counted correctly, I have to deliver three more links to reach twenty-seven. I don't care too much about numbers. Quality beats quantity, at least in my world. This reading list is quite subjective and it gets even more biased at the end. That's what human creation and curation is all about, I guess.

Consequentially, my third to last reading recommendation is about how to stay human as a writer in times of generative AI. The next one is a rant, written in 2024, about AI and sustainability misused as buzzwords, amended with a 2026 update on the state of AI and the AI-generated cartoon picturing Anthropic's AI assistant, Claude, reimagined as a soldier.

Finally, a hopeful and pragmatic mix of optimism, imagination, and hands-on experience: Last year, for the second time, my old-but-still-working mobile phone suffered another water damage which eventually rendered it unusuable in the end, but only months after it happened.

My post about Using Slightly Broken Smartphones thanks to Accessibility shows how I managed to save and reuse the device for a while and what my experience taught me about one-finger zoom gestures and mobile app accessibility issues.