I wrote a post a few years ago about the order I read an unfamiliar project in, and I've since decided the order was never really the point, and that the procedure's actual job is to stop me opening files at random and hoping.
Three people asked me last month what I use for something, and I gave three different half-answers from memory, so I've finally written the page, and the writing of it was more useful than the page.
WordPress is the boring right answer for a lot of small business sites, and almost all of the reasons are about the person who has to edit the thing on a Tuesday when I'm not there.
We spent 40 minutes arguing about whether a 28 KB framework was too heavy for the project, on a site whose tag manager was pulling in 470 KB of other people's JavaScript that nobody in the room had ever measured.
Set in January, written in a document. The site is now more than twice it and nobody broke a rule, because there was never a moment where anybody had to say no.
I reviewed a 400-line validation module last month and about 380 lines of it were reimplementing things the browser has done natively since roughly 2011.
Somebody typed a phone number with spaces in it, was told "Invalid input" three times, and gave up. The cause was a string written by a developer at the moment they were least interested in writing.
Two clients have asked me this year whether their site is accessible, both of them because somebody frightened them about a deadline, and both times the useful answer came out of a quarter of an hour and a browser.
A client asked whether we could drop Internet Explorer and I said yes, cheerfully, in a meeting, and the next twenty minutes were among the worst I've had this year.
For five years, the production version of every site I built was assembled on one MacBook in one room in San Diego. What finally moved me wasn't a disaster. It was noticing how much I was relying on not having one.
The monthly meetup I'd been going to since I started didn't happen in February, or in March, and nobody announced anything, and I think that's just how these end.
A client asked how long a dark mode would take and I said half a day, because I was thinking about colors, and the colors were about an hour of it.