331/365
Decided to chill out and take it easy today.
I went to bed a bit later than normal because I was up late FaceTiming with a friend in NYC. I love living in Japan, but the time difference with the midwest and eastern United States is a huge downside. I always feel like I'm not doing enough to keep in touch, while also feeling like I give a lot of the most valuable parts of my day to phone calls and messaging. It's the inevitable tradeoff for living far away from home, I suppose.
Due to my late night, I wanted to make the most of my morning and be a bit less hurried and more relaxed. As it happens, I left the house 10 minutes earlier than I normally would and made it to the ideal 8:23 train. Swung by a Doutor for a latte and still got to the office with 3 minutes to spare. Victories come in all shapes and sizes.
I started out with something very easy and simple, then moved on to one of the more frustrating tickets in my backlog today. You know the ones; with no clear approach and lots of tricky JavaScript timing. In times like these, I really wish we used some sort of state management instead of... whatever this is. Thinking about whether to use cookies vs session storage vs local storage vs sending it back to the view makes my eyes cross after too long. I fear that the gulf between the boss and customers' UI demands and the current architecture design is growing beyond the point where I can patch it together. I have a feeling that my database-backed user preference setting approach will be a good middle ground, as long as adoption is broad.
I was also confronted by an extremely bad decision I made roughly 11 months ago where I decided to hard code the height values for certain grid elements and completely destroy my sanity anytime a minor change needs to be made. At the time, I knew it was a bad idea. But, I wanted to get the task over with quickly and move on. Foolish choices always catch up to us in the end. It's always better to do the job right the first time. Or, at least, do it in a less annoying way.
Ended the day with an interesting CSS problem that my boss personally requested, which means it takes highest priority. The calendar page on our site has a row of three groups of buttons that are not aligned at all. Each button group is at a different height, giving the page a somewhat chaotic feel.
The boss would like it to look like this (but with the middle group more evenly centered. It's a WIP)
Looks great, right? Very clean and aligned. The problem is that the leftmost button group belongs to the calendar div, while the right two groups belong to the form above. These elements must be nested this way to ensure that the page is fully functional. When all the button groups are vertically aligned, however, the form and the calendar div are overlapping which makes one of the groups of buttons completely unclickable and inaccessible.
Green-and-blue colored dashed lines outline all three button groups and the calendar div below. These lines highlight the space covered by the calendar div and the leftmost button group, which overlaps with the two button groups on the right.
A peach-colored dashed line outlines the two button groups on the right that are part of the form. The outline has diagonal lines that shade over the left button group.
When I first noticed this problem, I was at a loss. Truly at the end of my rope at the end of the day. Still, I think I have a way to solve this using only CSS clip-path. Stay tuned.... I have tomorrow off to get my wisdom teeth removed, so this thrilling saga will have to continue on Monday.
I'm looking forward to this weekend, despite the fact that I'll be in pain for most of it. I'm going to do some 2026 planning with friends and maybe, hopefully, finally start on the gift for my friend's newborn. For now, though, I'm off to my Japanese lesson. Bye!