9 min
Shopify collection limits
A row of six related products came out one card short on about a third of a client's catalog, and the thing eating the missing card was a limit I'd never read about, being spent by a block I hadn't written.
Writing
Browse by topic →6 min
It got slower while I optimized it
I added lazy loading to every image on a site in about 20 minutes, felt pleased with myself, and then measured it and found the pages were taking longer to show their main content than before I started.
8 min
Cumulative Layout Shift
A client stopped in the middle of a status call to say their own site had done the thing where it jumps, which is the behavior I'd been writing into audit documents for them since 2018 with nothing to show for it.
2 min
prefers-reduced-motion
An operating system setting that has been sitting there since 2018 telling you somebody gets motion sick, and the two-line stylesheet that is the whole of respecting it.
11 min
I had to type my own address
A five-month redesign went out in one drop, conversion came down about 8%, and the thing doing it was a checkout field that had quietly stopped telling the browser what it was for.
7 min
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.
9 min
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.
7 min
What a performance budget is for
A designer asked in March whether we could add a semibold for the card headings. I said yes inside a minute, on a project where I had written the performance budget myself in January.
9 min
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.
7 min
One letter behind
I rewrote a staff directory with hooks the week they landed, and the search box started returning the results for whatever I'd typed a keystroke earlier.
9 min
A week became a day
I said about a week on a call and meant it, and two days later the word about was gone and there was a date in the plan with my name next to it.
8 min
Can I delete this?
I ran git blame on a line I could not explain and got back a one-word message with my own name on it, and the word was fix.