Hey friends,

How much does a rainbow weigh?

Not much, they’re actually pretty light. 🌈

(It's finally raining here after a long time!)

Thinking Too Hard 🤔

How do you deal with curveballs?

It happens all the time in client work — you think you're going one way, but then new information is revealed, politics happen, or the client changes their mind. What do you do? Here are some things I try to remember:

Fall back on what you know to be true. Likely not EVERYTHING will be changing, so anchor your new direction on the things you know you need to accomplish.

Speak honestly. The best decisions are informed decisions, which means you need to relay important information about the change to the client and the team. Be realistic about the effect of the change the impact on the schedule, or difficulties you see ahead.

Remember you don't have to answer right away. This one is hard for me, as the temptation to please the client is strong, but you don't have to make decisions alone! (Unless you really are the only person working on the project!) Take it back and discuss it with your team. They will help you uncover aspects you may not have considered or offer new options.

Write it down. Once you've thought through your new plan, you need to write it down and create a information trail. If you wing it, you'll have nothing to point back to later. This is especially important when communicating with the client. Details are easily forgotten, as are the consequences of past decisions, so keeping a record will make future conversations about them easier and more objective.

Interesting Web Bits 🍜

Web Stuff

• Mini Shai-Halud strikes again! The last one ALMOST got me, so make sure to enable an npm cooldown to give yourself a little buffer with min-release-age=7d (won't pull a package newer than 7 days old) in your .npmrc (Requires npm v11.10.0+ or higher).
• Ahmad Shadeed shows us how to align components to a vertical grid with round().
• TIL that Safari and Firefox maintain their own site-specific fixes and quirk patches for certain sites!!
• Kilian helps us understand safe-area-inset.
• Confused on what actually makes it into the Shadow DOM? You're not alone, but Adobe has released a guide on CSS behavior across the boundary.
• A retrospective on a vibe-coding app with some nice takeaways: Agents are good at features, less so at architecting and the illusion of progress is enticing.

Other Stuff

• Old tickets with cool fonts.
• Alex Standiford shares some tips on reaching inbox zero. Sometimes, this is my strategy too. 💀

👽 Weird, 📺 Watch, and 🎮 Play

• 👽 Check out some of these old title screams from retro games.
• 👽 The University of Waterloo has a goose problem.
• 📺 These paper airplanes are much fancier than the ones we used to make as kids!
• 📺 Making mochi looks kinda dangerous!
• 📺 A neat rain-on-window simulator.