Patrick Fulton pfulton

Speaker Rider

Last updated 14 April 2021

What is a speaker rider?

As speaking comes with immense privilege, I have crafted a speaker rider to set expectations and boundaries around my engagement. I am grateful to all the conference organisers who have brilliantly hosted me. I would love to continue to exercise this privilege to speak at conferences, and use this privilege to make the landscape more accessible and beneficial to tech's most historically excluded and marginalised communities.

Considerations

😫 I provide a lot of explanations for those of you who never had to consider these things. Most thoughtful conferences I've attended check most of these boxes intrinsically, particularly when conference runners are experienced speakers. They get it.

Conventional Commit Messages

See how a minor change to your commit message style can make a difference.

Tip

Take a look at git-conventional-commits , a CLI util to ensure these conventions, determine version and generate changelogs

Commit Message Formats

Default

Create a Contact Form in Rails 5

2021 UPDATE: some parts of this tutorial are now out of date, please use Create a Contact Form in Rails 6 instead. The rails 5 / gmail version remains below for posterity.

This is a complete, step-by-step tutorial showing how to create a fully functional contact form in production in rails 5. Rather than reinvent things, the following borrows from the best available documentation and tutorials (most notably, this tutorial on making a contact form in development). The finished contact form can be viewed here.

Please include a repro

You probably arrived here because of a curt message in response to an issue you filed on a repo that I contribute to. Sorry about that (particularly if you filed the issue long ago and have been waiting patiently for a response). Let me explain:

I work on a lot of different open source projects. I really do like building software that makes other people's lives easier, but it's crazy time-consuming. One of the most time-consuming parts is responding to issues. A lot of OSS maintainers will bend over backwards to try and understand your specific problem and diagnose it, to the point of setting up new test projects, fussing around with different Node versions, reading the documentation for build tools that we don't use, debugging problems in third party dependencies that appear to be involved in the problem... and so on. I've personally spent hundreds of hours of my free time doing these sorts of things to try and help people out, because I want to be a responsible maintainer and I

The State of Container Queries

tl;dr Developers would like the idea to style components based on a parent's width rather than depend solely on the viewport media query. This would allow modular components to style themselves while being agnostic to the viewport.

There is currently a lot of developer interest in getting a feature like Container Queries (née "Element Queryies") shipped in a browser.

2-min Catchup

Here are official'ish documents to outline the developer community's desires.

Hello, visitors! If you want an updated version of this styleguide in repo form with tons of real-life examples… check out Trellisheets! https://github.com/trello/trellisheets

Trello CSS Guide

“I perfectly understand our CSS. I never have any issues with cascading rules. I never have to use !important or inline styles. Even though somebody else wrote this bit of CSS, I know exactly how it works and how to extend it. Fixes are easy! I have a hard time breaking our CSS. I know exactly where to put new CSS. We use all of our CSS and it’s pretty small overall. When I delete a template, I know the exact corresponding CSS file and I can delete it all at once. Nothing gets left behind.”

You often hear updog saying stuff like this. Who’s updog? Not much, who is up with you?

I wanted to figure out the fastest way to load non-critical CSS so that the impact on initial page drawing is minimal.

TL;DR: Here's the solution I ended up with: https://github.com/filamentgroup/loadCSS/

For async JavaScript file requests, we have the async attribute to make this easy, but CSS file requests have no similar standard mechanism (at least, none that will still apply the CSS after loading - here are some async CSS loading conditions that do apply when CSS is inapplicable to media: https://gist.github.com/igrigorik/2935269#file-notes-md ).

Seems there are a couple ways to load and apply a CSS file in a non-blocking manner:

	on:
	push:
	branches:
	- master
	pull_request:
	types:
	- opened
	- reopened
	- synchronize
	- ready_for_review

	# Block Twitter’s new web font
	https://abs.twimg.com/fonts/chirp-bold-web.woff
	https://abs.twimg.com/fonts/chirp-heavy-web.woff
	https://abs.twimg.com/fonts/chirp-regular-web.woff

	# hides engage-y modules from the rightmost sidebar
	twitter.com##[data-testid="sidebarColumn"] div[aria-label]
	twitter.com##[data-testid="sidebarColumn"] div:has(> aside[aria-label])

	# hides promoted tweets

	.initial

	.top-banner-ad-container

	.top-banner-ad-container--desktop

	.top-banner-ad-container--facia-layout

	.ad-slot