A blog about front-end dev and literally whatever else I feel like
Welcome to fight night. In one corner, we have list semantics. In the other, we have headings. Only one can survive. Ok maybe that's overly dramatic, but I wanted to get your attention before embarking on a deep-ish dive into accessibility APIs and the specs that they implement. The problem I'm working on a new accordion component, based on the US Web Design System's implementation . Some key…
I find it a little grating when people talk about their jobs under the rubric of "personal news." No judgment if you feel differently, but in a perfect world, my personal life would not be meaningfully entwined with my job. That said, this post is all about how my job has affected me as a person this year and I will spoil it at the outset by saying the effect has not been good. But in order to…
It turns out that, at least for the time being, I work on a design system for a living. I also happen to really like working on them, so here I am (on the weekend!) blogging about some web component-based design systems I've come across recently. generic is a cool idea in that it's a set of (mostly) unstyled components you can pull in and style however you like. And maybe you've heard that web…
My favorite project that I've ever worked on is one from my early days at 18F. It's the one that really helped me get what the work was. I'm going to talk about everything I was lucky enough to work on on this project and some of the things I learned doing it. I'd love it if you took away some lessons about how great projects work, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't hope you'd read it and think…
Over the weekend, 18F was eliminated, and all of its staff placed on administrative leave in anticipation of imminent termination. I left 18F in November, so I wasn't directly affected by this massacre. But I was at 18F for over 5 years and these were some of my closest colleagues and dear friends, so it's not that I wasn't affected at all. The secondhand trauma is real. The survivor's guilt is…
Work This was my second week no longer being at 18F and serving full-time as eng. lead for USWDS . I had big plans to make some progress on some ADRs I need to write. I made just slightly less progress than intended (read: none at all). Not work as such, but it's been fun noodling on this website again. I like the colors. I like the octopus. Upgrading to Eleventy 3.0 was a breeze (probably because…
Work I'm working on a High Profile project I won't go into beyond saying that the portion of it I'm working on is a big Typescript/React project. I've been working on improving test coverage, and wrapped up testing a giant chunk of the front-end portion of the knowledge graph that drives the project. Unrelated to project work, I had a big, stressful choice to make I'm being purposefully vague…
I always knew that <C-o> would let you jump back to the previous cursor position, even if it was in another file. (And when I say always, I mean always. Like Meno always knew geometry.) While I was backtracking around with <C-o> today, it occurred to me that there must be a way to jump forwards again, and of course there is. It's <C-i> . The one right next to o on my keyboard. Bonus tip I didn't…
The basic skill of programming is not writing code, it's solving incredibly tedious puzzles over and over every day for years to produce a new app that everyone will hate being forced to use.
Are you sick and tired of fighting specificity in your CSS selectors? Have you ever wished you could tell the browser: "hey, my components' styles should take precedence over competing design system rules"? Well friend, do I have news for you. Cascade layers are here, and they basically let you do just that. I knew these were a thing, but hadn't had occasion to really do anything with them yet.…