The Curious Engineer

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Rach Smith's digital garden

rachsmith.com

Hi 👋🏼 I'm Rach. A developer building software for CodePen, wife, mother of two, productivity nerd and recovering screen addict. This is my digital garden.

Frontend / CSS / browsersEssays / personalSoftware / engineering practice

’22’23’24’25’26
Posts
242 from 8 Jul 2022 to 22 Nov 2025
Posting
now and then (1 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
Feed
https://rachsmith.com/feed.xml

2025 22

  1. 22 November 2025, 2:29 pm
  2. 27 October 2025, 12:33 pm
  3. Who needs a flying car when you have display: grid
  4. A letter to myself: Strategies
  5. 3 October 2025, 11:56 am
  6. 25 September 2025, 10:08 am
  7. 26 August 2025, 5:30 am
  8. 23 August 2025, 8:38 am
  9. 10 August 2025, 1:23 pm
  10. A stack of browsers
  11. Pages CMS
  12. 22 May 2025, 10:06 am
  13. 16 May 2025, 6:34 am
  14. 18 April 2025, 5:58 am
  15. The difference between programs and products
  16. A lack of frequency increases the pressure to deliver quality
  17. 15 April 2025, 5:36 pm
  18. 19 March 2025, 5:29 pm
  19. 13 March 2025, 10:03 am
  20. In the way
  21. 11 March 2025, 2:52 pm
  22. 2024

2024 51

  1. Planner plans for 2025
  2. Social skills
  3. Big black trash bag energy
  4. Home-cooked web apps
  5. It's okay to lower the bar
  6. Comfortable with the struggle
  7. Daily lettering week 4
  8. Daily lettering week 3
  9. Field notes
  10. Daily lettering week 2
  11. Daily lettering week 1
  12. Comedy series I've watched over and over (and over)
  13. A #WeblogPoMo2024 retrospective
  14. An easing rule of thumb
  15. Why being on my phone too much makes me feel bad
  16. Jumpsport 220 fitness trampoline
  17. Code sketch #7
  18. Code sketch #6
  19. I need your quotes
  20. Generative AI is for the idea guys
  21. My own little patch
  22. Start from a corner of the room
  23. Some observations after journaling every day this year
  24. Code sketch #5
  25. Styling the external links on this site
  26. I've never done a real interview
  27. Mum jeans
  28. How quickly can I make an Astro DB project? (part 2)
  29. How quickly can I make an Astro DB project? (part 1)
  30. Post Brain
  31. On being a mother
  32. Code sketch #4
  33. The worse you feel, the more committed you are to your protocol
  34. My favourite afternoon snack
  35. How does Anh Do write so many books?
  36. Creativity sprints
  37. I added a now page to the site
  38. Spotify DJ is like a music pokie
  39. I'm in a paperless trap of my own making
  40. Using lighter YouTube embeds on the site
  41. DJs that wear things over their head
  42. Is it cheating if your first post for Weblog Posting Month is about how you're partaking in Weblog Posting Month?
  43. The Organised Mum Method by Gemma Bray
  44. Madly, Deeply: The Diaries of Alan Rickman
  45. Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo
  46. Chronicling
  47. I turned off analytics
  48. Roland F701
  49. A not so casual gamer
  50. Conditionally adding content to my Obsidian daily note with the Templater plugin
  51. A work from home reset for the new year

2023 50

  1. App Defaults 2023
  2. Hobonichi Techo Cousin
  3. A big ass wall calendar
  4. My goal for 2024: to remember it
  5. A weekly task list with the Alastair Method
  6. My simple 16 step system for adding comments to my static site built with Astro
  7. Disco dishes
  8. A redesign
  9. If I could be anything
  10. Less typical
  11. I moved from my self hosted Mastodon instance to a micro.blog account
  12. No Inputs Day
  13. The middle point of softness, kindness, calmness
  14. How often do you get to rewrite and rethink?
  15. Flexibility
  16. Is TypeScript good?
  17. I made some rainbow fireworks with PixiJS
  18. Reassessing the morning routine in 2023
  19. 10 years ago we were at peak parallax
  20. Surrender
  21. My first try at using p5.js
  22. The inevitable menty-b of early motherhood
  23. Recent ChatGPT prompts
  24. Opal
  25. Find your feedback loop
  26. Recreating the title effect from creativesouth.com
  27. Lerp
  28. I could spend the rest of my life clearing the decks, if I'm not careful
  29. Content Collections are a welcome addition to my Astro setup
  30. I Will Teach You To Be Rich
  31. Renew the Let's Encrypt certificate on your Digital Ocean Mastodon Instance
  32. Using regex with find-and-replace in VS Code
  33. "The longer you leave it, the better it has to be" and other weird, wrong ideas from my perfectionist brain
  34. AI is making it easier to create more noise, when all I want is good search
  35. Create a rainbow-coloured list with :nth-of-type()
  36. Back on my bullet journaling
  37. I probably understand around 4% of the information I consume
  38. The Perfect Mother Myth and Mothering within the context of Motherhood
  39. And this is what a shit version of that would look like...
  40. Everything Everywhere All At Once
  41. Reading code is a different experience to writing code
  42. Subscribe a lot, consume a little
  43. Remove Shorts from your YouTube Subscriptions feed with :has()
  44. Learning in public isn't so easy when you're buried by layers of engineering
  45. The hardest part of being a Junior Developer
  46. School shoes
  47. Don't want to fix that bug? Here are 6 things you can do instead
  48. Today was an amazing regular day
  49. The incredible portfolio websites of Lynn Fisher
  50. Creating a Habits Dashboard with Obsidian and the Dataview JS API

2022 61

  1. How I achieved my goal of "writing more"
  2. (Almost) no one cares
  3. Oh, the things I would do with the time I do not have!
  4. HyperKey
  5. Where has Brett Terpstra's SearchLink been all my life?
  6. How Supabase fits into your stack
  7. I paid for some of those Lensa AI profile images
  8. You've heard of Elf on the Shelf...
  9. The Minimal theme for Obsidian has checkbox icons
  10. Deciding once about skincare and cosmetics
  11. Natural Language inputs for all the things
  12. Do what you say you're going to do
  13. Hanson's Christmas albums
  14. Moving from problem adder to problem solver
  15. Tired of timelines
  16. A non-exhaustive list of the completely messed up content I consumed in the 2000s
  17. My lifestyle-centric career
  18. I'm in need of a phase
  19. Oops! There's an oops in our error messages
  20. Use command+o to make new notes in Obsidian
  21. Don't remove a fence until you know why it was put up in the first place
  22. Keyboard shortcuts for navigating a large file in VSCode
  23. The shorter the feedback loop, the better
  24. Automating the process for moving notes from my Obsidian vault to my Astro site
  25. Atomic, linked notes
  26. Look it up
  27. Good things September 2022
  28. Time management advice for mums
  29. AR glasses are here?
  30. Functional perfectionism
  31. A developer has a baby
  32. Replace the curtains
  33. There is nothing better
  34. It doesn't seem that passive to me
  35. Wtf is an island and why is it in my website?
  36. Australian slang that I have used with my long-suffering American colleagues
  37. Good things: August 2022
  38. Putting the graph in GraphQL
  39. Little tees
  40. Do this before you use Apollo Client
  41. Quickly toggle Copilot suggestions on and off with your keyboard
  42. Use a narrowed focus to complete big projects
  43. There are two parts to minimalism
  44. The diminishing returns of self development content
  45. I love this post about loving
  46. Remote work
  47. How to spot a fake guru
  48. 64 percent
  49. Cool things: July 2022
  50. Track your time
  51. Is Ryan Kaji going to be okay
  52. How to get started with animating on the web
  53. Matthew Walker's Why We Sleep
  54. Grifter math
  55. Synthwave
  56. Maybe I'm in the sweet spot for GitHub Copilot
  57. How I added tags to my Astro site
  58. No one warns you not to pull your toddler's shirt off while they are standing next to the bath
  59. Beyond random
  60. Initial thoughts on Astro
  61. Spotify Podcasts should be a separate App

Undated 58

  1. Just a big brain developer trying to be a grug brain
  2. Does your face light up?
  3. Paying for software subscriptions is my passion
  4. It's okay for me to be wrong
  5. Fuck it
  6. Creating vs. Consuming
  7. 2021
  8. GitHub Copilot, hedonic adaptation and developer tools
  9. Weaning, mental health and productivity
  10. How to write a high-engagement tweet
  11. 10,000 gatsby develops later
  12. My blog is dead. Long live my digital garden
  13. Making my daily notes in the public workspace
  14. Loving right now: Optimize.me
  15. Code-first to product-first
  16. My parenting/mothering podcast recommendations
  17. What happens when you listen to yourself?
  18. Touch the keys
  19. Loving right now: the Tutorials and CodePens of George Francis
  20. Full-stack? T-Shaped? Comb-Shaped? Developer or Engineer?
  21. How I keep up with the latest Front-End Development news, without scrolling my life away
  22. Screen time
  23. Loving right now: This Figma template for creating Database ERDs
  24. We confuse visibility with competency
  25. I'm 35 - reflections, plans and wishes
  26. Learning how you best learn: some questions to ask yourself
  27. I completely ignored the front end development scene for 6 months. It was fine
  28. How I'm going to try and stop my "revenge bedtime procrastination"
  29. Ugg Boots
  30. I listened to: Parenting Mojo - Most of what you know about attachment is probably wrong
  31. Avoiding "when, then" thinking versus respecting your season
  32. Why write?
  33. The must-have utility apps I use every day on my Macbook Pro
  34. Strategies for dealing with a catnapping baby (that don’t involve sleep training): Define your priorities
  35. Another lesson
  36. Loving right now: Obsidian.md
  37. Matching pantry containers
  38. Thoughts on the Slight Edge by Jeff Olson
  39. How to open a specific Notion page on your iPhone
  40. The 5-minute timer hack I use to get almost anything done
  41. Baby products that actually helped me
  42. Loving right now: this VSCode font + theme combo
  43. The reason caring for babies and toddlers can be so maddening
  44. That family holiday is worth the work
  45. The Tech setup for this blog - Ghost + Gatsby
  46. Simple is hard
  47. To be whole is the goal
  48. Mantras for when the baby won’t nap alone
  49. Strategies for dealing with a catnapping baby (that don’t involve sleep training): Mindset and resetting expectations
  50. How I implement Atomic Habits
  51. TIL: Resulting
  52. Don't ask me, I'm a guesser
  53. 5 years at CodePen: a reflection
  54. Thoughts on Show Your Work! by Austin Kleon
  55. 1 year ago, I gave up Twitter
  56. 2020 - Shadow and Light
  57. Lessons I learnt with my first baby that I'm bringing to my second
  58. I haven't experienced imposter syndrome, and maybe you haven't either