9 min
Two bars in the parking garage
A page on two bars doesn't fail, it just sits there, and that turned out to be the only state where the thing I spent an evening building does anybody any good.
Writing
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Six breakpoints and a prayer
Device breakpoints go stale the moment a new phone comes out. We can do better than yet another list of numbers.
8 min
What the CMS does to your hero image
I launched that homepage at 180 KB, it is 2.4 MB now, and the only thing anybody did was change the picture through the form I built for changing the picture.
8 min
Just a refresh
The brief asked for new colors and what we handed over was a CMS migration, and the reason those two turned out to be the same project has nothing to do with the colors.
5 min
@extend considered harmful
The Sass feature that looks like it saves you bytes will quietly rewrite the order of your selectors, move your rules to a part of the file you didn't write them in, and refuse to work inside a media query.
7 min
I didn't open my own style guide
I built a style guide for a client site in January and by March I was copying buttons out of a template three folders away without it ever crossing my mind to open the thing I'd built.
5 min
var, let, and the one I still use
ES6 is arriving all at once through a transpiler, which means that adopting it is a series of individual choices instead of one and some of those features have earned it more than others.
2 min
git bisect
Halving a commit log is a mechanical process that finds a regression while you make coffee, and the only genuinely hard part is writing down what you are looking for before you start.
7 min
Alt text is writing
Every image on the site had an alt attribute, the checker reported zero errors, and not one of those attributes told anybody anything because filling in a field and writing a sentence turn out to be different jobs.
6 min
View source
The web taught a generation of us by being readable and I'm not sure the thing replacing it has that property, which might matter more than it sounds like it does.
6 min
Worth doing badly
Chesterton's line about doing things badly is the most useful thing I know about actually finishing anything, and it goes well past side projects.
5 min
Gulp, because Grunt
Spending all week on a tool just to save 11 seconds a run. Nobody does that math beforehand.