Skip to content

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

Brecht De Ruyte - front-end developer | utilitybend

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, but nowadays I'm mostly working with 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.

Latest articles

Articles overview

CSS Animation Triggers: Playing animations on scroll without scrubbing. It's a match!

Scroll-driven animations have been one of my favorite features to land in CSS. Being able to play animation progress to scroll positions opens up so many possibilities. But I always felt that something was missing: sometimes you don't want to scrub through an animation. Sometimes you just want the scroll position to determine when an animation plays, not how it plays, which for me was a far more common pattern in the past. Well, with scroll-triggered animation, this final piece of the puzzle is there. What's more, when you combine the two, it's a match so perfect, even Cupid would be impressed by the timing.

Read moreabout CSS Animation Triggers: Playing animations on scroll without scrubbing. It's a match!

Is it scrolled? Is it not? Let's find out with CSS @container scroll-state() queries

Oh, how I have been waiting to write this title! If you've read a few things by me, you know I'm always a bit hyped when CSS gives us the keys to the state-machine kingdom. For years, we've relied on intersection observers or scroll events in JavaScript to answer simple questions about an element's position and state. We already have a lot of these things happening in browsers, such as scroll-driven animations. But more state information is on the rise with an update on scroll-state queries.

Read moreabout Is it scrolled? Is it not? Let's find out with CSS @container scroll-state() queries

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.