Melanie Richards

Sketching in Discovery Park overlooking the Puget Sound / Some very orange berries Another month passed?

I think this is the latest I’ve ever posted a monthly Learning Log, but times have been busy!

Alongside Google and other participants in the W3C Open UI Community Group, Microsoft is exploring new primitives that will unlock greater customization of HTML control elements.

SEA — Seasons I always want to live more in tune with the seasons, so I'm pulling together a little site about seasonal living in the Seattle area.

Blossoms everywhere at the Seattle Arboretum I got the first dose of the vaccine late this month!

Highlights site Fixed a title attribute I broke when migrating the site to Eleventy, d’oh. 🤦‍♀️ This is what happens when we think we’re not making user-visible changes and don’t test thoroughly.

Experiment of the Month 👩‍🔬 I decided to try out a 30 day experiment for myself, and for this first month picked “take a mid-workday walk break”.

An Event Apart During my weekend project time in February I’ve mostly been working away at my talk for An Event Apart’s Spring Summit!

I don’t know about you, but I’ve reached a point of exhaustion with screens amidst this pandemic, and have realized that my analog creative outlets give me the most joy in the Era of Video Chats.

Whew, it’s been a busy month.

Work/life balance was a dubious concept prior to the holidays, so many of the investments I made into self-directed learning came after the holiday break.

2020 was the year of plans changed, of systemic inequities laid bare by a global pandemic.

If you’ve ever tried to put a sticky item in a grid layout and watched the item scroll away with the rest of the content, you might have come to the conclusion that position: sticky doesn’t work with CSS Grid.

Earlier this year I started a new practice called seasonal cleaning, in which I make little improvements to my existing side projects, workflow, tooling, etc.

Took a break from my regularly scheduled side projects this month to: Gab too much about pens Build [most of] a blog for my fiber crafts (knitting, sewing, weaving) that I’m not sure I’ll actually use 🙃 Convert a couple lingering projects from Jekyll to E…

No, not that kind of pen test.

Writing this month’s Learning Log is mostly an exercise in restraint, i.e. resisting the temptation to refresh a map of the United States… I made a Bookshop!

After firing off another long missive email the other day, I tweeted a request for resources on the art of brevity.

Not much interesting to share this go-around (for me, anyway.

Thanks to working from home and having nowhere to go in the evenings, I (like many who are lucky to have a job right now) have been operating under burnout-in-motion this year.

At the end of August I started a new quarterly practice: Seasonal Cleaning!

I haven’t done my Learning Log in a couple months.

Last updated: June 19, 2020 I’ll keep this simple: systemic racism has got to stop.

Due to the current global health crisis, Microsoft has moved its huge developer flagship event—Build—online for 2020.

Posting these Learning Logs during the COVID-19 pandemic feels somewhat uncomfortable.

Back before COVID-19 hit the global scene, I thought it would be pleasant to have a list of the good things in life.

Quarantine So.

Typeface is Bagnard by sebsan I started a new open source project the other day, and wondered where—other than Google Fonts—I might find fonts for inclusion in a permissive public repo.

Late in February, I headed out to India with my S.O.

Decided to revert from Weeknotes back to monthly Learning Logs for various and sundry reasons.

Draft Jam I’ve been thinking about a project modeled after game jams, which is where developers build a game from scratch on a compressed timeline (e.g. a couple days).

So long, 2019!

Auto Layout in Figma is a revelation!

Week of Nov 15 Thinking and doing Overtime work this week is really cutting into my Pokémon Sword time.

Over the weekend I decided to be slightly ridiculous and get the new Surface Laptop 3 in Sandstone (disclaimer: I work for Microsoft).

Chemex Timer Instead of making progress on Draft Jam, I ended up working a bit on the design for that’s a timer for the various phases of Chemex brewing.

Happy Halloweek!

Fall foliage along a river-side trail in Leavenworth, WA I’ve been thinking about whether I want to change the frequency of these posts, because they can be hard to keep up week-over-week.

Batching tasks A couple months ago I read “Make Time” by John Zeratsky and Jake Knapp, which encourages you to choose a “highlight”, or a daily priority to focus on above all else.

Once again it’s been a bit since I last put together a Weeknotes post, and for good reason: I spent the past nearly-three weeks traveling outside of the U.S.

It’s been about a month since I last wrote some weeknotes, which I suppose is a datapoint in and of itself.

Webmentions I’ve been working on getting Webmentions up and running on my blog posts.

Having been #blessed with actually-summery weather last weekend, my S.O. and I hopped over to West Seattle to meander in Schmitz Preserve Park, grab a beer at a brewery, and walk along Alki Beach.

Independence Day resolutions A friend I used to work with—and whom I’m most likely to run into at marches and rallies—shared this comic around the 4th of July (aka Independence Day for the United States): Text alternative for the comic dialog Person A: So,