Andrew Walpole's Blog

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Principal Web Developer and Engineering Manager

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Previews Are Hard! Also, Web Mullets
May 4, 2022 · original
Previews Are Hard! Also, Web Mullets I love the Jamstack revolution that has been going on for the last few years. Statics sites, yes please! SSR, yes please! Headless CMS, let's freaking go! Netlify, Vercel, AWS Amplify, Cloudflare pages, tears, folks, tears. of. joy. But this soup of delicious tech, like all the others, has its souring points. The one I'm most particularly interested in calling out here is content previewing. Living that agency life, most of the time we're just building websites for less technical folks to manage. Sure we're going to give them a great-looking, fast, functional website, but they also need to change that content, swap those images and relabel all the CTAs. Unfortunately, my findings are: Jamstack stacks have poor implementations of preview workflows , and in many cases, implement them as afterthoughts, if at all. The Problem img class="half" src="/static
First
Apr 30, 2022 · original
First Well, I did it; after two years and three scrapped site designs – and of course I'm not even that stoked on this one – the itch to blog has been growing, so here I've settled to make a go at it. This site is built with eleventy, with a custom esbuild setup for the small bits of sass and javascript. It's hosted on Cloudflare Pages, which is a bit of a departure from my usual choice of vercel or netlify, but I've been really happy with Cloudflare workers, so I'm giving this a go as well! What can you expect from this blog? Well, probably just a decent bit of web-related punditry and maybe a bit of leadership stuff... Really whatever strikes my fancy I guess. My goal is to publish a healthy mix of useful tech-specific things along with my own views on the way the web development industry is moving, with some sprinkling in of random things I like. If that's your jam, welcome, feel free
Living on the Edge Functions
May 3, 2022 · original
Living on the Edge Functions Edge Functions are all a buzz at the moment. Netlify just got them , they're in beta over at Vercel , and Cloudflare has had them for a few years under the somewhat misleading name, Cloudflare Workers. It's easy to confuse them with serverless functions, and in my mind, I think they are a type of serverless function. The main difference is in the name; edge functions run as close to the requestor as they can (on a distributed edge server), while serverless functions are deployed to a specific region where they run regardless of the initiator's origin. Beyond that universal difference, the specific organizations offering edge functions may implement different runtimes and add a proprietary layer on top of their usage that is less consistent. Or said another way, edge functions and serverless functions could likely work exactly the same, but in an effort to pro
Throw the dart
May 5, 2022 · original
Throw the dart You don’t get good at darts by holding on to a dart, analyzing it’s form, composition, weight, learning about its history, the dart production, packaging and distribution process, binge-watching hundreds and hundreds of dart-throwing videos on Youtube, showing the dart to friends and dart enthusiasts and philosophizing about how it works and how it will fly when it is thrown. Then, at the last possible second, when the game has started, when it counts, when it has to be good, when it can’t fail , you throw the dart. All of that education and preparation you did may help a little, you might not miss the board. But I hope you agree with me and see that there is a much more efficient way to get better at darts; to compete when it counts. Throw the dart. Early. Often. Again, and again and again.
What You've Done is What You'll Do
May 9, 2022 · original
What You've Done is What You'll Do I can't claim these words, but they've stuck with me from an old (2009 maybe?) Adobe MAX talk by Erik Natzke , and so I thought I might pass them forward here. I love learning new things. Being a part of the web industry right now, it's essential to constantly be learning new things if you want to keep up with the latest and greatest. But there's a cost to focusing on that idea too much. Worrying about figuring out how to keep up can be a huge emotional drain, and with all the avenues there are to explore it's quite easy to burn-out on the burden of learning. 'What you've done is what you'll do' manifests for me in my daily life in two main ways: Scoped Learning First, it reminds me that when there is something new to learn, I can break it up into two major buckets: "Do I want to know how to do this?" or "Do I just want to know about this?" The latter q
Diverge, Converge, and Repeat
May 13, 2022 · original
Diverge, Converge, and Repeat If I were to roll up the things I've learned into high-level concepts, I think one of them might be, mindset , defined as: the way you intentionally prepare for, and approach, a contextual period of time. What filters do you have at the ready? Are you prepared to be overtly emotional, or defensive or aggressive or curious or passive? Our reactional self, for sure, will have something to say as things happen, but I do believe there is utility in setting your own expectations going into any situation. It's useful to take just a few minutes to think about a situation – it might be a meeting, or a place I'm going to – to think about what my mindset might need to be. What should I be prepared for, and how might I respond to those things? There's a core practice in Design Thinking that is really all about mindset. If you're unfamiliar with Design Thinking in gener
What's Your Go-To Web Stack?
May 16, 2022 · original
What's Your Go-To Web Stack? One of the best parts of my job is figuring out what technologies a client's website should be built in. I love the challenge of it ; there are so many different external variables to consider and every client has its own set of opportunities and constraints to align a solution to. Out of doing that work, I've made it a habit to present the following question to folks, not as any sort of test – though it's one of my favorite interview questions – but much more so as wanting to fill a genuine curiosity I have. What's your go-to web stack, right now? Here's the set-up: I need you to build me a website right away (of course)! Content on the site will have to be updated at least once a week, but for the most part, the structure won't change much or at all. I'd love to post a few short, simple blog posts every now and then and I have a contact form I'd like people
The Fourth Language
May 12, 2022 · original
The Fourth Language The web, and more the browser as we know it today, has its three core technologies that allow us web developers to build web content: HTML, CSS and JavaScript. But what's next? What will the fourth language be? I know there's not much of a dialog to be had here on my blog, though I would love to hear your thoughts, perhaps via twitter . But here's what I think. The fourth could be a language of state. There are countless flavors of state-keeping libraries rooted in JavaScript these days, and you might be prepared to argue that they can stay there. There are some really amazing implementations; Vue's reactivity library being incredibly impressive for how small and simple it is, and so many other examples that have made it easy to build robust and complex application workflows. But there's an issue of interoperability. As state libraries deeply ingrain themselves into J
Building a Like Button with Cloudflare Workers
May 6, 2022 · original
Building a Like Button with Cloudflare Workers Previously, I touched lightly on Cloudflare Workers . In this post, we'll get deeper into the weeds and see how we can use them to build a small portable like button (exactly the one you see down in the bottom right of the page – sorry RSS folks). What are Cloudflare Workers and Cloudflare KV? Cloudflare workers are edge functions (serverless functions that run on an edge server, so they're super duper fast). They're just a bit of Javascript that can do anything Javascripty you want and return a value, like some json or even an entire webpage . By default, when you create one, you get a url that you can curl/fetch/browse-to that will trigger the function to run. You can also disable that url and point specific routes of your website to trigger the function when they are navigated to. Cloudflare KV is a separate-but-related offering from Clou
Stop Leading Zeros with Leximited Notation
May 10, 2022 · original
Stop Leading Zeros with Leximited Notation Have you ever started a content series of some kind – maybe videos, music tracks, book chapters, blog posts or podcast episodes – where you want the episode number to be a part of the title, and so you just start naming them: 1. Introduction 2. The thing after the introduction 3. We're well beyond the intro now . . . 10. Quite a milestone 11. It goes to to eleven Have you seen the problem yet? You can sort numbers easy-enough, sure: [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21].sort() OUTPUT: [1, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 2, 20, 21, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9] Whoops! Oh yeah, it's JavaScript, you can sort numbers easy-enough , sure: [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21].sort( (a,b) = a - b ) OUTPUT: [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21] As you saw in the first example
Work is a Place to Help People
May 20, 2022 · original
Work is a Place to Help People The angle at which you approach all things is important. That's certainly one of my big recurring threads. It's a broad enough idea that it shows up all over the place, "look on the bright side," "the glass is half-full," "take a walk in their shoes;" all of these notions are concerned about the way we interpret, and then react to, the world in front of us. I like to carry this idea with me as often as I can. One of those places I carry it to is my work. I can't really say when or where or from who the idea came from, but at some point in my career – I think around the time I started leading people – I made a fundamental shift in how I perceive work. Work used to be a place to contribute meaningfully to a business, and in return be provided a snug-fitting piece of the life-puzzle. It certainly isn't not that, just as the glass may also actually be half-empt
Do it for Context
May 31, 2022 · original
Do it for Context In 2019 I made a ten episode podcast series called Code Snippet . The idea of doing a podcast had been rattling around in my brain for many years prior, but I just didn't have the ingredients that pushed me to take action on it. A few lukewarm ideas, no one to co-host with, mediocre equipment. But those were just excuses, not real reasons why I couldn't make a podcast. Finally, the thing that got me to do it was this simple idea: Do it for context. Context informs the shape of the lens with which we perceive things ; it is the key to understanding with confidence. I had no further expectations other than to learn how to make a podcast, and in hindsight, this was an amazingly wonderful reason to get started. How do I publish a podcast? Do I need a script? How do I come up with topics? How should episodes be structured? Do I even sound good? How much editing is involved?
Accessibility is Hard and Important
May 19, 2022 · original
Accessibility is Hard and Important Were you aware that today, May 19th, is Global Accessibility Awareness Day ? How do you feel about that? For a lot of web developers, including myself, the feeling can often be somewhere along the spectrum of shame and despondency. Why? Because Accessibility is hard and important . If you feel this way, you're not alone. We have to acknowledge these feelings, face them head on. It's Important We feel shame because it's important to us. We care, and that's a good starting point. I feel ashamed when I write inaccessible HTML because there might be someone out there who I'm frustrating, or letting down because they can't access the content the same way a non-disabled person might. It's not comfortable, but I'm telling you here and now that it's important enough to not run away from. Embrace the discomfort, embrace the shame , take a step in a better direc
Do Hard Things Again
Jun 14, 2022 · original
Do Hard Things Again One of my longer-lived side projects has been mfm.rocks . And while the explanation for what's going on there deserves its own post, let's save that for another day. I was recently doing some development on what is now the 2.0 version of the platform there, and for a bit I had been putting off reimplementing a particular element called SwapWorm , that I severely struggled through putting together on version 1.0. Scared isn't quite the the right feeling I had about it; perhaps dread is slightly more fitting. I vividly remember fighting nasty bugs with SwapWorm for weeks, unsure why it wasn't quite doing what I needed it to do. Ultimately, I did find the issue and conquer the bugs, and it felt really great to finally overcome the challenge. Well, I dove in on it a few days ago, and what a different experience it was. SwapWorm 2.0 came together in an hour or two, and su
Escape Hatches
Jun 17, 2022 · original
Escape Hatches In web development, we rely on a lot of 3rd party systems when it comes to the practical building of websites and apps. Your stack is a conglomeration of important decisions. As someone responsible for making those decisions, the choice often comes down to: What do I get, and what do I give up? Each framework, technology, or system gives you something – proprietary features, enhanced development experiences, hyper-specific workflows; essentially abstractions and shortcuts to getting the work you need to do done quicker and easier. You're buying-in to system productivity. At the same time, all of those abstractions force you into a specific set of constraints. Some systems only integrate well with particular other systems. Others, may only solve for specific use-cases on top of a general process, cutting down on flexibility (or maybe it makes you feel better to call this co
Build Momentum for the Next Thing
Jul 13, 2022 · original
Build Momentum for the Next Thing It's very easy to get stuck in a mindset of worrying about whether what you are doing will be successful or a failure. It makes a lot of sense, because often how we get to perceive the progress of others is through their milestones (the things deemed successful or failures), and not their full nuanced progression. My take though, is that success and failure are only by-products of a greater trait that is often overlooked; momentum! It's always in the last place you look It's a groaner for sure, but I've always thought it interesting how a silly quip can be so truth-rooted. I think the same goes for momentum: Doing something always leads to the next thing Meaning, just get started, do something , start the wheels turning. It's advice you hear again and again, it's advice I still often need to hear, but I will say that it's also a core principle that, when
We Need Context Management Systems
Nov 18, 2022 · original
We Need Context Management Systems The problem with headless content management systems is that they don't cleanly account for the context of content to always be defined in a proper place. Take a headless CMS with content representing a restaurant menu. In that instance, the content can be modeled in a way that is very easy to manage without assigning context to it. A very clean separation where content manager can happily keep up the data while the front end assumes the role of applying that content into its final context. However, take a homepage, comprised of components (or blocks or modules). Here we have the content – the words and media on the page – as well as a specific context – the order and layout decisions that mold content into a consumable digital experience. Just ordering the list of components on the screen is applying a hierarchical context to the page. And then each co
Consider Astro over WordPress for your Brand's Website
Jan 29, 2023 · original
Consider Astro over WordPress for your Brand's Website I've spent the last handful of years building lots of websites for company brands big and small. As the lead architect and stack decision-maker for those projects, I've come to one major conclusion: WordPress is great if you get it right, but if you get it right, it's quite expensive. How is WordPress so expensive? You might be thinking, "But WordPress is free!" Sure, the software and often some of the most critical plugins and themes are free or even quite affordable. If your content is your main focus for your new site, go ahead and grab a nice theme and have fun. I'm specifically talking about you, dear future-someone's-client, about your future-new custom website that showcases your brand and products/services, setting your business apart from your competition. WordPress ends up being expensive in three ways: Development : Gettin
The New Astro Content Collections are Great
Feb 10, 2023 · original
The New Astro Content Collections are Great It's official, I think I'm an Astro fanboy. If you're here, you might notice the site has been spruced up a bit, and that's because I just spent the last few evenings moving my entire site over to the newly landed Astro 2.0 . It was a joy to build. And while I quite loved my old Eleventy setup too, I'm glad I made the move. But I'm not ready to gush about all things Astro yet, right now I just want to talk about a specific new feature: Content Collections . Content collections are a clever and simple file-based CMS The way Content Collections work in Astro is you have a directory called content/ in your project src/ . In there, you create more directories, one for each content-type (or content collection) you want to manage. Within those content-type buckets you can put markdown or MDX files. The classic use-case is for a blog, like this one! W
Sprinkling Interaction with Petite-Vue
May 17, 2022 · original
Sprinkling Interaction with Petite-Vue How do you sprinkle on a little bit of interactivity to a website? For many of us, jQuery was the definitive answer; from simple to complex, jQuery fit the bill for a long time. With many of those core DOM APIs getting back-filled into vanilla JavaScript, we have long-since moved away from jQuery. But even years later, I can't help but still see a gap left in its wake. The Gap Vanilla JS is better than ever, don't get me wrong, but the work to get things hooked-up tends to inflate pretty quickly as your features grow. What you thought would be a sprinkling turns into a dousing. It's too easy to step too far and find yourself nearly writing your own framework. On the other side, many of us have gone full hog-wild into a framework. React, Svelte, or Vue are great places to have all the interactivity you want at your finger-tips. But with them, comes a

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