Blog · page 10
Notes on engineering, design, and everything in between.
Dark mode forms stay white: color-scheme is the switch
Painting a dark background does not darken native controls. Select popups, date pickers and autofill follow color-scheme; accent-color only reaches checkboxes and sliders.
Stop guessing the header height: measure it with ResizeObserver
A wrapping navigation, late webfonts and changing content all break constants written into CSS. A ResizeObserver watches the element and writes the measured value back into a variable.
Design tokens: one file that runs the whole site
Why every colour, spacing step and corner radius lives in _tokens.scss — and why changing this site's entire visual direction only touched two files.
Manual i18n: what hand-rolling three languages costs
I hand-rolled this site's i18n instead of using Astro's built-in config. Here is why, and exactly where the cost shows up — two 404 incidents and a blog that was half translated.
2048: collapsing four directions into one operation
Sliding, merging and scoring only need to be written once; the other three directions reuse it through transpose and reverse. The hard part is that each tile may merge at most once per move.
Minesweeper: deferring mine placement until the first click
A minesweeper where the first click can lose is an unfinished minesweeper. Deferring placement and excluding the surrounding 3 by 3 is the single most important design decision here.