6 min
Where everybody went
The place where this industry has conducted most of its conversation for about a decade came apart over six weeks, and everybody scattered, and the thing I miss most is not the site.
Writing
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Intl
I added a date library out of pure habit, for one line of formatting, then removed it. Then I read what's actually built in and found four things I've been doing badly for years.
7 min
Most flaky tests aren't
A test that failed about one run in 15, and a team with a ritual around it. The ritual was clicking a button. It had been going on for eight months.
7 min
Web fonts are the budget
I measured a client's homepage in August and the fonts were 41% of it, which makes them the largest avoidable cost on the page and also the one line item nobody will let you touch.
11 min
Mostly off
My VS Code settings file is mostly a list of things I've turned off, and the reasoning behind the unpopular ones (no tabs, no hover, no Copilot) is more coherent than it looks from the outside.
7 min
The maintenance contract nobody sells
A site I built in 2018 was serving malware by the summer of 2021, and nobody involved did anything wrong, and that's what I find hard about it.
6 min
IE11 died and nobody noticed
Support ends today, after nine years for this version and about 27 for the browser, and the thing I keep turning over is that it doesn't feel like anything, and that the not-feeling-like-anything is the whole story.
6 min
AbortController
Everybody meets this as the way to cancel a fetch. The more interesting thing it does has nothing to do with the network at all.
6 min
has() in one browser
The parent selector shipped last month, in one browser, after roughly 20 years of everyone being told it was impossible, and the interesting part isn't the new things it lets you draw.
9 min
Just look at it
Most image optimization advice is about codecs, but the actual bug is usually that nobody has opened the file and looked at it since the day it came out of Figma.
6 min
The reflog
A message at 4:10: "I think I've just deleted three hours of work." It took about 90 seconds to get it back.
7 min
Cascade layers
Three engines, six weeks, which almost never happens. It addresses the oldest structural problem in CSS: specificity is a terrible proxy for what you actually meant.