Fieldnotes #06
A quiet week of documentation, a few accessibility audits, and finally getting that component refactor over the line.
A quieter week than most, but one of those productive quiet weeks where you look back on Friday afternoon and realise you actually got things done.
Work
Spent the early part of the week deep in documentation. Writing good docs is an underrated skill — it’s slow, it requires you to explain things as if you know nothing, and nobody really thanks you for it at the time. But six months later when someone can actually onboard without pinging you every ten minutes, the investment pays off.
Did a couple of accessibility audits on some newer components. Found the usual suspects: missing focus states, colour contrast ratios that were borderline at best, and one particularly egregious case of cursor: pointer on a non-interactive element that someone had inexplicably made interactive with JavaScript. We’ve all been there.
The component refactor I’ve been chipping away at for two weeks finally landed. It’s one of those changes that’s invisible to end users but makes the codebase meaningfully better. Those are my favourite kinds of changes.
Reading
Been working through Resilient Web Design by Jeremy Keith again — it’s free online and holds up brilliantly. If you build things for the web and haven’t read it, stop what you’re doing.
Outside of work
Cold. Very cold. Considered cycling. Did not cycle. Made soup instead.