9 min
Everyone has a Brent
Not a good novel. I got more out of it than most of the good books I read this year, largely because of the one character everybody quotes the wrong lesson about.
Writing
Browse by topic →7 min
The tests I actually write
The testing pyramid assumes your software is mostly logic, and a brochure site is mostly templates, content and CSS, so the bottom of the pyramid ends up testing functions I wrote to have something to test.
7 min
srcset and the guess
The browser has to pick an image before it knows how big that image will be on the page, so it guesses, and `sizes` is the attribute where you tell it what it's guessing about.
6 min
The indexer
A price was right on the product page and wrong on the category page for eleven days, and the answer was not in any of the code I'd been reading, because the two pages were reading from different tables.
7 min
The handoff
A client should own their domain, their hosting, their repository, their analytics and every account their business runs through, and in three years I have met perhaps two who did.
7 min
Every project needs a README
I lost a day changing a phone number on a site I built myself, and not one minute of that day was spent on the phone number.
7 min
A design system for one
Everything written about design systems this year comes from teams of forty with a five-year roadmap. I build storefronts on a six-week clock. Sorting the practice from the apparatus.
7 min
The brief is not the problem
A brief arrives as a numbered list of features, and every line on it is somebody's guess at a solution to a problem that isn't written down anywhere in the document.
7 min
Utility classes, reluctantly
I have spent three years telling anyone who'd listen that a class name should describe what a thing is and not what it looks like, and I've spent this month writing `mb-3` on a client project and finding that I don't mind.
6 min
The channel for everything
Eighteen months on Slack. It fixed several real problems, and I still can't work out why my day feels more fragmented than it did when the tool was worse.
7 min
position: sticky and the parent that eats it
It does exactly what it says, and fails completely silently when it can't. The culprit is nearly always a clearfix somebody wrote in 2014. Sometimes me.
6 min
Grid and Flexbox aren't competing
A reasonable question with a slightly annoying answer. The framing everyone repeats is perfectly true and is not the bit that helps you decide.