Hello Reader,

As you might expect, I get a lot of emails.

A large majority of them are from people who follow me, and fall into a few general categories:

• Replies to something I mention in a newsletter.
• Asking a question or looking for guidance.
• People simply letting me know they appreciate what I do.

I like all of those emails, even if I have a hard time keeping up with them and don’t always have a chance to reply to everyone.

Then, there are the emails from people trying to sell me something.

Occasionally it’s a product, but more often it’s a service.

99.9% of them are incredibly lazy.

They are generic, and occasionally, typo ridden as well (including misspelling my name)!

For me, the biggest pet peeve is when they try to make it sound more personalized in the most surface level way possible, like with this email I got earlier this week (which went on to talk about a service they have).

Asking me to do the work for you is not going to get me to engage with you (knowing full well you’ll never listen to what I suggest anyway).

And I get it, these people take a “spray and pray” approach, hoping that the right offer lands in the right inbox at the right time.

You see this all the time with traditional marketing, where you get flyers for things like lawn care services, even if you live in an apartment where you don’t have to worry about it. The company just sends out hundreds of thousands of them, and will get some clients because the timing is right for a handful of people.

Emails like this get even less of my attention than flyers for services I have no need for.

It’s all as generic as possible, and with the amount of these types of emails that I get every single day, I just ignore all of them.

People take the same approach when applying for jobs

I’ve talked to people who are part of the hiring process, and others who do portfolio and CV reviews to help people improve them in order to help land a job.

Every time I talk to them, the main thing I hear is that the large majority of job applicants are incredibly lazy.

When they describe what they see in a typical pile of resumes, it sounds exactly like the marketing emails I get, with piles of generic, and even typo ridden resumes.

It’s hard to get a job and so a spray-and-pray approach enters the picture, with many people sending out literally hundreds of applications and hoping for the best.

But like those email marketers, often they never hear back.

And it's because no one gives those applications a second thought, just like the emails I'm ignoring.

Circling back to that email I got earlier, the real purpose of the email was all the way down in the P.S. where they mentioned they’d started a podcast network, and were looking for podcasts to add to their network.

Know what would have been cool from that email I got about my podcast? If they’d mentioned something I talked about in an episode, and how that type of content would fit well within their network.

I’m not saying I’d join because of it, but it might have actually got my attention and I might actually take the time to click through and see what it is at that point, which is exactly what they want.

The more people they can get clicking through, the more likely someone will actually sign up with them.

Now, I realize that if you’re sending out even 1000 of these emails (and more likely, 10,000+), you can’t take the time to listen to even 5-minutes of every podcast you’re sending it to.

But depending on how committed you are to it, you could do that for 20-50.

And the advice I hear a lot of the time is to do the same for job applications.

If you’re going to send out 100 job applications, pick the top one that would be your dream job, and spend a lot of time working on it (or those, if there are two to three), and making them fit the company and role.

Then, have a second level where maybe it isn’t your dream company, but the role is what you’d really like to do, and spend a decent amount of time on them. Don’t go all-out, but take time to personalize each one of them to the company and role.

And finally a third tier where it starts becoming a bit more generic, but do make sure what you’re sending fits to the role you’re applying to (yes, not everyone does this).

This isn’t guaranteed to land you a job, just like a marketing email that took the time to know something about my podcast isn’t guaranteed to get me to join their network, but it raises the odds of it at least getting paid attention to.

The more often your applications are getting paid attention to, the more likely one of them will actually land you a job.

And I'm fully aware that right now, the market is still in a bit of a rough spot, and there are people putting the time and effort in without having landed anything yet.

It's definitely tough, but that just makes it even more important to try and stand out from the crowd.

🙋‍♂️ What I’ve been up to this week

Fixing when CSS Grid has extra spacing

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If you use display: grid on an Flex or Grid item, there is a good chance that you end up with extra space, like you can see in the thumbnail of the video.

It can seem like there is no good reason for that space to be there, and can be frustrating, so I did a very quick video looking at what the cause is, and one approach to fix it.

There are alternative approaches—such as grid-auto-rows: min-content, or even a height: fit-content, which are both fine!—but personally, I like going with a align-content: start as I show in the video.

If you’d like to play with it, here is the Codepen from the video, and you can comment out line 6 to go back to the original version (the issue only happens at larger screen sizes).

Don’t use spans or code for shortcuts and keystrokes

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I talked about the <kbd></kbd> element in both an HTML & CSS Tip of the Week and a Short recently, but in this video I go into a lot more detail, including styling them up, and I also look at the <samp></samp> element as well.

Interestingly, the semantics can change quite a big, depending on how you nest <kbd></kbd> and <samp></samp> elements.

⚡ Quick tips

• ​The :focus-visible pseudo-class (HTML & CSS Tip of the Week)
• ​The unexpected burden that can come from a disability (Short)

🎙️ Podcast Navigating CSS Layout Decisions Inspired by recent articles from Andy Bell and Alex Riviere (linked in the links section below), I explore a bit of my own decision-making process when deciding between Flexbox and Grid. This leads to me talking about intrinsic and content-first layouts as well, and how the most important thing is that we're thinking about the decisions that we're making. LISTEN ON: APPLE | SPOTIFY | YOUTUBE | WEB​

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🔗 Other awesome stuff around from the web

If you like this section of the newsletter, you should probably sign up for The Index (either email or RSS), it’s a twice weekly collection of links to cool stuff you’d probably like 🙂.

• ​Beyond DEI Statements: How to Actually Evaluate Company Culture​
• ​Tech continues to be political (​​And the politics aren’t looking great)​
• ​VS Code Tips - Code Navigation Using Breadcrumbs​
• ​Making Baseline actionable with real user data​
• ​Using the step and pattern attributes to make number inputs more useful​
• ​HTML & CSS for a One-Time Password Input​
• ​Cursed accent-color Perlin demo and More cursed accent-color vibes​

🏁

Circling back to the job thing quickly, the other bit of advice I can give is to network.

The more I've been attending events, the more stories I hear of people landing jobs from a friend they've made by being at events.

It can be hard, depending on where you live, and of course, not everyone enjoys socializing, but I can't stress how big of an impact it can have, so if you do have the opportunity, do try to attend some local dev meetups.

Have a great week,
Kevin

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113 Cherry St #92768, Seattle, WA 98104-2205