Learning Log, June 2024
My husband and I visited my family in Gainesville, FL for Father’s Day and my niece’s fifth birthday. Still a Cool Fun Aunt, fingers crossed that status holds!🤞🏻
This was a particularly nature-filled trip: my husband had never seen an alligator before—crocodiles, yes—so we made it our mission to spot one. We apparently just missed a big one that had wandered further into the UF campus from Lake Alice, but we did catch a couple in the lake itself!
![A small alligator gliding along in fairly clear and sandy-bottomed shallow waters. It has bands of yellow across its scales.](/assets/images/content/melanierichards-alligator-s.webp)
![Two freshwater turtles on a log, stretching towards the sun. In the background are deciduous trees, and in the foreground, crystal-clear aqua waters](/assets/images/content/melanierichards-turtles-s.webp)
The next day, we floated down the Ichetucknee Springs and spotted tons of turtles sunning themselves, cattle egrets, and a beautiful yellow-crowned night heron.
I was chatting with someone about our trip when we came back, and they remarked that they weren’t expecting me to have such a stereotypically Floridian trip…and yet! 😂
🚢 Shipping
Shipped a “small but important update” with the team: !important flag in Webflow custom properties
🌱 Digital gardening
This site
- Created a changelog! It was fun poking around in the Wayback Machine to uncover older versions of the site design.
- Finally added a Reading page—powered by the Airtable API—and wrote a blog post about the process.
Learning
- How to use the Airtable API
- How to bead fringe earrings
✂️ Making
- Finished sewing my Creative Maker Supply Case and feeling very accomplished 😌
- Started knitting my second sock (in a pair, and ever)
- Set up a new travel palette
- Wrapped up my journal for the first half of the year, and started a new one for July–December
On the internet
- This short but sweet video about finding the energy to sew
- Slash Pages: yay, more little ideas for me to get excited about!
Reading
Only finished two books this month, but those accounted for about 1000 pages?!
Product
- The Linear Method: Opinionated Software
- How to Take Bigger, Bolder Product Bets — Lessons from Slack’s Chief Product Officer
Web
- CSS Cap Unit
- Everything Apple Announced at WWDC 2024: AI Features, New Siri, Genmoji
- News From WWDC24: WebKit in Safari 18 Beta
- CSS Container Queries
- What Are CSS Container Style Queries Good For?
- We’ve Got Container Queries Now, but Are We Actually Using Them?
- Masonry and reading order