• 27th May at 13:24

    I’ve written 0 lessons for the eleventy course today. I planned to write at least two (even though I have 4 in my bullet journal lol).

    Having 37 lessons to write is a real mountain, I must say. I’m into double-digits now, but I refuse to force myself to write, if I’m not feeling it. I don’t want the quality of the course to suffer. This is one of my favourite parts about being my own boss: giving myself maximum freedom!

    I’m just gonna do some admin and play with the kids in the garden instead and maybe I’ll write a lesson later.

  • 26th May at 10:24

    I’m re-working a section of my talk “Keeping It Simple With CSS That Scales” today. C-BEUT is gone and instead replaced with CUBE CSS - Composition Utility Block Exception.

    I see composition as a really important aspect of keeping things simple. Micro-optimisation in my experience, has usually resulted in fragile re-inventions of core language capabilities and we’re seeing that again with various re-inventions of the Stack from Every Layout.

    I’ll blog about it on piccalilli later.

    C-BEUT was such a shit name.

  • 24th May at 15:52

    One thing I’m getting sick of hearing is "the government did a good job with the hand they were dealt".

    They didn’t. They fucked up.

    Every other government around the globe got dealt a similar hand, yet we’re only just behind America in deaths.

  • 27th April at 07:33

    ‪If you write to get lots of views, your posts will probably never be great.‬

    ‪If you write really good content, though, you’ll achieve the former by proxy. ‬

    ‪It’s all about patience. So many of my old articles did nothing, but I’m a completely different and much better writer now for persisting.‬

    ‪I can also link pretty much all success in the web world back to writing. Publishing on my own blog has been endlessly useful too. ‬

    ‪The blog platforms will get you short term views, sure, but what happens to your hard work when they’re gone? ‬

    Lastly: anyone can be a great writer. I did terrible at school, but over the last five or six years, I’ve persisted and improved. You just gotta work at this stuff, like anything else.

  • 21st April at 09:12

    Tip for Firefox users on Mac.

    By default, you can’t tab to links. To fix it:

    1. Go to “about:config”
    2. Search for “accessibility.tabfocus”
    3. It won’t show up but will offer to create one. Set it to a “number”.
    4. Set the value to 7
    5. Done

  • 8th April at 09:43

    After a ridiculously stressful few weeks, I’m finally slowing down a bit today.

    We’ve been in self isolation (which isn’t that different to lockdown) for 13 days because both our kids have had coronavirus symptoms. We’re not convinced it was coronavirus, but at this time, even a standard edition kid fever hits differently.

    Being a parent is hard work right now and I’ve certainly not experienced this level of anxiety for a lot of years.

    I’ve also been deep in one of the largest client projects I’ve ever done. The peak of which happened while we were in this panic state about our children’s health. That’s been a real test, but it’s also given me a buffer which I’m incredibly privileged to have. I’ve got so much empathy for my fellow freelancer chums going through this time right now.

    It’s all looking up though. I launched the pre-orders of my new Eleventy course yesterday which have been flying off the shelves. The support from folks has legit made me do a little cry over the last 24 hours. Y’all are amazing and you’re helping me to dedicate more resources to the end-product.

    So, back to today: I’m just gonna muck around building some bits for Piccalilli and generally chilling out. It feels good starting my day at 10:43am BST. I’m back to normality a little bit.