Journal

I’m wary of list-based clickbait – and Adam’s recent 6 CSS snippets every front-end developer should know in 2023 feels like that – however I like this modern and minimal approach to creating a circle. I’ve previously seen aspect-ratio: 1 used to create a square box and it’s a lovely shorthand for “make width and height equal”. It makes sense that you can use it for a circle too, just by adding some border-radius.

System font stack CSS organized by typeface classification for every modern OS. The fastest fonts available. No downloading, no layout shifts, no flashes — just instant renders.

I was delighted to discover that my talented colleague Anda has her own website and uses it to write articles like this! This one is obviously pretty relevant to me too, given that I work on the same team.

Something we often talk about in our Design System team is that components should not be like Swiss Army Knives. It’s better for them to be laser-focused because by limiting their scope to a single task they are more reusable and support a more extensible system through composition.

Getting to profitability is no longer a distant, post-IPO nice-to-have, but a short-term necessity for survival. But how to do that without cutting off the legs of the product team? By using better tools and techniques, that's how.

DHH of 37 Signals and Basecamp offers three pieces of advice for productivity and profitability.

1: Unless market conditions demand otherwise, delay native app development for as long as possible.

2: Hire full-stack developers, and don't let them split the frontend and backend into separate jurisdictions.

3: Hire designers who work natively with the web.

Me, Clair and Rudy just enjoyed a lovely weekend break. We stayed at Drinkbetween cottage on Banchory Farm. While only 70 minutes drive from home it provided some lovely countryside isolation, with the bonus of nice nearby towns to visit nearby too.

Clair and I loved this story of Viggo Mortensen’s Ben Cash and family temporarily leaving their off-grid existence in the Pacific Northwest to enter civilisation. It poses some interesting questions about parenting, lifestyle and morality but mainly, it’s just a lot of fun.

Judging by his movie review for The Guardian, Mark Kermode seemed to like Captain Fantastic too.

Having pre-recorded previous shows, I recently made a first visit to Clyde Built Radio’s station at the Barras market for a live show and really enjoyed it. It’s such a great location and it was a nice change to spin records on a Sunday morning.

Responsive design for tables is tricky. Sure, you can just make the table’s container horizontally scrollable but that’s more a developer convenience than a great user experience. And if you instead try to do something more clever, you can run into challenges as I did in the past. Still, we should strive to design good narrow screen user experiences for tables, alongside feasible technical solutions to achieve them.

I’ve started reading some entries from Manuel Matuzovic’s 100 days of (more or less) modern CSS series, and began with the excellent Day 99: Native Nesting. It clearly explains how to use the now-agreed syntax for various common scenarios.