Journal

I’ve been:

• reading The Islander by Chris Blackwell and Paul Morley
• watching Oppenheimer on the big screen and The Bear on TV
• listening to 1982 by A Certain Ratio and Matt Wilde’s Hello World
• out to see Moorcroft at the Tron and thinking about it ever since
• enjoying collaborating and socialising with teammates in the office but not loving the commute
• at one wedding (Lou and Tom) and one funeral (Aunt Elsie)
• losing sleep while Rudy goes through a night-whines phase
• starting to re-find some form at table tennis training
• wanting to write regular posts like this – this is the test run!

Something Adrian Roselli said recently has stuck with me. The gist was that when developers need definitive guidance they shouldn’t treat MDN as gospel, but rather refer to the proper specifications for web standards.

Note: this post is a work in progress. I’ll refine it over time.

Adrian tests how blockquotes, marked up in a variety of ways, are announced in different screen readers.

There’s a great section on Source order and layers in Every Layout’s Imposter layout. It’s a reminder that when needing to layer one element on top of the other you should:

1. favour a modern layout approach such as CSS Grid over absolute positioning; and
2. not apply z-index unless it’s necessary.

which elements appear over which is, by default, a question of source order. That is: if two elements share the same space, the one that appears above the other will be the one that comes last in the source.

z-index is only necessary where you want to layer positioned elements irrespective of their source order. It’s another kind of override, and should be avoided wherever possible.

An arms race of escalating z-index values is often cited as one of those irritating but necessary things you have to deal with using CSS. I rarely have z-index problems, because I rarely use positioning, and I’m mindful of source order when I do.

In web-based products from e-commerce stores to email clients to accounting software you often find index pages where each item in a list (or row in a table) has a Delete option. This is often coded as a link… but it shouldn’t be.

I liked this comment by Rails developer Dan where he advises a fellow Rails developer that to create his Delete control he should use a form rather than a link, via Rails’s button_to method.

Love Matt Wilde’s music and his new LP Hello World is even better than expected. Beautiful laid-back and understated vibe from start to finish. Lovely artwork too.

I really like Jim’s idea of putting an avatar file somewhere that’s memorable and easy to access by me wherever I am and that also (in the future) might be automatically grabbable by any platform that needs my avatar.

Great post by Chris here on the double-edged-sword of our rapidly-evolving web standards, and how to stay sane. On the one hand the latest additions to the HTML, CSS and JavaScript standards are removing the need for many custom tools which is positive. However:

it can also leave you feeling like it’s impossible to keep up or learn it all. And that’s because you can’t! The field is literally too big to learn everything. “Keeping up” is both impossible and overrated. It’s the path to burnout.

Clair recently brought her fancy coffee machine home from work. It’s a Sage Barista Touch. Since then, I’ve been learning what’s involved in making a coffee by grinding fresh from whole beans, barista-style!

It’s more complicated than I would have thought, and has involved lots of learning and trial and error.

Here are my go-to resources and my rules-of-thumb. I’m not saying they’re perfect, but they’re working for me! Any additional tips from people more in the know are, of course, very welcome.

This lasagne was meat-free, fun to cook, easy on the eye and tasted great.