Weeknotes 26:15

Posted 8 hours ago

Week of April 5–11

Once again, I worked on a lot of smaller tasks this week in my day job. One of the tasks I addressed was font declarations in our stylesheet. I believe someone in the past had set up Sass variables for the serif and sans-serif fonts but that somewhere along the line. Those were no longer being used and the fonts were being declared without the variables. This has caused an issue recently as we needed to use just one font family on our Farsi site. I took time this week to define the fonts as CSS custom properties and then refactor the CSS to use those custom properties instead of the entire font-family declaration. This made it very easy to define the custom properties for our Farsi site to use just the one font.

One year

I celebrated my first year work anniversary with Revive Our Hearts on April 9. I am so grateful to have this job especially in this very challenging job market. This role has been the right fit for me. I am glad to be back in Christian ministry and to use my technical skills and abilities to help Revive Our Hearts as they help women to experience freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ. I had hoped to write an article to celebrate the occasion but I have been very unmotivated to write recently (hence this weeknote being published on Wednesday). I might still try to make that happen in the next month.

Un-sassed my site

After many months thinking about it, I finally put in the work and un-sassed my site. I also created a new light and dark theme for the site. And at the last minute, I decided to keep the dark theme I had created a couple of years ago, now named “Classic.” I worked on refactoring my stylesheet the previous weekend and put in a little bit of work each day and was able to launch it on Wednesday (April 8). I really like the purple light theme. It was inspired by my oldest daughter (her favorite color and the color of her school) as well as rebeccapurple which has significance in the CSS community. I hope to write more about the project in the coming days.

The Layout Maestro

I have been able to take advantage of a slower pace at work to spend some time each day in The Layout Maestro course I bought a couple of weeks ago. I had a bit of an “aha” moment related to style container queries. I have struggled to understand the practical use of them, especially when you could easily just use a class. But Ahmad went through a specific use case and addressed my concern.

You might be thinking: why use style queries when we can add a class? The main benefit is that styles can respond to what is inside the layout. With :has(), we can detect patterns like a top section that contains a single card and apply a featured style for that case.

A class alone can’t do this unless we add it dynamically, which defeats the purpose of layout slots and style queries.

This is exactly the types of things that I was hoping to learn when I bought the course. I was intrigued by some of the clever ideas he shared in CSS Day last summer. I knew that he was just whetting our appetite through the talk and would expand upon it in the course. I highly recommend the course to anyone building CSS layouts. He has some very clever thoughts on creating conditional layouts with a combination of modern CSS techniques.

To the moon and back

I couldn’t help but be excited and get caught up in the wonder of the Artemis II mission to the Moon this past week. I was alive when humans last visited the moon but was too young to remember. I enjoyed watching the livestream on Monday as the astronauts approached the moon and began making observations. I was watching when they named one of the moon craters after the commander’s late wife. I also turned on the feed later in the day just as they were reestablishing contact with the crew after their silence on the far side of the moon. It is amazing how much of what I saw in the movie Apollo 13 made a lot of sense of what I was seeing in the live feeds or helped me understand milestones of their mission. I also watched the splashdown on Friday.

Articles I read

What I watched

Moon Joy, Courtesy of NASA’s Artemis II Astronauts (YouTube)

Books I am reading

Walking

  • Sunday – 3.81 miles in 1 hour 11 minutes

What I played

MLB The Show 23 (Orioles) – I went 6-1 this week. I won the finals game of the series against the series against the BlueJays (won series 2-1), swept three games from the Yankees, and won a series against the Rangers (2-1).

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