Hi 👋🏼 I'm Rach. A developer building software for CodePen, wife, mother of two, productivity nerd and recovering screen addict. This is my digital garden.
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A friend asked me if I could build him a simple website for his new Mechanical Engineering business: just a few pages showing off what they’re about and what they can do. This is the sort of work I did when I was just starting out with web dev - marketing sites. It’s been 14 years since I worked a gig like this, and I was so struck by how much easier everything is now. First of all, the…
When you put something in the oven and need to remember to take it out, or put washing in the machine and need to remember to hang it out, or need to do anything else time-sensitive like take medication, set a reminder for it. And not just any alarm or reminder, the kind that bugs you over and over until you do it. When packing for family trips, use your lists. Keep the lists updated. Refer back…
I was a very happy Arc user for a couple of years, but after The Browser Company announced they would no longer be working on it , I started to assess alternatives. Now I've ended up with a stack of browsers, instead of reaching for a single browser to do all the things. Polypane For dev work involving designing, layout and styling. Chrome For all other dev work. Horse For general internet usage.…
Recently I've been experimenting with adding title-less notes to this site, for thoughts the length of a microblog or social post. Around the same time, I saw Pages CMS popping up in my communities. I decided to give it a try, for adding these micro posts (I call them nuggets) to my Astro content. I didn't want to replace the authoring flow for my regular notes with Pages, because I quite like the…
The whole “vibe coding” thing is another reminder that quite a lot of people working in tech don’t understand the difference between programs and products -- Dylan Beattie in The Problem with “Vibe Coding” Love the distinction made by Dylan in this post. I am still as in love with programming as I was 15 years ago. Product development, on the other hand, brings me to tears on a weekly basis.…
I have this story in my head, that the longer I go without writing a note here, the better that note has to be when I do eventually come back and post again. I was looking on the internet to see if this is a common thought pattern - that if something is infrequent, it must be excellent. I couldn't find anything like that on the psych blogs, so I have to assume that I've taken the phrases "quality…
I was texting with my best friend. Her mum has cancer, and my friend is going through the brutality of watching it take her piece by piece, just as I did with my own mum 13 years ago. I was thinking about how to respond to the latest message, too personal to relay here, when a suggested reply, animated in glowing colours to let me know it was "intelligent" popped up: Hang in there! My thought…
This year I set a goal to journal every day in the hope I can write one of these 2024 year-in-review notes for my site. I didn't get to it every single day but I did it enough that I can look back and remember the year that was! There was a lot that happened this year so I've tried to pull out some threads/themes that particularly stood out or came up over and over again. Most of my focus…
Last I had a Hobonichi Techo Cousin and I loved so many things about it: the paper, the layout, how flat it lays on the desk. The one thing that bothered me was just how big the pages were. I struggled to fill them and it just felt like a waste having so many half-blank pages. So this year I'm going to do my daily journaling in the A6 size. I bought a HON because I loved the rainbow cover. It is…
A conversation about the day's playground shenanigans with one of my kids had me asking him: "do you know what social skills are?". He replied "no, what's that?". After I explained, he was keen to tell me which skills he thinks he is good at (being kind and respectful, communicating with friends, being able to compromise within a group with different needs). He then said "the skill I don't have,…
