Elliot Vance — Writing https://elliotvance.dev/blog.html Essays on web performance, PostgreSQL, design systems, accessibility and the operational habits behind software that stays up. en-gb Elliot Vance hello@elliotvance.dev (Elliot Vance) hello@elliotvance.dev (Elliot Vance) hand-written static HTML Fri, 18 Apr 2025 09:00:00 +0200 1440 https://elliotvance.dev/assets/img/icon-512.png Elliot Vance — Writing https://elliotvance.dev/blog.html 512 512 Boring infrastructure is a feature https://elliotvance.dev/blog/boring-infrastructure.html https://elliotvance.dev/blog/boring-infrastructure.html Fri, 18 Apr 2025 09:00:00 +0200 Engineering Every novel technology you add is something you will one day debug at 3am, with no documentation and eleven people asking whether it is DNS. How I decide what earns a place in a production system, and what novelty actually costs. Shipping a design system in six weeks https://elliotvance.dev/blog/design-system-in-six-weeks.html https://elliotvance.dev/blog/design-system-in-six-weeks.html Thu, 06 Mar 2025 09:00:00 +0100 Design systems How a three-person team replaced four competing button components with 64 documented ones, why the token layer mattered more than the components, and the week where it nearly fell apart. A performance budget you will actually keep https://elliotvance.dev/blog/performance-budget.html https://elliotvance.dev/blog/performance-budget.html Wed, 22 Jan 2025 09:00:00 +0100 Performance Most performance budgets die in a spreadsheet because nobody owns the number and nothing blocks the merge. The version that survived two years of feature work, plus the CI job that enforces it. Cascade layers changed how I write CSS https://elliotvance.dev/blog/cascade-layers.html https://elliotvance.dev/blog/cascade-layers.html Thu, 14 Nov 2024 09:00:00 +0100 CSS Twelve years of fighting specificity, solved by an at-rule I ignored for two years because it sounded like a build-tool feature. How I structure a stylesheet now, and what I deleted to get there. The five Postgres indexes I actually use https://elliotvance.dev/blog/postgres-indexes.html https://elliotvance.dev/blog/postgres-indexes.html Mon, 30 Sep 2024 09:00:00 +0200 Databases Not a tour of everything the manual lists: the five index types that earn their place in production, when each one is the wrong answer, and how to find the indexes that have become dead weight. An accessibility audit in one afternoon https://elliotvance.dev/blog/accessibility-afternoon.html https://elliotvance.dev/blog/accessibility-afternoon.html Mon, 12 Aug 2024 09:00:00 +0200 Accessibility You do not need a consultancy to find the first eighty percent of accessibility problems. The four-hour pass that caught 212 issues across a fintech product, in the order that makes the findings fixable.