# July 2026 newsletter Canonical URL: https://gabrieldalton.com/writing/newsletter/july-2026 Date sent: 2026-08-11T03:38:09.994Z Author: Gabriel Dalton Original Substack URL: https://gabrieldalton.substack.com/p/gabriel-daltons-july-newsletter-4 [All newsletter issues](https://gabrieldalton.com/writing/newsletter) 11 Aug 2026 4-Min Read Contributed to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), Planted 725 Bush Fig Trees in Tanzania Through a Partnership with Young Guns Studio, Visited Ottawa/Toronto and Turned 18 Years Old. Hello Fellow Humans, Last month was a cap and gown. This July, I spent ten days in Ontario with family, turned eighteen, and spent most of the remaining hours coding — including my first contributions to the W3C, the organization that writes the technical standards behind how the entire web works (think HTML, accessibility guidelines, that kind of thing). Getting a change accepted there is something I said I wanted to do back in May, and I genuinely did not expect it to happen this fast. Here’s what I’ve been up to, what I learned, and where I’m headed next. ## What I’ve Been Up To 📈 - **I spent ten days in Ontario.** Family, cousins, and a birthday. I turned eighteen on July 21. ![A birthday candle burns above ice cream, fruit and chocolate on a waffle for Gabriel’s eighteenth birthday.](https://gabrieldalton.com/img/newsletter/july-2026/8142425605da02e2.webp) - **I contributed to the W3C Web Sustainability Guidelines.** Three of my pull requests were merged into the `sustainableweb-wsg` repository, and another into `sustainableweb-impact` — corrections to the guidelines’ text, broken test-suite references, the JSON API examples, and an inconsistency in how the Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice (DEIJ) framework was referenced throughout. I also submitted fixes to the WCAG repository. Small patches, but they’re in the standard now. - **I started building with [Young Guns Studio](http://ygstudio.ca).** I mentioned this was coming in June’s newsletter. I’m rebuilding ygstudio.ca and working alongside Pete Young on the not-for-profit foundation side — board recruitment, grant readiness, and the strategy that has to exist before any of the fundraising does. I also sat in on Build Club, their weekly co-working space for people with projects they’re tired of postponing. - **I planted trees with them, too.** Oasis of Change and Young Guns ran a joint tree-planting push this month through our Tree-Nation account. Watching a creative studio for teenagers turn into a reforestation partner in the space of a few weeks was the most fun I had in July. We supported the planting of 725 bush fig trees in Tanzania. View planting certificate, [here](https://tree-nation.com/certificate/d909fa8576d63177). ![Tree-Nation graphic shows people holding seedlings under the words “United with shared mission”.](https://gabrieldalton.com/img/newsletter/july-2026/04d069577ba81e6b.webp) ## Achievements & Highlights 🚀 - **Merged into the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).** Contributions accepted into the Web Sustainability Guidelines and the Sustainable Web Impact project. - **Contributed to [ACCESSIBILITY.md](https://github.com/mgifford/ACCESSIBILITY.md)**, [Mike Gifford](https://github.com/mgifford)’s open template for accessibility statements — fixing broken links, a missing section, and leftover AI-generated text. - **Shipped**[cupel](https://github.com/Gabriel-Dalton/cupel), a page-level image compression toolchain that measures whether compressing an image is actually worth what it costs to do it. - **Published**[ai-contribution-signals](https://github.com/Gabriel-Dalton/ai-contribution-signals), an open catalogue of the markers that show a code contribution was made with AI assistance, with a risk framework and policy templates for open-source maintainers. This one came directly out of the W3C work — reviewing other people’s patches made me realize how few maintainers have any framework for this. - **Opened a conversation with Camino Verde**, a reforestation organization working in the Peruvian Amazon, about pro bono technical support from Oasis of Change. ## Top Lesson From This Month 💡 This month’s real lesson was learning what Scrum and Agile actually are, not just the buzzwords everyone throws around. Most people hear those words and picture something reserved for software teams at big companies. In practice, they’re just a way of organizing work: break everything into short cycles called sprints, keep a running list of what needs doing called a backlog, and check in often instead of disappearing for weeks and hoping it all comes together at the end. Agile is the mindset behind it — stay flexible, adjust as you learn, and treat the plan as something you revisit constantly rather than something you set once and follow blindly. I’d recommend that anyone learn this early, whether or not you ever work in tech. It’s a way of thinking about any project — a school assignment, a club, a business — that makes ambiguous, overwhelming work feel manageable. You stop trying to hold the whole thing in your head at once and instead ask: what’s the smallest useful piece I can finish and check in on this week? That question alone will change how much you get done. ## Top Quotes From This Month 💬 > “If two people have the same opinion, one is unnecessary. ... I don't want to talk, to communicate, with someone who agrees with me; I want to communicate with you because you see it differently. I value that difference.” > > — **Stephen Covey** > "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." > > **— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry** ## Shoutouts 👏 - **Pete Young and the Young Guns team**: for the honest design feedback and for trusting me with the rebuild. - **Robin Van Loon at Camino Verde**: for a genuinely challenging conversation about how tree-planting impact should be measured, and for pushing back on the “price per tree” framing that a lot of the sector runs on. I came out of that call thinking differently. - **The W3C sustainability and accessibility maintainers**, and **Mike Gifford**: for reviewing and accepting my project contributions. - **My family**, for ten days in Ontario and for putting up with a laptop at the table more often than they should have had to. ## What’s Next? 🚀 - **The Young Guns site launches**, along with the foundation’s board build-out and first grant applications. - **I start at BCIT this fall**, supported in part by the West End Community Centre scholarships I mentioned last month. - **Oasis of Change keeps planting.** We’re closing in on the next milestone (19,000) — details, as always, at [impact.oasisofchange.com](https://impact.oasisofchange.com). - More projects and collaborations in the works. Stay tuned… Know someone who’d enjoy following a young entrepreneur’s journey? Please forward this email and invite them to subscribe. Every new reader helps. Onwards and upwards, Gabriel Dalton P.S. Want more behind-the-scenes? For more in-depth discussions, check out my [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/gabrieldalton/) or [Medium](https://medium.com/@gabrieldalton) profiles. [Read this issue on Substack](https://gabrieldalton.substack.com/p/gabriel-daltons-july-newsletter-4) [Subscribe on Substack](https://gabrieldalton.substack.com/subscribe)