u/CoVegGirl

A friend’s startup is willing to pay me to redesign and redevelop their landing page. I’m not as concerned about my ability to deliver the thing I’m getting paid for, but more concerned about all the things that surround it.

I’ve done some research about the processes people use. I just want to dig into the details more.

Are there any things that I need to be thinking about working with friends? I do know that this is still a business transaction and should be treated as such.

I know one of the first things I need to do is sit down and discuss the project with the client. What exactly are the things I should discuss with them, and what information should I walk away with? I get the feeling they just haven’t put much thought into their landing page, so it’ll probably be on me to drive the process a little bit.

I also know that there needs to be a contract and proposal. Is there a particular contract template you prefer? What exactly should go into the proposal? I’m guessing it’s more than “I’m going to rewrite your landing page“.

How do you handle subcontracting, or do you handle subcontracting? For starters, their logo sucks and they’d benefit from having a graphic designer design one for them. Also, maybe they could use some custom illustrations? How would I ballpark how much these things would run them?

And finally, at what points do you go back to the client for feedback?

I’m really interested in working for myself for a little bit, but I’m having difficulty figuring out how to best position myself for such a thing.

Like I could certainly market myself as someone who can design and build websites, but somehow that doesn’t feel like the best use of my abilities. Also, I’m not really sure I yet have acquired the design skills to really lean in on heavily selling myself as a designer.

One thing I’ve heard design engineers are really useful for is smoothing out relationships between design and Eng. That‘s probably something I can do, having about 10 years experience working with design in a complex environment. But I don’t have any professional contacts I can lean on, and I’m not sure how I’d go about putting myself out there.

Does anyone have experience in this area?

I’m working on an Astro page that uses an islands architecture. I want to use a select component I can restyle.

The issue that I’m running into is that it’s difficult to find components that don't add a huge amount of page weight. I get that these components are probably complex and are going to add a significant amount of JS. But I’ve tried Ark UI and Base UI, and they both add on the order of 100k to my 20k page.

I think I’d rather deal with an ugly built-in select component that add that much page weight. I know you can style that component, but the browser support isn’t great.

I‘ve been using Preact for this, but I’m not wedded to it and would use another framework if it would make a major difference. Are there maybe any Astro libraries or components that would help out?

I really like neubrutalist designs, but at the same time, I know they need to be executed very well and have a specific time and place.

So my question is: if you saw a neubrutalist designer’s site, what would you think of them? Would you vomit?

It’s very strange to me that Google fonts has a ton of variable fonts for free, but that fonts you pay for rarely have variable versions. It seems like most foundries have a handful of variable fonts if they have any at all. I saw one foundry that sold variable fonts that were more expensive than buying the whole family.

Is it that web fonts aren’t the focus for many foundries? Is there some reason it’s harder to make variable versions of paid fonts?

For context, I’ve got 10 years of experience as an engineer, and I’m pivoting into more of a design engineer role. So I have some subject matter experience, but I’m still kind of a newb at design.

I’m working on software for animal sanctuaries. What I’m struggling with is trying to figure out how I can tailor my approach and come up with a design that’s appropriate for the subject at hand.

Like I’ve written enough business software to be confident that I wouldn’t struggle so much with this. And to be clear, this is software for people with a job to do, so it does need to retain somewhat of a professional feel.

But this isn’t software for worker bees for-profit corporations. It’s software for volunteers at non-profits who really care about animals and want to do good in the world.

My fear is that if I don’t take a moment to think outside the box I'm used to thinking in, it’s going to come out feeling sterile. But I’m struggling to think about what an alternate approach would be.

So to summarize, the requirements for this design are:

1. It needs to have more of a warm, compassionate feeling to it
2. Ideally it would integrate animals somehow
3. I can’t go too overboard with 1 and 2. It needs to still be professional.

I’m trying to figure out how best to execute this. Like are there any patterns that I’m used to that I want to rethink?

I got handed off a design, so I have a starting place. I don’t want to dig into this too much, but there’s one part to it that I really like. I just feel it could be executed better.

It works in pictures of the animals into the design. I really like the idea, but the execution isn’t right. It’s just too distracting. Like if my choice is between doing boring administrative work or looking at pictures of cute animals, I’m going to look at pictures of cute animals.

Is there any way this could be done in more of a restrained manner?

Anyway, if you’ve made it this far, I really appreciate it!

It seems like there’s a very real pattern of open source projects starting out simple, but growing more complex over time. Then I hear people say things like “I miss when *x* was just about *y*”.

It seems like a very major part of this is learning to say no, probably even including to myself. But how do I decide what exactly to say no to? Saying no the right way seems to be a problem that a lot of open source projects struggle with, and some maintainers just ghost you while others are complete assholes.

And then sometimes I wonder how much we should really treat simplicity as a goal in and of itself. Software is complicated, and oversimplifying things *also* leads to something that isn’t very useful.

This has been a bit rambling, but I’m wondering what thoughts people have.

My server currently supports HTTP/1.1 connections, but it looks like that traffic is almost entirely bot traffic. Being that HTTP/2 is widely-supported, is there any reason to keep supporting HTTP/1.1? It seems like it would cut out a lot of bots.

I took a sabbatical. It’s been great because I go to sleep whenever I want (usually around 2 or 3) and get up whenever I want (usually 10 to noon). I hadn’t even realized that I was a night owl until I didn’t have to get up for work.

But one of the biggest things that’s really making me dread going back to work is the thought that I’m probably going to have to get up at least at 9AM.

It just sucks.

This post is half vent, half request for advice.

I got burnt out and took a sabbatical. Fortunately I have enough saved up that I can take a significant amount of time off. After a year and a half of barely even touching a computer, I’ve been able to reconnect with what I love about programming. And I’m developing new design skills.

I feel about programming how I did when I was in school. And I cant imagine ever giving coding up in some form or fashion.

However, in college, I was naive enough to be excited about the prospect of going to work as a SWE. This time around, I’m jaded enough that I know that this industry is very excellent at stifling that joy.

And then there’s the job market, which is tough in and of itself.

But what really gets to me is how hiring is done in this industry. It’s completely broken and nobody seems to be interested in fixing it.

I’ve got 11 years experience working with Angular. But when I previously tried job hunting, I kept constantly getting denied by recruiters because there’s no way I could pass a “react interview”.

Why are react interviews even a thing? I know I have the fundamentals down and could work with a react app (outside of a one hour rushed interview.

Personally, I’d much rather hire someone who knows the fundamentals than a person who knows very specifically about the exact technology. And setting all that aside, how am I supposed to get the experience I need? For seniors, people want to see “deep experience with react internals” or “10 yoe working with react”. That’s not something I can just do writing a todo app.

At the other end of the spectrum you have Leetcode style interviews, which are so disconnected from the actual day-to-day work that it doesn’t seem to really give any useful signal about how good a programmer really is.

Oh, and I haven’t even gotten to AI yet. Honestly, I have zero desire to learn it. But I know that it’s going to count against me in the interview process, and that I’m likely to have to use it in the workplace.

Anyway, this turned out to be longer than I expected it to be. Long story short, I dunno wtf I’m going to do.

I’m working on my personal site, and I’m trying to work out how I should present my personal “brand”. I’m an engineer who’s working on improving her design skills, so it seems I’d have good luck presenting a design that balances engineering precision with a human touch.

The thing I’m struggling with is thinking about how to make this all coherent instead of making it feel like it’s trying to be two things at once.

I’m thinking that a good way to accomplish that would be to combine a precise geometric font with a warm humanist font. Any advice for good pairings? Are there any other font pairings I should be thinking about?

Also, for color schemes, I’m thinking I could maybe combine a cool color with a warm color, but how do I do that without them clashing?

I've been doing front-end dev for over 10 years now, but I'm really starting to love CSS more and wanting to do more design. Are there things I should read up on? Any practice projects I should think about trying?

So oklch is in Baseline widely available, however I look at caniuse, and it says it's supported by 92%. Normally, I wouldn't worry too much about that, but there isn't really any sane fallback behavior is there?

Like doesn't that essentially mean that if I just used oklch, colors would stop working altogether for 8% of users?

God. Some men really will do everything they can to avoid listening to you, won’t they? For this project I’m working on, the effort I have to put into getting the simplest of ideas across is absurd.

And it’s a volunteer project. I’m not even getting paid. Needless to say I won’t be continuing it.

But the amount of self-doubt it causes is real. Somehow I always walk away feeling like *I’m* the difficult one.

Anyway, that’s my vent.

Generally, I don’t want what’s in my `node_modules` folder to be shown in file explorer or file lookup. But occasionally I do want to go sleuthing in that directory to figure out why something is going wrong.

Is there any way to do this?

I have a CSS library that is themeable by way of CSS variables. I set the variables in the library like so:

:root,
:host {
  --my-color: #ffffff
}

Then in their own CSS code, the user can override this value:

:root,
:host {
  --my-color: #000000
}

This seems to work, but I'm wondering why it works. The selector is the same in both cases, so I'm not sure why it's using the variable.

Also, is there something I can do to ensure that in all cases the latter variable always gets chosen?