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05.22 – 05.28

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Work

We started getting real with Visual Story designs. I’m excited to be coming into a phase of building new UI after a period of fixing/tidying/maintaining.

I installed the Styled-components syntax highlight and Stylelint plugins for VS Code. I feel fairly silly for not having done this a long time ago.

I came out in a cold sweat when our UX designer suggested we overhaul our spacing hierarchy. I need to get better at accommodating change.

JPB made a totally banging cake.

Life

I moved on to round three of antibiotics and finally feel like something might be shifting. Although still not at any great pace. Really hoping I’ll feel up to going for a run soon. I’ve actually been slightly surprised by how little I’ve missed it while I’ve been feeling like this – if it had been a musculoskeletal thing, I’d have been scaling the walls by now, but I’m currently spending most of the time worrying about how much it’s going to hurt when I cough next and the prospect of running seems weirdly alien.

I think I’ve got antibiotic-induced dysgeusia because everything tastes manky. I’ll have some industrial reconstruction work to do with my microbiome when I come out the other end.

Little man announced that his ‘tummy felt wobbly’ on arrival home from nursery on Tuesday. Bae said he looked a bit pale. I definitely thought he was just hamming it up in order to be allowed to watch telly but he rapidly disabused me of that opinion by painting me (and swathes of the living room) in vibrant shades of chunky puke. Thankfully he got over it after one night, but he does now seem worryingly addicted to sleeping on the sofa instead of in his cot as a result.

We had to forcibly evict him from his pal’s birthday party when he had a post-cake meltdown on Saturday – the same day he chose to start dropping the F-bomb with wild abandon. What a wee character^[1]. He had a wild time at a production of WOW! Said the Owl on Sunday though.

Baby girl’s on the brink of teething so she’s experimenting with a different quality of screaming. She’s spending considerably longer stretches being fairly content though. She continues to be completely shit at sleeping.

They have both made the end of the week exceptionally challenging. The good weather is working very hard to the edge off.

I made my VS Code look like Zed by adding the Custom VS Code UI CSS plugin and this line to my settings.json – the upshot is almost all the UI (as well as any code) has the same monospace font (current fave MonLisa).

"customvscodeuicss.css": ".mac { font-family: 'MonoLisa Variable'!important; }"

I can’t see Zed being a viable option yet given the total lack of extensibility. And since it was very much the way it looked rather than features such as ‘every buffer is a CRDT’ (don’t even know what that means) that was peaking my interest in Zed in the first place, I’m happy with this result.

I also sorted out my Alfred workflow that launches various URLs such that it can take multiple arguments, making it considerably more useful. For example, I can launch localhost on a port by typing lh {port}. Felt like some top-end nerdery.

Reading

• The Yellow Fade Technique with Modern CSS using @starting-style – another Chrome Canary thing to keep an eye on
• Markdown images are an anti-pattern
• Boringness in design systems
• My double standards about JS framework compilers – Dave Rupert on a blogging tear
• A Web Component Intro – about time I wrote one of these. Trying to think of pointless/fun things to componentise
• UK to crack down on plant-based food and drink labels – this wound me right up – “plant-based products should even be prohibited from saying they are ‘not milk’” and “misuse of protected dairy terms” are two of the stupidest things I’ve read recently