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Hi, my name is Brecht De Ruyte, Front-end developer

I'm a self-taught front-end developer and Google Developer Expert located in Belgium with a passion for UX and Design. After more than a decade working in tech, I decided to start a little blog for documenting my findings about HTML, CSS and JS with an eye on accessibility and UX.

During the day, you can find me working at iO on a variety of projects. There are a lot of environments I'm working in, the majority of them being Twig or React. But my real niche will always be semantics and CSS, especially now, with the ever fast updates in browser support. It's a great time to be a front-end developer.

Brecht De Ruyte - front-end developer | utilitybend

Latest articles

Articles overview

The customizable select - Part five: Optgroup, creating a true select menu

In this part of my customizable select series, I want to highlight option groups! Option groups are part of our select interactions to provide clarity, and now, they can be styled. This will certainly not be the last demo I did on the select, and more updates are coming to this element. With a wink to the past, we will be creating a restaurant dish picker, a true “Select Menu”.

Read moreabout The customizable select - Part five: Optgroup, creating a true select menu

The customizable select - Part four: Scroll snapping, state queries, monster hunter, and gamification

In this (long) part of the customizable select series, it’s all about gamification. In this article, I’d like to highlight one of my demos, where I aimed to recreate a piece of UI found in the Monster Hunter games. To re-create this behavior, I had to think in terms of keyboard navigation first. This demo requires quite a lot of CSS, as well as some scripting, and in the end, I do want to highlight some accessibility concerns. This is an experiment on how far we can take it when styling select elements.

Read moreabout The customizable select - Part four: Scroll snapping, state queries, monster hunter, and gamification

Love for photography

photography hobby corner

Morning mist photography

Photography is something I enjoyed for a long time. It all began with capturing landscapes in Belgium. It truly opened my eyes to the beauty of nature that often lies right on our doorstep. There's a calming effect to using a camera and experimenting with shutter speed and aperture. It's a form of personal therapy for me.

Most of the images are near my hometown Deinze. A small city famous for its cycling near the Lys river. I added some photos on this website as sort of a "hobby corner". I will update them from time to time here, as I kinda gave up on the "instagram thing" for photography.