Weeknotes #5: Willkommen to Washington
I have a pro-bono client that I’ve worked with long-term the past couple years (10/10 would recommend for feeling connected to something larger than yourself). When we first put together the website, we did a “work party” retreat to get everyone in a room together to populate the site, ask technical questions, etc. This weekend we had a similar retreat in Leavenworth, WA to get things up and running for their 2019 conference. I’d recommend this somewhat unique way of working—instead of spreading out work across weeks and sporadic communications, you can get a whole lot done by sitting down together for a longer work session.
If you are unfamiliar, Leavenworth is a somewhat ridiculous little place east of the Cascades mountain range that is decked out in full Bavarian regalia. I’m talking: heavily-guarded corporate branding rendered here in ornate blackletter signage. Brats and pretzels aplenty. Leavenworth was struggling in the 1960s, so a group of business people got together and decided to reinvent the town as an Alpine village. This has worked out pretty well, especially around Oktoberfest. I’d never been and had always assumed there was some sort of cultural heritage here but nope: just a commercial idea that did really, really well. This was my first time to Leavenworth, and while I somehow managed not to eat a single Bavarian good, I was enamored by the mountains looming large behind the town.
And: I also learned the pretty yellow flowers that popped up a week ago on I-90 medians is an invasive weed called Scottish broom.
Email magic ✨
That lovely thing where you think your MX record is borked and then a message comes through! I broke said record when I moved my site to deployment on Netlify, attempted to fix it, and thought that didn’t do the trick. I’m very glad that it was an issue of particularly long propagation times because I was dragging my heels on debugging that (to the point of temporarily putting a different contact email up on my site).
Reading
Design and development
- The State of Accessibility: GAAD 2019: I’m…pleasantly surprised that this U.S. administration did something good for accessibility?
- Google Fonts is Adding font-display
- A Few Functional Uses for Intersection Observer to Know When an Element is in View
- Into the Personal-Website-Verse
- Native image lazy-loading for the web!