The big file was dead
I spent my first full day on an inherited store reading the file everybody had warned me about, and the git log said nobody had changed a line of it since 2018.
Blank on purpose
A client's homepage sat blank for a second and a half before it painted anything, and the code holding it there came from the tool they had bought to make the site convert better.
Can the client do that themselves?
An account manager watched the Page Builder demo in April and asked whether the client could do that themselves, and my job since then has mostly been deciding what that means.
Six kinds of white
A client asked what it would take for their site to go dark along with their laptop, I said half a day, and then I searched the stylesheet for white and got 61 results.
I wrote my own login
I spent most of last year building the login for a side project by hand on Node.js, and one Laravel command generated all of it, including the password reset I hadn't gotten to.
Measuring a consent banner
A client came back on the consent banner we'd built to ask whether the accept rate could be higher, and it turned out to be the only number anybody asked me for on the entire project.
Outlook renders with Word
A client asked whether their newsletter could look like their new site, which is a completely fair question, and answering it honestly meant explaining that the biggest email client in the working world lays out HTML with a word processor.
Cron schedules and cache windows
The merchandiser at a client could tell me how long a price change took to appear on the store, morning and afternoon separately, and nobody on our side could have told you either number.
Logic in templates
For a year I built tickets like this one around placeholder text and handed the rest to a back-end developer, until the rest turned out to be a few lines in a file I'd been editing all along.
git reflog
Almost nothing is actually gone after a bad reset, because git keeps a local log of everywhere HEAD has pointed for the last ninety days and hardly anybody knows to look at it.
fieldset and legend
A group of radio buttons has a question attached to it, and the question needs to be in the markup rather than in a heading that happens to sit nearby.