Weeknotes 25:13

Posted 3 days ago

Week of March 23–29

I have two weeks before I start my new job on April 9. It is nice to be able to enjoy some “free time” now that the pressure and stress of the job search has been relieved. I am taking some time to reflect on the year to help identify lessons that I learned both personally and professionally. It has been good to give myself this space at the end of a long job search and time of trial.

I enjoyed getting to celebrate my new job with people online and in person this week. I shared the news on LinkedIn and took the time to reach out to several people who had played a bigger role in helping me over the past year.

I will be traveling up to Michigan in two weeks to onboard for my new job at Revive Our Hearts. I booked flights and made a rental car reservation. I also got to give some input into the new work computer that they are ordering for me. I am looking forward to getting to meet people in person and start this new chapter.

Tinkering

I spent some time tinkering on my site on Saturday. Jeremy Keith mentioned having a “on this day” page in his archives and I liked the idea. I had recently wrote some PHP scripts to do this very thing on my Memory Keeper personal project. I took that script and tweeked it a bit to create my very own “on this day” page for my site. As Jeremy mentioned, it is probably of no interest to anyone but me. But I consider myself my main audience for my site so it was worth taking some time to add it.

If it works, it’s right

I like the attitude behind Andy Bell’s post, If it works, it’s right. He mentions how he disagreed with another person’s approach to solving a problem. It is not the approach that Andy would use, but as Andy points out, the other person was not wrong. The approach worked for that person. In the end, it is not about coming up with the right solution but finding the solution that works best for you or your team.

CSS and development in general is very flexible. There are more than one way to solve a problem. There is not a definitive right solution. And there are times when what works is more important than doing it “right.” There are solutions that I know I could have done better but the important thing is to ship and launch projects and that means that our solutions are not always as good as we want them to be. Not that we are negligent and ship “bad” products.

One reason this article stands out to me is that I was having a conversation with my son yesterday. He is taking a Web design class. He has been working on a design and will start coding it out later this week. I told him that I would love for him to send me a zip of the files later in the week so that I can see what he comes up with. He made some comment that his code would not be as good as mine or something along those lines. I had seen some of his code earlier in the semester and made a comment about all the IDs he was using. I was just explaining to him that is sort of a best practice to avoid using IDs in CSS because of the high specificity. But the thing is that it is not wrong for him to use IDs. I just have a preference to not use them.

I tried to assure him that I will not judge his code. I think about how often I look at older code I wrote and want to put my hand over my face. But the code worked. And at that point in my development, it was right because it worked. I might do it differently but it is not wrong. My son is just learning. I don’t want to discourage him. So I need to be careful what I say. I needed that gentle reminder that Andy’s article highlights.

It reminds me of something Andy Budd once shared in a talk. He told us to never be ashamed of our past work and to remember that it reflects where we were at in the process at the time. We are all growing and developing and continuing to hone our skills. So take it easy on others. And take it easy on yourself.

Built-in accessbility checker in Figma

Joey Banks

joeyabanks.me

Woohoo, a big win for accessible design! @figma.com now includes a *built-in* color contrast checker, making it easier to design for everyone. ?

A screenshot of Figma showing a new color contrast checker built into the color picker within the properties panel.

Articles I read

Books I am reading

What I watched

  • Assorted third and fourth round games of NCAA tournament (CBS)
  • NCIS (Netflix)
  • Mad About You (Samsung TV Plus)

Walking

  • Sunday – 1.1 miles in 19 minutes (my walk was interupted by phone call from my son who had car trouble on his way back to school in Kentucky)
  • Tuesday – 4.17 miles in 1 hour and 12 minutes

What I played

  • MLB The Show 20 (Twins) – I went 10-2 this week. I have been having a lot of fun with the Twins. I am taking advantage of the time before I start my new job.
  • NBA 2K25 (Nuggets) – I played one game this week and beat the Magic.

Colophon

I wrote this post while listening to Laufey’s Bewitched album. The jazzy, mellow songs were perfect for this activity. I had listened to it while writing another weeknote in the past so I decided to try again today.

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