Notes on using the CSS contrast() filter in WordPress themes: how the RGB math works, why it beats a black overlay on hero images, a 125% hover fix for washed out product cards, and where filters get expensive.
CSS has a hypot() function that does Pythagorean distance math and, unlike pow(), accepts units like px and rem. I cover what it returns, a cursor-proximity example using container style queries, and the edge cases worth knowing.
One ballot label counted as two parties made English local elections look like they were splintering. The fix was normalizing party families before aggregation instead of after, and the headline finding reversed once we did.
Fixed-height cards look tidy in a mockup and fall apart when an editor doubles the copy or a translation runs long. I go through what breaks, and how Flexbox and intrinsic sizing hold the same grid together without hard-coded heights.
Appending text to a container is the easy part. This post covers the scroll flag that stops snap-back, batching renders to keep layout shift down, ARIA live regions for screen readers, and cleaning up after a broken stream.
High accuracy is the easiest number to fake. This post covers the machine learning pitfalls I keep finding in production systems: library defaults nobody checked, data leakage from scaling before the split, and metrics that ignore what the model actually decides.
Notes on the newer platform features: HTML-in-Canvas behind a Chrome flag, the CSS content property for swapping an image source, sizes=auto for lazy-loaded images, and why e-ink browsers still lag behind.
WordPress 7.0 stopped hardcoding which blocks support Block Bindings and Pattern Overrides. Support is resolved through a filter now, so any lookup table you were trusting is out of date. Also new: a native Accordion block and an Icon block.
The data science career path in 2026 asks for more than Python. Notebook work is the easy half; the rest is MLOps, domain knowledge, and keeping your own judgment while agents handle the tedious parts.
WordPress 7.0 lands May 20, 2026, and RC3 on May 8 is now being treated as the new Beta 1. The experimental Presence API gets its own wp_presence table with a 60-second TTL for tracking who is editing what.