Hello! Welcome to 'what i did today'. On this blog, I write about my work as a software engineer and, occasionally, a bit about my life in Japan. Thanks for...
Last week, my code editor froze mid-scroll, and that was the last straw. I've been using VS Code for the last 6 years and I've long grown tired of it. It's laggy and prone to freezing after hours of use. Which, as a professional dev, is absolutely unacceptable. At first, I didn't notice it. My work machines were top-of-the-line MacBook Pros. They could handle the demands of running an…
This talk was presented by Zach Leatherman, who also created 11ty.dev This talk is a historical survey of web technologies as told through the creation of an image comparison component. This talk was super interesting. I never studied computer science formally, so a lot of the historical and technical specifics were new to me. Of course, I've encountered the issues presented in my day-to-day work,…
This is one of my favorite topics. I firmly believe that every developer should observe or participate in a user/usability research session. We spend our days guarding against edge cases. But, when it comes to a user's experience of a website, there will always be things that we cannot anticipate. This talk, presented by Chad Gowler, was an excellent exhortation of the importance of building…
We've made it to the first break! So far, my primary reaction is, "wow, I wish I could attend this event in person." Maybe next year, I'll have enough PTO saved up for a quick jaunt over to the UK. The first talk was "Anchors aweigh! Tethering Elements in Pure CSS with Anchor Positioning" by Bramus Van Damme and it discussed a relatively new CSS feature that allowed for simpler anchor positioning.…
As part of my effort to level up my professional skills, I joined a bunch of different frontend/UX email lists at the beginning of the year. Back in January, one of them included an ad for the State of the Browser 2026, which was my first introduction to this conference. This is a frontend development conference based in London, England. The talks piqued my interest, so I bought an online ticket…
At work today, I learned about how to add external filters to an AG grid table. Our users had requested a way to toggle the visibility of full-width rows on certain tables. Initially, I thought this could be achieved by returning 'false' in the isFullWidthRow grid option function. However, I quickly realized that this approach only removed the fullWidthCellRenderer and left a normal row behind.…
My boss was in the office today, which brought a real "gotta get stuff done" energy to an otherwise tepid Friday. Most of my day was spent cleaning up some client-side data handling that I wrote and listening to TikTok drama recaps on YouTube. My lead really doesn't like fetching data from the client, so I'm rewriting the JS to process the same data from the backend. While I do have some concerns…
My favorite thing about commuting via Tokyo public transportation is that delays are inevitable, especially on high-congestion lines like mine. I was up early. I left the house early. But, for reasons unknown to me, I was 5 minutes late. Thankfully, my train car wasn't as crowded as it usually is, so I was able to breathe comfortably as we paused between stations for minutes on end. Travelling…
Today was quite ordinary. I started keeping this blog to mentally distinguish between days like these. Not slow, not fast. Normal, seasonal temperature, cloudy but not rainy. Did a normal amount of work, drank a small amount of coffee. Truly nothing to write home about. I thought about quitting my job. Fantasized about living off my savings and unemployment for a few months while I sowed my wild,…
I had a fascinating dream last night. The world had experienced an apocalyptic event that made the air toxic after long periods of exposure. People did as people do and created little enclaves that, somehow, maintained clean air. Most of these enclaves were, ironically, the big cities: Tokyo, New York, London, etc. But there were also a few small villages that used the same technology. In the…