8 min
Saying no
I said yes on a call last month while a voice in my head was very clearly saying don't. What I'd have needed in that moment wasn't courage.
Writing
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Deleting code
Three days on a retainer, removing things. The client asked what they'd got for it, reasonably and without any edge, and I did not have an answer ready.
7 min
AVIF and the format question
Two things happened to image formats this fall, and the less exciting one is much more useful. I'd like a flowchart for choosing between them. I don't think one can exist.
7 min
Code review is teaching
I can still quote a review comment somebody left on my work in 2015, and I can also remember one I left last year that I'd like back, and neither of those is about whether the code was correct.
6 min
Everything is a video call
I added up last week's calendar and it came to 19 hours, and I'd estimate that 11 of those hours replaced conversations that used to take two minutes and happen next to somebody's desk.
7 min
Contrast ratios lie
A page I'd checked properly, that passed every automated tool I own, was unreadable on my own phone in a beer garden in June, and the number had nothing to say about why.
7 min
Focus management
A full page load does a small piece of housekeeping nobody has ever had to think about. Swap content with JavaScript and you have quietly taken it on, almost certainly without noticing.
6 min
Liquid is not a programming language
I spent a week being annoyed that the template language wouldn't let me do a thing, and then worked out that it wouldn't let anybody do that thing, on purpose, and that the restriction is most of why the platform works at all.
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.
7 min
Core Web Vitals is a client conversation
Eight years of losing this argument, because it was my opinion against somebody's feature. Then Google published three numbers with thresholds on them. That changes the politics far more than the engineering.
6 min
The kitchen table
Two weeks and three days of working from a table that is also where I eat, and the thing I keep circling back to is that this was always possible and we were always told it wasn't.
8 min
200 things at once
A change delivered all at once isn't braver than the same change delivered in slices, it just makes you unable to tell what you broke, and the web platform itself is the best argument for the slow way.