Cassey Lottman

I've been exploring a new hobby in the last couple months: creating jewelry and miniature sculptures with polymer clay.

The music that kept me going 🔗 The Mountain Goats according to Spotify this is what I played the absolute most - all 5 of my top 5 songs came from The Mountain Goats.

You have probably already observed, or heard someone else observe, that time seemed to flow in a new pattern this year.

This piece by Redux maintainer Mark Erikson called "Blogged Answers: A (Mostly) Complete Guide to React Rendering Behavior" is long, and I've only read through it halfway so far, but it's really interesting and informative.

tl;dr: 🔗 class MySpecialClass { constructor(objectFromServer) { Object.assign(this, objectFromServer); } } more details 🔗 Inspired by the book "Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code" by Martin Fowler, I am starting to use ES6…

Dennis Hagemeier shared a super helpful post on how to compile Sass with Eleventy directly, without needing to rely on a build helper tool like Grunt or Gulp.

I'm reading "Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code" and it mentions a definition of continuous integration I'm not familiar with.

On a new machine, I want to turn off the pager for git commands.

Sometimes I'm doing stuff in the terminal and realize whatever I need to do next would be easier in Finder - maybe dragging around a selection of files or folders.

After installing a global module with npm (npm install -g my-cool-module), when using asdf, you might then get command not found: my-cool-module when you try to use it.

On my mac, I did a quick cat of a file in the terminal, and saw an extra % at the end of the text.

Asdf is a tool for managing versions.

Today I learned a new way to write today I learned posts!

I picked my own color palette for the redesign of cassey.dev, and this site called Contrast-Ratio.com was helpful in resolving a pesky contrast issue between the background color I was originally using and the link text.

I started a new job this week, at a consulting agency that works in Ruby on Rails a lot.

My new boss told me about Firefox Multi-Account Containers which I had heard of a while ago, but have never used.

I need to preface this with: until recently, even though I used Firefox for browsing, I typically used Chrome and Chrome's Developer Tools for web development.

As I was working on making my Today I Learned posts first-party members of this very site (they used to live in a separate site on Glitch), I moved over all the posts and placed them in a new folder called til/.

Lately twitter has been displaying short tweet replies/quote tweets on mac/firefox in a way that doesn’t respect my minimum font sizes - they're too small!

This entire post is a spoiler for the Bottomline Corp quest in Spiritfarer I'm playing Spiritfarer, and I got a cryptic note about a strike from workers at Bottomline Corp.

I watched "What the heck is the event loop, anyways?"

On Friday, I was working on converting a very complex tooltip component in React from CSS Modules using Stylus to styled-components.

As I have mentioned before, I read a lot of advice columns.

2025-12-17 update: You're not still using Twitter, are you?

You can run git remote prune origin and delete all the remote-tracking branches from your local machine that have been deleted on the origin.

Today I remembered Chrome has its own task manager, which is another tool to help decide why my laptop fans are on, and if any sites that I am responsible for building are the culprit.

This isn't a "Today I learned" so much as "today I remembered that more people should know this".

I have this strange feeling of being saturated in news, from all over the world, while at the same time, feeling like I really don't know what's going on overall.

A worldwide coronavirus pandemic is going on.

Update 2025-12-17: removed links to twitter and some code I wanted to make a post with a bunch of tweets on it.

**Update 2025-12-17**: removed links to Twitter.

It's hard to think of anything that I have loved as long or as consistently as I have loved advice columns.

Updated 2025-12-17: Since Glitch as 'the friendly community to build on the web' is shut down now, I removed the direct links to Glitch.com that no longer work or won't work soon enough.

Updated 2025-12-17: Since Glitch as 'the friendly community to build on the web' is shut down now, I removed the direct links to Glitch.com that no longer work or won't work soon enough.

A Litany of Woes 🔗 tl;dr: 🔗 I learned recently that the only way to use Enzyme to test a React component that relies on a useContext hook appears to be to use render or mount, not shallow.

I have, as the prophets say, some personal news.

In the community centers and church halls of small town Nebraska, grief is an ailment best treated with white bread sandwiches.

I knew that a major feature of CSS is the "C", or cascade.

In doing some cursory performance auditing on the site I work on, I came across a recommendation to ensure text remains visible during webfont load on Google's PageSpeed Insights, to prevent a Flash of Invisible Text (FOIT).

Updated 2025-12-17: Since Glitch as 'the friendly community to build on the web' is shut down now, I removed the direct links to Glitch.com or Glitch-hosted projects that no longer work or won't work soon enough.

It is very cliche to say that this year, no matter what year it was, was a big year, but... 2019 was a big year for me!

Updated 2025-12-17: Since Glitch as 'the friendly community to build on the web' is shut down now, I removed the direct links to Glitch.com that no longer work or won't work soon enough.

I had a bug where a background image was being set on a container with position: absolute.

My a11y learning for the week, after playing with Axe a bit over the last few weeks, is that the Accessibility Insights extension only runs a subset of the rules that axe-core has.

This is a newsletter I sent out via TinyLetter.

Reflection from me 🔗 This talk reminded me a lot of a keynote I saw at Strange Loop this year by Felienne Hermans on "How to Teach Programming (and other things)".

I'm working on writing component tests for React at work.

There's a new library of React components that are shared across the organization at my job, and it uses Styled Components which I don't know much about.

Update 2025-12-17: removed links to Twitter I attended a conference called Strange Loop in St.

Today I read a short article on a subject I knew at one point, but feels fresh to remember.