If we haven't met yet, hi! I'm Lara. Thanks for coming.
I love to write about and share my work with web technologies, as well as general life topics and creative undertakings. Hopefully you'll find something of interest, and maybe learn something new!
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Most of the websites I work on at work are not accessible and won't be any time soon. I had a bit of a realization this week about how to deal with that – accessibility doesn't have to be all or nothing. One step at a time.
It's time for the third installment of Designgineering Chronicles! This one is a long one and written in major haste, so buckle up. Lots of good things about job titles, CSS standards, JavaScript, perfectionism, and the joys of refactoring.
.u-glue is a CSS utility class (or what I would call an algorithm) that provides an API for positioning an element absolutely over another element. We are using it at PMC, and it's proven a useful model!
Over the past year, I've been giving a talk called The Algorithms of CSS, originally created for CSSConf EU. This post covers the first part of my presentation, and breaks down how CSS fits into the categories of programming languages.
This is the second in a potentially ongoing series about my work at PMC as a Design Engineer. This month was full of lessons learned about working at a big company, building out a pattern library, and an exciting foray into Node.
I'm really loving the medium of trustworthy email newsletters lately – here is a compendium of my favorite weekly-ish ones, both within the web dev sphere but also outside it.
I've been researching design systems lately, and this is an evolving list of the resources I've found particularly resonant for my purposes. Have anything to add?
Things are going *really well* for me right now, and that calls for a blog post! This one is much more personal than my posts usually are, but it's healthy to open up a bit now and again, right?
The code we humans write cannot be read by computers – it must be translated into machine code. Compilers and interpreters do that, and the browser is an interpreter!
What is programming, anyway? I just love, love, love this talk from Felienne from earlier this year. It both affirms a ton of my own thoughts, and poses a wonderful, more inclusive alternative to "engineering" for talking about what we do as programmers.
This is the first in a potentially long series about browser mechanics, in my own words. Read on to learn about one of the first steps a browser takes: decoding bytes to Unicode code points.
I set my standards too high for blog posts. I know that they are too high because I don't publish them. It's too much pressure! (It's got to stop, it's got to stop)
And a cool thing: I was magically able to write blog posts again after publishing this one!
I highly suggest watching Brittany's full talk – she is a brilliant speaker, and her presentation is full of both fun facts about programming jargon and critical information about the impact of the terms we use.
Is CSS a programming language? What is a "CSS algorithm"? Read on to answer these questions, and to learn how CSS fits into the world of programming and computer science.
I'd seen dimmed properties before, and I always thought of them as the properties that are there by default, or ones I'm not supposed to manipulate. It turns out that's pretty much correct. The technical term for that is that dimmed properties are non-enumerable vs. enumerable properties.
This should be required reading for anyone who works in tech...and anyone who uses tech! In particular, wouldn't it be great if every new boot camp and college graduate was required to read this book?
This post is a response to a tweet critiquing the "code export" capability of design tools, and a talk called "Stop Drawing Dead Fish" that calls for better tools to allow artists to create visual art without code. Should designers code? Should artists code? It's a nuanced, interesting topic and I had some thoughts.
I started the year exceptionally motivated and productive, with a reasonably-sized to-do list that has now expanded by a factor of at least three. This article by Frank Chimero about the increasing complexity of web development came about at the right time, and it deserves a share.
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