About

I'm Bùi Trung Lộc. On the internet I go by loc.

I build front-end for Shopify apps from Bắc Giang, in northern Vietnam. Most days I'm somewhere between a design file and a browser devtools panel, trying to make merchant-facing interfaces feel less like software and more like something made by a person.

#What I work on

Right now, most of my attention goes to accessibility. I'm auditing a Shopify app against WCAG 2.1 AA — color contrast, focus order, motion, the way placeholder text behaves on top of a merchant's overridden theme. It's slower work than it looks from the outside, because the fun part is rarely the first fix. The fun part is the second fix, after you realise the first one broke something three screens away.

On the side, I write here. The blog is a place to think out loud about three things: Claude and AI-assisted coding (what works, what doesn't, where control really lives), front-end craft (typography, CSS, the small details), and accessibility as a practice rather than a compliance checklist.

#How I got here

I didn't start in tech. I came to HTML and CSS the way a lot of people do — wanting to change one thing on a page, and then another, and then realising six months had gone by and I'd stopped wanting to do anything else. SCSS was my first real language. Everything since has been a slow widening of the surface I'm comfortable touching.

I'm self-taught in the boring, unremarkable way: one problem at a time, no bootcamp, no mentor, a lot of reading other people's source.

#What I believe about the work

Three things I come back to:

• Accessibility isn't a feature, it's a reading of the work. If a contrast ratio is off, the design wasn't finished. The audit isn't extra — it's how you find out whether the design held.
• Typography does more than we give it credit for. A good serif at the right size, set in the right measure, is worth more than a motion library. Most sites would be improved by removing two fonts and fixing the line-height on the one that's left.
• AI tools are leverage, not authorship. I use Claude every day. It writes a lot of code that ships. But the judgment — what to build, what to refuse, when to stop — is still mine. That line is the whole job, really.

#Off the clock

I play guitar. Mostly fingerstyle, mostly badly, mostly alone. A good half-hour with a nylon-string is the cheapest thing I've found for putting a bad day down.

I also read Buddhist philosophy, slowly. Not for the metaphysics — I'm not sure about most of it — but for the psychology. The idea that most suffering comes from clinging to a preferred version of the present has quietly reshaped how I work. It turns out "the framework I wanted this to be" and "the framework it actually is" cause a lot more bugs than the framework itself.

Neither of these show up in my code. Both of them show up in how I approach it.

#Elsewhere

You can find me on GitHub and by email. I read everything, I reply to most things, eventually.

If you're here because of something I wrote — thanks for reading. That's the whole reason this site exists.