All writing | All about Ken Hawkins

4 Sep 2025 | Note post

Recursion: it’s fonts all the way down

I’ve moved from Now Alt to Recursive, an open‑source variable font that unifies UI text and code with one flexible file.

31 Aug 2025

A simpler, faster site: moving to pure Eleventy v3

I upgraded the site to Eleventy v3, removed Gulp and the Visual Framework, and simplified everything.

17 Aug 2025 | Project note

Reclaiming three weeks of editorial time every month

No single issue was breaking UNDRR's editorial experience — it was an accumulation of paper cuts that drained editor time and patience.

11 Aug 2025

Making PDFs more viewable

Because ‘Just give them the PDF’ isn’t good enough.

10 Jul 2025

Drupal delayed by Azure MySQL

Managed Azure Database for MySQL cost us 50%–80% slow down. After six months of pain, we moved our Drupal 10 site back to a classic VM and halved our page‑load times.

1 Jul 2025 | Project note

Recovering platform performance after a cloud migration failure

UNDRR's Azure migration followed the playbook — managed services, platform-as-a-service, letting the cloud handle complexity. Instead, performance degraded and user trust eroded.

8 May 2025