Learning Log, May 2024
How about that aurora?! We got to catch the aurora borealis over our neighborhood in Seattle, and I’m still so surprised and grateful that I got to have that bucket-list-level experience.
Webflow retreat
Also in gratifying experiences, Webflow held an all-team retreat in Quebec City, ~2 months into my tenure. That timeframe struck a lovely balance between having enough context into the team, while also getting a good sense of folks’ personalities in the 3D world early on.
There’s something really special about bonding as new co-workers and getting energized by each others’ enthusiasm for the work. And Quebec City in spring was beautiful: a mix of heavy stone architecture and delicate greenery. ✨
🚢 Shipping
The team I work with at Webflow shipped a few tiny but mighty updates, like additional sizing and layout controls, and some small UX/UI tweaks for renaming grouped variables.
🌱 Digital gardening
Product Resources
- Added more resources
- Filtered out the “News” category from public view
World Snacks
- Published a few new snack entries, including the first Canadian treat
- Made a couple copy changes on the “About” page
- Configured the browser theme color suggestions to match the big squish banner at the top of each page. I have a different color for dark mode vs other other color modes. One problem here is if the user chooses a theme from the theme switcher in the site footer that is different to their system color preferences, the browser theme color will look a bit disjointed. Still, I think it looks more intentional than browser default UI, in (likely most) cases where the color will match.
- Upgraded Eleventy to version 2.0
- Switched to using the Slugify package for cleaner page slugs, which is safer given some special characters in snack names that previously would fail my builds
Highlights
Added highlights for “The Night Watchman” by Louise Erdrich
Crafts blog
- Broadened the purpose of this site from just fiber crafts to any such analog crafty projects. The old subdomain now redirects to
making.melanie-richards.com. - Removed the projects list sidebar, as it keeps falling out of date
On the internet
Reading
Product
Web
- How Do You Accidentally Run for President of Iceland?
- Seven Years of Blog Posts, Sorted by Sleep
- Front-End Development’s Identity Crisis
- A Quick Light-Dark() Experiment
- I Am Once Again Asking Our Tech Overlords to Watch the Whole Movie