8 min
Things I unlearned
I read a post I wrote in 2015 and found the person who wrote it insufferable. That turns out to be the useful part of keeping an archive for 11 years.
Writing
Browse by topic →7 min
.gitignore
A live payment key in a tracked `.env` file. The repository had `.env` in its `.gitignore`, and had done for two years.
6 min
The test that would have caught it
The same bug arrived twice, 18 months apart, on the same client site, and the second time I found my own fix from the first time sitting in the git history with no test next to it.
7 min
Ask a question that gets answered
Two questions went into the same channel within about ten minutes of each other. One got a useful answer in four minutes. The other is still sitting there, and the difference wasn't the difficulty.
6 min
currentColor
I opened a button component with 11 color declarations in it, across four variants, and the correct number was one per variant, because six of those properties already default to the thing they were being set to.
5 min
Everyone says they're faster
Three people in one standup gave three different multiples for how much quicker they've got, none of them had measured anything, and I sat there working out whether to say that I genuinely don't know if I'm faster at all.
7 min
Web sustainability
Three years of declining performance work. Then the same list of changes, approved in two weeks, because it arrived under a sustainability heading instead of a technical one.
6 min
The agent wrote a test that passes
I asked for test coverage on a module that didn't have any, got 14 tests back, and all 14 passed, and about half of them could not have failed under any circumstances whatsoever.
6 min
text-wrap: balance
A card grid where, at exactly one breakpoint, one heading broke with a single word on the second line, and the fix used to be a non-breaking space typed into the content by a person who'd have to remember forever.
6 min
Anchor positioning
When I wrote about the popover attribute I said the positioning half hadn't arrived and you'd still need a library for it, and it has now arrived in one browser, and it deletes the library completely.
6 min
Dependable and boring
Everybody wants to build the new thing, but the web runs on old software that somebody unglamorous is keeping alive, usually for free and usually without being thanked.
7 min
Technical debt is a bad metaphor
Somebody asked how much technical debt we had, wanting a number. Nobody could give one, and not because we hadn't measured. The question doesn't mean anything; the metaphor makes it sound like it does.