Weeknotes 2025W11

This week was busy with lots of client development work. At the end of last week, I mentioned that I buttoned up the design for a website. On Tuesday, I wired up the domain, put on finishing touches, set up a contact form, and launched it! He has a unique branding strategy, catering the language to the heavy equipment operators and farmers in the area that will be interested in his services. He emphasized wanting a clean, pretty minimal website and this is the design we landed on. We’re both really happy with how it turned out. He’s been getting compliments on it and it might turn into more clients for me.

I had to go down a rabbit hole to learn about responsive images for this site. I used Astro’s <Image /> component to deliver different sized images depending on the user’s browser to get a fast page speed score. That went deeper than I thought. The most important “gotcha” I learned was there are two different kinds of pixels when you’re talking about web development—software and hardware pixels. Hardware pixels are each dot of light on a device. Software pixels are 1/96th of an inch and are what we normally think about when we hear “pixel”. The browser will then pick the best image for the device while taking into account the DPR, or the ratio of hardware to software pixels. On high-resolution devices, it chooses a larger, more detailed image. That realization solved a big headache I had when it kept loading the biggest images possible.

I also got some specifications I was waiting on for a different client project. This one is a podcast website where they will consolidate all of their content. With that, I coded up a design and a process for updating it and sent the clients a test link. To toot my own horn again, this one looks really good as well. Coming soon!

For the weekend, we got a big group together and went shooting. We mostly had competitions to see who could shoot clay pigeons the best. I definitely didn’t win but I did have fun.

Links

• Flip a real coin by Dylan Rush. Flip a real coin with a device in someone else’s home.
• It is as if you were on your phone by Pippin Barr. Want to fit in with other humans on their phones without actually being on your phone? This is the perfect tool!
• The 2FA app that tells you when you get 314159 by Jacob Bartlett. This was a fun read! The author made a 2FA app that alerts you when you are about to get a cool 2FA code.
• So Long and Thanks for All the Words: A Toast to Douglas Adams by Robb Corrigan at The Multiverse Employee Handbook. Douglas Adams has delighted so many people with The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.