I'm a teapot

There are eleven letters between the A and the Y in the word accessibility. Someone counted them, replaced them with the number 11, and somehow that became the shorthand for an entire movement.This week on I'm a teapot, Jake gets into the origins of a11y — why the community uses it, and why, despite working in accessibility every day, it makes his skin crawl every time he sees it. Including when he types it himself.But this episode does not end in a grumble. It ends with a goal. A genuinely ambitious one. Involving a very famous venue in north London, a community that deserves a flagship event, and a name that — in a moment of beautiful hypocrisy — uses the very abbreviation Jake spent twenty minutes complaining about.A11y at Ally Pally. Coming eventually. Possibly.Accessibility note: transcripts are not automatically generated on my current plan but are available on request — get in touch and I'll get one to you. Working on making them standard. Watch this space.

Remember when websites had loading bars and everything bounced? That was Flash. For a generation of people, it wasn't just a platform — it was the internet.In this episode Jake takes a trip back to the era of Newgrounds, Albino Black Sheep and things you definitely shouldn't have been watching at eleven years old. This episode, explore the full story of Macromedia and Adobe Flash: where it came from, why it won, why it mattered — and why it's gone.Along the way we get into what Flash meant for developers who finally had a tool that worked the same everywhere, what it meant for the millions of people it locked out, and what its disappearance says about how we build for the web today.***I'm a Teapot is a show about the web, accessibility, AI, and the gloriously weird corners of the internet.Accessibility note: Transcripts are not automatically generated on my current plan but are available on request — just get in touch and I'll get one to you. I'm also actively working on making transcripts available for all episodes as a standard feature.

Jake rejoins LinkedIn after a several year break and immediately runs into three flavours of inauthenticity: AI-powered engagement bots churning out hollow comments at scale, personal grief repackaged as professional content, and mass layoffs dressed up in corporate buzzwords. What happens when a platform rewards performance over substance — and what does any of this have to do with accessibility and AI?

Why is this show called 418 I'm a Teapot?In the first episode, Jake explores the strange, stubborn life of HTTP status code 418: how a joke protocol for internet-connected coffee pots became a real standard, why developers fought to keep it when someone tried to remove it, and how it ended up on the website of the Russian Ministry of Defence during one of the most serious moments in recent history.Along the way: what a well-placed "I'm a teapot" says about building better AI, and why confidently knowing your limits might be the most underrated quality a system — or a person — can have.A show about the web, accessibility, AI, and the fact that the internet is gloriously weird.I'm Jake. I'm a teapot. And I hope you are too.