11 min
It's never the prompt
The prompting turns out to be the least interesting part of my Claude Code setup, and most of what's actually doing the work is a handful of files I wrote once and then stopped thinking about.
Writing
Browse by topic →9 min
Documentation for future-you
I came back to a project after a year away and found three notes I'd left myself in one confident voice, two of which saved me an afternoon and one of which cost me one.
8 min
Let the browser measure it
A site built last year with a perfectly good image pipeline was still sending the 1600px file to a phone, and it turned out to be the same missing attribute I wrote a whole post about in 2018.
17 min
Exit 0 means allow
Porting an internal Claude Code safety tool from Linux to macOS took a couple months, and nearly every failure I found on the new platform failed in the permissive direction while printing a checkmark on the way out.
14 min
It will finish the list
Two Claude skills at work cover the two ways a Shopify client repo starts life, and having written both I'm fairly sure the numbered steps are the part nobody needed written down. The four or five places where the instruction is to stop are what earn the disk space.
2 min
light-dark()
Two color values in one declaration, picked by the color scheme, which removes most of the reason a theme needed a second block of custom properties at all.
11 min
Who owns this file?
Our template for new Shopify projects contains no theme code at all, and the most useful thing in it turned out to be the part that says which files we own, which ones belong to the client, and which ones should never have been copied in.
9 min
Style queries
A card with 5 surface variants and 4 children that each had to know which one they were sitting in, and 20 selectors across 4 files holding that together until a feature I'd been ignoring since 2024 deleted all of them.
11 min
Doomers and hawks
I've spent about a decade watching the careful work get cut first whenever a date slips, so I know exactly what the safety people are worried about, and I still come down on going faster.
9 min
Keep the last three
How a Shopify theme change at work went from somebody typing a push command on a laptop to one repo of shared GitHub Actions workflows, and the backup cleanup I had to get wrong three times before I stopped overthinking it.
2 min
scrollbar-gutter
The layout shifts by fifteen pixels when a modal opens, everybody blames the modal, and the actual cause is the scrollbar disappearing along with it.
10 min
Something that can go red
Somebody asked me for something to read about naming conventions, so I sent them a post I wrote in 2015 and then made the mistake of reading it myself.