Things I Like
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When we talk about millennial student debt, we’re not just talking about the payments that keep millennials from participating in American “institutions” like home ownership or purchasing diamonds. It’s also about the psychological toll of realizing that something you’d been told, and came to believe yourself, would be “worth it” — worth the loans, worth the labor, worth all that self-optimization — isn’t.
I have so many thoughts on this piece, more than I can put into a comment here, so I should probably write a blog post and maybe I will. But this piece hits the nail on the head in one way that really struck home with me: all the things we're told to do to be successful won't be what makes us successful in the end. Full disclosure: I'm a Gen Xer, not a millennial, but as she talks about the optimization of childhood and more and more debt for education I was right there with her when she said it wasn't worth it. I've seen it in my own life and I've seen it so many people who I know.
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Part of the impulse to launch Ridgeline is that I want to step away from Instagram. Many reasons why. The biggest is the “fool me once ... shame on me. Fool me, like, you know, fifteen times …” feeling I have with much of social media. Facebook has collapsed as a viable marketing / distribution platform for me. Twitter is fine, but the audience trends heavily to certain demographics. And as lovely as Instagram has been, with the loss of its cofounders in 2018, I feel like we are entering the Death By Monetization/Optimization™ spiral that Facebook is so very good at.
I know, Mod again, but his newsletters are really great, I recommend them if you aren't already subscribed to Roden. But he's also talking in this one about social media and I can completely relate. I'm trying to figure out what to do in 2019 about social media and talking about things I care about and I keep coming back to this site. I'm hoping to post more photos here, along with all the usual links, book reviews, and occasional longer form articles and shorter notes.
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It’s also worth noting that Thompson’s position is protected: No outsider can take away his subscribers or prevent him from communicating with them. Email is a boring, simple, old technology. The first email was sent in 1971 by Ray Tomlinson. Unlike followers or social media subscribers, email has yet to be usurped by algorithms (for the most part; Gmail does a little bit of sorting now). It’s a predictable marketing channel.
Craig Mod writes a good history of books, electronic books and magazines, and where we are now. His part about email as a book and publishing format is really interesting because the uptick in email newsletters is growing and I myself subscribe to quite a few. I enjoy the slowness of it—I choose when to read it—and how it shows up in my inbox just for me. There is no algorithm telling me what I should see, I'm making the choice to get this. It's an alternative to RSS that works well. For a bit of push back on Mod's essay, I recommend the piece Tim Carmody wrote on Kottke.org.
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Accessibility isn’t just a “nice to have”; it can affect everyone’s livelihood, including people with a range of disabilities (vision loss, inability to use a mouse or a trackpad, cognitive impairments, and more). Knowingly or unknowingly putting barriers in place that disproportionately affect access for people with disabilities–or any other protected characteristic–is discrimination, and it’s definitely something to worry about.
This piece by Marcy is amazing and I'm so glad she wrote it. We do this work because everyone has the right to access the information we're putting out on the web.
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I’m not sure what it is about the job of ‘design systems’ but it seems like it’s an excuse to be an asshole and to pretend as if you’ve never made a mistake before. Mina’s vulnerable talk makes me hopeful that this current trend can be broken.
I haven't watched the talk that Robin links to (it's on my list though), but I love the way he points out how people write about design systems as being easy. I think a lot of this comes from many of the stronger voices being folks who are consultants, they aren't living with the system for the long term and hence may not be around to see the mistakes. But I also think many writing about them act as if their way of doing things is the only way, which usually isn't the case.
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Fixing climate change will include lots of technocratic tweaks, lots of bills about dirt. They will be hard to defend against later repeal. So it would be nice if lawmakers could wed them to a new benefit, a superpower that people will fight for years after passage. Hence the job guarantee—a universal promise of employment meant to win over Americans in general and create more union jobs in particular.
I love the way in which Meyer discusses this and the reality of how to get people on board with doing something about the climate. It's not easy and it may mean change and sacrifice, but with jobs and help, I think we can do something to curb the effects.
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I reckon HTML and CSS deserve better than to be processed, compiled, and spat out into the browser, whether that’s through some build process, app export, or gigantic framework library of stuff that we half understand. HTML and CSS are two languages that deserve our care and attention to detail. Writing them is a skill.
Thank you Robin. As someone who's spent a career caring about HTML and CSS, I couldn't agree more with this piece. It's amazing to me how many developers push this off as easy or not important, but doing it well makes a huge difference for accessibility, performance, and easier development as you iterate on things. It's worth taking the time and caring about both of them.
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Medicine is a complex adaptive system: it is made up of many interconnected, multilayered parts, and it is meant to evolve with time and changing conditions. Software is not. It is complex, but it does not adapt. That is the heart of the problem for its users, us humans.
There is so much in this article, if you make software I highly recommend you read it. But I was struck by two things. First, how many people the software he talks about was trying to serve and how their interests were so varied, how could you make one piece of software to serve them all? Second, how an innovative group in an office for neurosurgery did the work themselves, they talked to each other and made changes to make the software fit their work flow, and that's amazing. I wonder if the software maker does user testing and if they watched that group of folks making changes for themselves and learned anything.
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After these foundations were implemented, it was much easier for us to consistently implement polished design details in our interfaces. The foundations are part of our shared vocabulary, and continue to be a language that designers and engineers can both speak to.
So much good stuff in here and I love that the Vox team is sharing the work they've been doing. This reminded me a lot of the way that Alla Kholmatova talks about creating systems that work for the team and the product with hard work rather than trying to replicate what another company has done. This isn't easy, but when you do the hard work the system will be so much more useful and therefore maintainable to the entire team.
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It’s an indescribable feeling, the rush and jolt of publishing I mean. (This is about to get sappy so bear with me). It’s a feeling of boundless enthusiasm for how words can be packaged and transported, and it’s this feeling that we can share ideas in this vast human society that we’re building together, a place where borders are just structures we’ve placed in between ourselves, and that words have momentum; a link to a website can lead to a book in your hand, to a friend at a party, to a conference in another town, to a long lasting love in a distant land.
I'm with Robin here, I still love pushing out code and writing on the web, no matter where it is. I've been quiet lately, but that is going to change soon as I'm writing again and loving it.
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We’re not absolutists about it. Authenticity is a relative term. Most people don’t undergo mild epistemological queasiness while they’re looking at a conventionally restored Rothko. We look at restored art in museums all the time, and we rarely worry that it’s insufficiently authentic. In the case of the Harvard Rothkos, though, the fact that the faded painting and the faked painting are in front of us at the same time somehow makes for a discordant aesthetic experience. It’s as though, at four o’clock every day, Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes turned into the ordinary Brillo cartons of which they were designed to be simulacra. You would no longer be sure what you were looking at.
I'm a massive Rothko lover, his work was very influential while I was working on my BFA in drawing and painting and I could sit for hours in front of his paintings. But this piece was also intriguing for the ideas of authenticity and what makes art art. I'm still thinking about a lot of this still.
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Those folks tend to avoid straw man/hypothetical arguments, provide more thoughtful and weighted opinions, share work and projects they’ve built, don’t pick fights, and don’t feel the need to chime in on every bit of drama. There’s a high signal-vs-noise. Realizing this spun me off on a bit of self-discovery thinking about the parts of development that I enjoy and I’ve been peeking at new technologies that I think might suit my ethos.
I'm with Dave, I want to write about the things I'm excited about and today I opened up Byword and started an outline for one such thing. There is a lot of room for criticism, but I'm tired of all of that and would rather talk about the good things going on.
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The theme of the past century of Western fashion is this: We take clothes designed for activity, and we adapt them for inactivity. And that’s true beyond the world of sports. For decades, Levi Strauss jeans were worn mostly by men working in factories and farms; today, denim is for loungers. Wristwatches were pioneered in World War I to keep soldiers punctual; today, we embrace them as peacetime jewelry.
The history in this piece is fascinating. If you like it, you should listen to 99 Percent Invisible which did a series on clothes.
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What’s required to build a good design system is a new set of habits. When someone asks a question like “how does component X work?” they might not know that documentation exists. So, yes, sharing your docs regularly is important but being the public face of your system is just as important as the docs. Evangelizing the design system with every opportunity you get and making sure that all this doesn’t feel like a burden — that’s vital for the effectiveness of a system to scale in the long run.
Robin's writing about design systems and what they're learning at Gusto so great in showing not only what's working for them but also what things you may want to think about when working with your team on a system.
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Some issues can be solved with better tools or better processes. In most of our workplaces, we tend to reach for tools and processes by default, because they feel easier to implement. But as often as not, it’s not a technology problem. It’s a people problem. And the solution actually involves communication skills, or effective dialogue.
This is a really great article about all the problems that come when trying to work with people and make things and make sure all the possibilities are covered and thought about. So often in our teams we overlap, we need to work together, or we won't be able to get the work done. Yet, so often, our organization isn't set up to be able to deal with that, it's a lot of what I do in my work, trying to get people to work across the silos. I lvoe the way it's talked about in this piece.