Weeknotes 2025W07

More website edits for that client project. It should be ready to launch soon and I’ll be doing a write-up of my process and what I learned later.

I took a shot at drafting a contract to use for client web development work. I went the informal route in this last project because it was a friend-of-a-friend and learned that I wasted quite a lot of time doing revisions and edits. For future projects, I’d like to use a contract less for actually protecting against legal action and more for defining scope and a process to avoid endless revision loops. I think the whole process would be more efficient if we settled on a design before actually building anything.

I helped a friend build some sound panels for a podcast studio. They already did a lot of the work but a bunch of small boards needed to be sanded and prepped for stain. So, we stood in a cold shop with headphones on and went to town with an orbital sander. Haven’t done that in a while. Similarly, I helped AM build something in the shop for her upcoming project. I have mostly forgotten my wood-building knowledge but we pieced something together that is functional but not that pretty.

Links

• The Lean Product Canvas by Jeff Gothelf. Similar to the business model canvas that I really like, this one focuses on mapping out products. It lays out what you have now, what you want, how to get there, and how to find out if you were right (testing/experimenting).
• Taking RWD To The Extreme by Tomasz Jakut. Responsive web design now focuses on telling the browser what to do instead of how to do it. It “moves the power from the web developer to the browser and, effectively, the user.”
• Image manipulation with ImageMagick by Wavebeem. I recently learned about image optimization on the web and ImageMagick is an easy tool for that. For a recent client project, I first used cwebp to convert to a .webp file and resize it to its rendered size in the layout. It wasn’t the nicest setup. magick is a much better tool for me.
• Understanding the trade-offs of using Tailwind CSS by Scott Boyle at Measured. I’ve been thinking about doing future web project using Tailwind. Tailwind is great for smaller projects where speed is a priority. Vanilla CSS is good for readability, maintainability, and scalability.
• Make life possible by Mandy Brown. Using Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott as a jumping point, Brown adapts four patterns for building more human-centric worlds. Take small steps, be ready to shift direction, anticipate surprise, trust in creativity, and go with friends.

Created: 2025-02-16

Last modified: 2025-02-16