8 min
Drawings and lists
Everyone answers grid or flexbox with one dimension against two, which is true and has never once helped me pick, so I've started asking a different question instead.
Writing
Browse by topic →9 min
CSS Grid and the wrapper div
CSS Grid landed in Firefox and Chrome in the same week, and the first thing I did with it was break a layout with an empty wrapper div my hands typed on their own.
9 min
Everyone was Susan
A full-page cache took the store's category pages from about 2 seconds to 300 ms and broke four things, and all four turned out to be one piece of the header being rendered in the wrong place.
6 min
content: "\00a0"
Why the most-used string in my stylesheets is an invisible one, how CSS escapes will silently eat the character after them, and the parts of the content property that aren't strings at all.
8 min
It was a bug because I said so
A screenshot arrived six weeks into a build and nothing anywhere in the project said whether we supported that browser, so whether it counted as a defect got settled by whoever happened to be standing in the corridor.
7 min
Logic in templates
A category page was slow and it turned out to be six lines I had copied into a template months earlier, which is how I found out I'd been writing a language I kept telling people I don't write.
6 min
Nobody prints anything
Except invoices, tickets, recipes, directions, order confirmations, and every page a client's accountant touches, and the stylesheet for all of that is about 40 lines nobody thinks to write.
10 min
Picking the green on a call
A client spent most of a call deciding whether their green was too cold, and I spent that same call in DevTools changing the green one rule at a time.
8 min
How template fallback picks a file
A 10-minute ticket ate most of a day because there were four copies of the template on disk and I kept picking the wrong ones.
8 min
Only mine was broken
A client's nav collapsed at the wrong width on my machine and nobody else's, and it took two days to find out that the four of us had four different copies of the same dependencies.
9 min
See email from Casey
The ugliest 40 lines in the store I took over are wrapped in a comment telling me not to change them, and the email that comment points at stopped existing years ago.
2 min
word-break and overflow-wrap
Two properties that sound like synonyms, do different things, and get reached for in the wrong order roughly every time a long URL breaks out of a card.