The Developer Who Spells "Colour" Correctly
The year is 2023. Somewhere in Perth, Western Australia, a front-end developer named Declan Chidlow decides that the single greatest injustice in web development is that CSS forces English speakers to write color instead of colour. His solution: write 14 kilobytes of JavaScript, call it BritCSS, publish it on GitHub, and watch it accumulate 170 stars while Hackaday writes it up as if it's the most important CSS tool of the year. Which, honestly, it might be.
That is the kind of developer Declan Chidlow is. He sees a problem - usually one that everyone else has decided to quietly ignore - and ships something. Not a Medium post. Not a Twitter thread. A working tool, with documentation, in a public repository, often in a language he probably didn't need to use (Rust, for a static site generator, because why not).
Known online as Vale, Chidlow operates from the physical and metaphorical periphery: Perth is one of the most geographically isolated cities on Earth, and the front-of-the-front-end is one of the most undervalued positions in the tech stack. He occupies both with the kind of quiet conviction that doesn't need a conference talk to validate itself.
There is No Future Without New Blood.- Declan Chidlow, State of Devs 2025
Front of the Front-End
Chidlow's technical identity is specific by design. "A skew to the front of the front-end" is how he puts it - meaning HTML, CSS, and JavaScript in their most foundational forms. No framework allegiances. No build-tool tribalism. The web platform as it was intended, with progressive enhancement as a north star rather than an afterthought.
This isn't the stance of someone who doesn't know frameworks exist. It's the stance of someone who has looked at the whole stack and decided that the browser is already a remarkable piece of engineering - one that most developers treat as an obstacle rather than a foundation.
That philosophy shows up in his portfolio. The Public Libraries Western Australia website redesign. Wardfinder, an indoor navigation tool for medical facilities. Stoat, a user-first chat platform with its own moderation bot. TechConf.Directory, a no-frills listing of technology conferences. These aren't showcases of framework mastery. They are products that work - accessible, functional, and visually coherent.
Writing That Actually Explains Things
Alongside the code, Chidlow maintains a writing career that spans some of the most respected publications in web development. Smashing Magazine published his deep dive into optimizing Progressive Web Apps across different display modes in August 2025. CSS-Tricks has run his complete guide to bookmarklets and his exploration of next-level cursor styling. Piccalilli - Andy Bell's hands-on technical publication - has published his pieces on print stylesheets, view transitions, and RSS syndication.
The through-line is specificity. Chidlow doesn't write about what CSS can do. He writes about the part of CSS that trips everyone up at 3am when the design looks perfect on screen and catastrophic on paper. Print stylesheets. That's the article. And it's exactly the kind of article that gets bookmarked and referenced for years.
What He Ships
BritCSS is the most famous thing Chidlow has built, and it is also the most illustrative. A 14KB JavaScript script that pre-processes CSS files, allowing developers to write background-colour, centre, and other British English properties - translating them to their American equivalents before the browser ever sees them. Hackaday called it out. The community starred it. It works.
Adduce is the serious one. A static site generator written in Rust, designed for speed and flexibility without the overhead of frameworks like Gatsby or Hugo. Twenty-eight GitHub stars understates it - it's the kind of tool that a small number of developers adopt and never leave.
Stoat is his chat platform experiment, complete with AutoMod, a TypeScript moderation bot. He built the Mutant Remix emoji site for the same community - design, development, branding. All of it.
His personal site, vale.rocks, is itself a project. Built with Web Origami - an unconventional framework that most front-end developers have not encountered - it contains long-form posts, short micro-updates, photography, video, a library of media he's consuming, and links to everywhere he exists online. It is a complete personal internet in miniature.
When not programming, Chidlow can be found cruising around on a unicycle - a detail that appears in his bio across every publication he's written for, which suggests it's less a quirk and more a core identity marker.
BritCSS exists because Chidlow apparently found American English CSS property names personally offensive. The solution was a 14KB script. The result was a Hackaday feature and 170 GitHub stars. Linguistic conviction pays.
He has 61 photos on Unsplash - precisely matching the number of posts on vale.rocks. This is either a remarkable coincidence or a sign of someone who approaches output with unusual symmetry.
His bio mentions that when experimenting with technology, he occasionally converts "an otherwise functional piece of technology into a paperweight." A rare admission of fallibility from someone whose public output is relentlessly polished.
On the Developer Job Market
In his contribution to the State of Devs 2025 report, Chidlow turned his attention to a problem that affects every field but hits developers at the junior level hardest: the closing of the entry point. His analysis was direct. Entry-level hiring has become a numbers game. Networking matters more than job boards. AI represents a real threat to the first rung of the career ladder - the junior role that teaches you everything the job posting never mentions.
His headline - "There is No Future Without New Blood" - is not a slogan. It's a structural observation. Experienced professionals define what industries look like now. Newcomers define what they become. A field that closes off entry is a field consuming itself.
He also flagged something the industry rarely discusses with enough candor: geographic and demographic representation in developer surveys skew the data. Most surveys over-index on North American and European respondents, producing findings that get applied globally but reflect locally. He advocates for more diverse participation - not as an ideological stance, but as a quality-of-data argument.
This is how Chidlow engages with the industry: not with hot takes, but with the observation that proves the point. Firefox usage among developers is 14%, he notes - seven times the global average. What that actually means about how developers perceive browser choice, privacy, and platform control is left as an exercise for the reader. But the number is correct, and the implication is clear.
The Arc
Photographs, Unicycles & the Open Web
Declan Chidlow photographs fungi. Moss. Lizards. The Petronas Towers. Perth's native flora. He has published 61 images on Unsplash - nature, landscape, botanical - under the handle OuterVale. The same handle he uses on CodePen, YouTube, and everywhere he doesn't go by just Vale.
Vale.rocks carries a badges section at the bottom - small 88x31 buttons in the old web tradition, displaying support for open standards, anti-fascism, and various web technologies. It's not ironic. It's a genuine expression of the commitments that shape the work: the open web as infrastructure, accessibility as baseline requirement, the browser as a commons worth protecting.
His 61 blog posts span hardware reviews (Framework Laptop, Flipper Zero, an old Nokia), keyboard layout experiments, AI terminology criticism, biohacking notes, China's gaming regulations, iFrame design patterns, and at least one post about end-of-life planning. The range is either evidence of a restless mind or a very efficient content strategy. Probably both.
He describes his personal site as "the gateway to all the horrific abominations I concoct." The abominations include a working static site generator, a moderation bot, a chat platform, and a spelling-corrector for CSS. As abominations go, they are quite well-documented.