Digital Garden

Notes that grow.

Not a blog. These are working notes on performance, CSS, and security — kept in the open while they are still forming, and revised whenever I learn something that changes them. Every one is something I checked myself.

How to read this

Every note carries its own ripeness.

A garden is honest about what is finished and what is not. Nothing here pretends to be more settled than it is.

🌱 Seedling

A rough thought, recently planted. Probably incomplete and possibly wrong. Published anyway, because hiding drafts is how they die.

🌿 Budding

Taking shape. The core idea holds up, but the edges are still being worked out.

🌳 Evergreen

Tested and stable. I have used this repeatedly and would defend it. Still revised when something changes.

The shape of it

How the notes connect.

Drawn from the links between notes, not decoration. It gets denser as the garden grows.

4 notes, 2 connections. Dot size follows how many other notes a note touches; colour follows its stage. Solid lines are direct references, faint lines a shared tag.

The Notes

Currently growing.

Linked to each other rather than sorted by date, so related ideas sit together.

The height attribute quietly beats your aspect-ratio

Adding width and height to stop layout shift can break images sized by CSS aspect-ratio. One base rule fixes it.

Tended 6 August 2026·2 linked notes

Nobody chose to be insecure, they just did not choose

A large share of lab wins come from settings no one decided on. The default decided instead.

Tended 6 August 2026·2 linked notes

An image is only big relative to the box it lands in

File size on its own tells you nothing. The number that matters is intrinsic pixels divided by displayed pixels.

PerformanceImages

Tended 6 August 2026·2 linked notes

The browser check is for the user, the server check is for you

Every developer knows client validation is not security. Bypassing a form yourself is what makes it stick.

Tended 29 June 2026·2 linked notes

Marginalia

Lines I keep coming back to.

Collected from books, talks, and people who were right before I understood why.

“

Weeks of coding can save you hours of planning.

— Engineering proverb

“

It is not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer.

— Attributed to Albert Einstein

“

Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability.

— Edsger W. Dijkstra

“

Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.

— Abelson & Sussman, SICP

“

The most dangerous phrase in the language is: we've always done it this way.

— Attributed to Grace Hopper

“

Measure. Don't tune for speed until you've measured.

— Rob Pike

Finished pieces live on the blog.
Longer write-ups that are done changing.

Follow the garden as it grows.
Every note and article in one feed, including revisions to notes already published.