Weeknotes 2022 W47: Burn IV

November 21​–​27, 2022
800 words

The bandage has come off my burn wound, and it’s almost fully healed. Whether it will leave a scar remains to be seen. Oof, burn wounds sure take a long time to heal.

I took my first proper shower yesterday — one where I didn’t have to keep my left arm lifted in the air, away from the water.

I cancelled my dentist appointments. It turns out they don’t take my insurance, which would make the dental work beyond what I’m willing or able to pay for at the moment. I set up an appointment with my old dentist, but that’s only for January.

Eh, waiting just over a month is probably fine, yeah?

The book Every Layout got recommended to me (I forgot by whom), and bought a copy. It’s fantastic. Even though I’ve been doing CSS for probably close to 20 years now, I learnt a ton from this book.

I’ve also been reworking the source code for denisdefreyne.com to use the things I’ve learnt. Hopefully, everything remains working and nothing breaks. No promises though! The code has already become considerably shorter and more readable, which is definitely a win.

One change that I’m making to denisdefreyne.com is removing the use of CSS margins. This is what Max Stoiber wrote about a few years ago in Margin considered harmful, and it’s advice that holds up well.

I did a bit more work on Nanoc this week. There is an unreleased :dart_sass filter now, which is a filter that uses Dart Sass. Take a look at the nanoc-dart-sass directory for details. I’ll need to finish it up and release a 1.0 version soon, I think.

Implementing the :dart_sass filter was surprisingly easy. I kept putting off working on it for so long because I dreaded the complexity that it’d bring. The implementation is not complete yet, but I got a first version properly up and running in a very short time.

I didn’t realise how much of an improvement Dart Sass would be over Ruby Sass, both in speed and functionality. I need to take the time to read through the documentation and get re-acquainted.

Otherwise, I’ve not spent time on side projects. The budgeting app prototype has been left untouched.

The short story I’m writing is making little progress.

I bought Byword, a Markdown text editor, which seems to really help me out in putting the focus on writing and hiding all distractions. Paragraph focus and typewriter mode are so useful.

I had a good long phone call with Justine for some research that I needed to do to make the short story feel realistic. Now I just need to write the words.

At work, I finally set up an internal site for engineering documentation. There’s plenty of existing documentation, but it’s spread out across far too many places. I’ll soon start pushing people to migrate to it, away from GitLab wikis.

I’m using Material for MkDocs, which is a great tool for building documentation sites, especially because it comes with so much out of the box. Search is the biggest feature that I’ve missed: being able to search all engineering documentation from one place is amazing.

Let’s talk entertainment:

Links:

Software links:

You can reply to this weeknotes entry by email. I’d love to hear your thoughts!
If you like what I write, stick your email address below and subscribe. I send out my weeknotes every Sunday morning. Alternatively, you can subscribe to the web feed.