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04.10 – 04.16

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Work

I didn’t really reap the productivity rewards I’d hoped for from a week sponging off bae’s parents. And some possibly yarn.lock-related shenanigans pissed all over any hopes I had of getting much done towards the end of the week (hopefully someone else will have figured it out by the time I’m back). At least I wasn’t responsible for bringing the homepage down (this time). Probably just about par for the week all told.

Life

I basically blacked out with tiredness last Sunday night and started this week feeling more alive than I have in months. Overall we didn’t do as well recovery-wise as we might have, but can’t deny it’s been a big help. Even just not having to cook and do the dishes has been huge.

Consumed too much mediocre chocolate and felt predictably rubbish about it. I’m in my forties and it seems reasonable to conclude that I will never learn how to change this pattern of behaviour.

Baby girl’s capacity for screaming prompted bae’s parents to (somewhat unhelpfully) question if there’s something we (and all the doctors) are missing. Fairly sure there’s not.

The kids got showered in love and gifts. It’s so lovely to see the effect they (mostly) have on the mood of everyone in the tribe – especially the elders. Kids understandably not that impressed to be back in the sole care of mum and dad now (actually I don’t think baby girl gives a shit – she was bound to scream her face off regardless). In spite of this, we had another unimaginably good train journey on the way home – knackered old iPad mini working overtime stuffing CBeebies into the little man’s eyeballs.

Little man developed a bit of a ‘big bed’ addiction and is less than happy to be back in a cot at home. Don’t really want to have to buy him a bed if we’re actually going to move house imminently though.

Spent a hugely enjoyable Sunday afternoon in the company of the inimitable Andy P (‘ANDY P! ANDY P!’). Even if the rumours are he only visited to see his name in lights in his feed reader.

This site

In a moment of madness I added some JavaScript last week. I since regained a degree of sanity and accomplished what I was after with CSS alone. In fact, I was much happier with the overall effect. It had the added bonus of working with overscroll, and worked regardless of how quickly you flick the screen (something that was causing the IntersectionObserver to crap out on iOS). There’s a .shadow element that’s always in the same place, but if you’re not scrolled at all, it is masked by a .shadow-mask which is a taller element with a higher z-index and a linear-gradient background that fades to transparent. When the page is scrolled, it appears as though the ‘shadow’ fades in because it is covered by a decreasingly opaque mask. This is plainly not an original idea, but I was pleased it dawned on me nonetheless. Anyway, I then decided to get rid of the shadow altogether ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Cool story.

See the Pen CSS-only shadow on scroll by David McCormick (@davidpmccormick) on CodePen.

I’ve also started using CSS custom properties – something I’m slightly embarrassed to admit I’ve never worked with for real. Going to have a proper CSS tidy-up soon.

And I made the pointless pseudo-markdown/code toggle look more like the version in iA Writer for iOS.

Listening

• Classic FM – a frankly objectionable amount. At high volume. But it’s hard to complain when you’re being given free bed, board, and childcare.

Reading

• AI & the Science of Creativity
• Using color-mix() to create opacity variants – in my (limited) experience, this approach maps closer to how UI designers think about creating colour variations than relative color syntax does
• Native [css] nesting – looks like this is very nearly good to go
• Don’t override screen reader pronunciation – we occasionally do this (e.g. to make an <audio> element with timecode 00:00 announce the time as ’zero seconds’ instead of ‘zero-hundred hours’). I think I’d defend our decisions, but something we might have to revisit. A blanket ban feels too strong without any clear grounding in research
• The details element is amazing – thinking about a no-JS version of our image gallery

TIL

• Octopuses occasionally punch fish for no apparent reason
• Largest island in a lake on an island in a lake on an island

Running

Monday life-affirming windy/soggy af loop of Beverley fields and Hull River. Wednesday Beverley Hills (b’dum tsssssss). Friday and Sunday London hills where the universe continues to communicate with me, this time via the medium of a board game for ages 4+.

A board game called, ‘run, run, as fast as you can!’ left in front of a house at the top of a hill