Blog · page 11
Notes on engineering, design, and everything in between.
Turning screen-printing limits into design tokens
This site's visual direction is Riso screen printing. What I actually built was the printing constraints as tokens, so retheming touched two files and no component changed.
Base and unit conversion: temperature is the only non-linear one
Converting between bases 2 and 36 needs BigInt to avoid silent precision loss. Across ten unit categories nine are linear ratios, while temperature is affine, and a single multiplier is always wrong.
Color and contrast: relative luminance is not an average
Converting between notations is just the entry point. The real trap is WCAG contrast, which needs gamma decoding before weighting, and deciding between black and white text, which is not a brightness threshold.
Full-text search on a static site: index at build time, no backend at runtime
A static site does not need Algolia to have search. Generate the index during the build, run the query entirely in the browser, and pay a few seconds of build time.
Hash and checksum: why CRC32 and MD5 have to be written by hand
The browser only offers the SHA family, and only in a secure context. CRC32 and MD5 are not in Web Crypto. Along the way: large files should not be read into memory whole, and checksums should not be compared by eye.
Regex Lab: hits, groups, replacement preview, and the zero-width trap
A regex tester has to do three things well: show where matches land and what each group captured, preview the replacement, and never hang on a zero-width match.