7 min
Grid shipped today
Firefox on the Tuesday, Chrome on the Thursday, and after seven years of building page layout out of a property that was invented to wrap text around a photograph, we have a layout system that was designed as one.
Writing
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The cart is not a page
Full-page caching made the whole store about eight times faster and broke exactly four things, and all four of them were the same problem wearing different hats.
7 min
The support matrix
Nobody signs off a list of browsers in week one. So it gets decided in a corridor in week six, by whoever is standing there, and by then it's a concession rather than a decision.
5 min
I learned PHP by accident
I did not decide to learn a back-end language this year. I got cornered into it one template at a time, and I've been thinking about how much of what I know arrived that way rather than on purpose.
7 min
Custom properties arrive
These have been in three browsers since the spring and I spent nine months not using them, because I'd filed them as Sass variables with worse syntax, and under that filing they are genuinely worse.
5 min
Yarn, because npm
A new package manager, three projects moved across, and the distinct feeling that I have written this post before under a different noun.
7 min
200-line functions
I inherited a codebase where the function at the center of everything is 211 lines long, and my first reaction was contempt, and my first reaction is always contempt and has never once been useful.
8 min
Service workers on a brochure site
Five pages, a contact form, updated roughly twice a year, and I spent an evening giving it an offline experience. I've been trying since to work out honestly whether that was worth doing or just fun.
6 min
Three themes deep
I spent most of a Tuesday looking for the file that renders a product's price. I found four. The one actually running was the one I'd have guessed last.
7 min
The CMS undoes it
I shipped that homepage at 180 KB and it is currently 2.5 MB, and nobody did anything wrong. They just changed the picture like they were supposed to be able to.
8 min
The redesign is a re-platform
The brief said refresh the look and feel, and the client meant it sincerely, and the reason that sentence is expensive has nothing to do with the look and feel and everything to do with the four years of decisions sitting underneath it.
7 min
The style guide nobody opened
I have built four of these now and exactly one is still alive. The difference between them was never the quality of the document, it was whether opening it was a decision somebody had to make.