Jots

“Where words leave off, music begins.”

— Heinrich Heine

Today I learned you can inline remote images in Astro content collections using the image() schema helper. No more manual imports.

schema: ({ image }) =>
  z.object({
    ogImage: image().optional(),
  });

Game changer for authoring ergonomics.

This Practical Typography book by Matthew Butterick is one of the best free resources on the web. Every developer who touches text should read the first four chapters.

Shibboleth

A custom, phrase, or pronunciation that distinguishes one group from another. From the Hebrew word for ear of grain or stream — used in the Book of Judges as a password test to identify Ephraimites, who couldn’t pronounce the “sh” sound.

The best design systems feel invisible. They don’t demand attention — they clear the path for attention to land on content. Every visual choice that calls out “look at me” is a choice stealing from what actually matters.

New favorite CSS trick: using columns for a masonry layout with zero JavaScript.

.masonry {
  columns: 3 280px;
  gap: 1.5rem;
}
.masonry > * {
  break-inside: avoid;
}

Three lines, no library, works everywhere.

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”

— Aristotle

Switched from ripgrep flags to ast-grep for structural code search and rewrites. Being able to match AST nodes instead of regex patterns makes refactoring feel precise rather than fragile. Highly recommend for any non-trivial codebase migration.