Things I Like
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I’ve found this cycle has fomented another emotion beyond distrust, one I’ve felt most acutely in 2018: Disdain? (Feels too loaded.) Disappointment? (Too moralistic.) Wariness? (Yes!) Yes — wariness over the way social networks and the publishing platforms they provide shift and shimmy beneath our feet, how the algorithms now show posts of X quality first, or then Y quality first, or how, for example, Instagram seems to randomly show you the first image of a multi-image sequence or, no wait, the second.
I enjoyed the way Mod talks about newsletters and what's going on in that world. Right now I'm overwhelmed by the sheer number of interesting newsletters out there and I want to get the all, support them all, but my time and my pocketbook can't handle it. I'm being selective and it's hard. But I love that I can read them when I want and they come directly to me.
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I might be the “old guard” but if you think I’m incapable of learning React, or another framework, and am defending my way of working because of this, please get over yourself. However, 22 year old me would have looked at those things and run away. If we make it so that you have to understand programming to even start, then we take something open and enabling, and place it back in the hands of those who are already privileged. I have plenty of fight left in me to stand up against that.
This is such a good post by Rachel. I taught myself CSS when my HTML instructor at the community college I attended wouldn't teach us. I used books, view source, and online articles to learn and it was the start of a whole new career for me. What I've been amazed at recently is how hard it is to do that now. And how you are pushed into the land of JavaScript so quickly when you start.
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That’s not to say that this is the best approach, but it’s a good reminder that the web works by default without all of our additional layers. When we add those additional layers, things break. Or, if we neglect good markup and CSS to begin with, we start out with something that’s already broken and then spend time trying to make it work again.
On the heels of Rachel's article, Garett makes some wonderful points about how we build things and what the result is. He too talks about how HTML and CSS are entry points, there isn't anything to install, a text file and a browser and you can begin learning.
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...[U]nder this definition, you can find solitude in a busy train car or a coffee shop, or wherever. I am slightly nervous about this re-definition (it seems to me that being truly alone has a ton of value), but I am also attracted to this idea that you don’t necessarily have to be alone to be with your thoughts, you just have to be free from input.
I like the idea of solitude as being free from thoughts, of being free from input, of being able to be alone in your mind. It relates to what Anne Helen Peterson talked about in her newsletter last week. I'm thinking I need to read Newport's book as I've been reading so much about it from others lately.
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My gut feeling was that there was clearly a reduced amount of work in the team for the UI engineers (I am one of them), and that this was caused by the fact that we were not continuously writing new CSS at every new feature, but we were able to re-use and simply combine (“like Lego”) the existing UI components provided by Cosmos. And that this was also caused by the fact that also the mockups provided by the designers were more consistent, and followed a set of pre-defined patterns, so building UIs for us had become increasingly simple and straightforward.
Really interesting look at a way to measure the reduced work load that comes when you have a well functioning design system in place. This wasn't the easiest thing to chart, but the results are stunning and amazing.
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And yet even today I rarely volunteer how utterly happy I am with the decision I made more than 20 years ago. Because I never had a child, I don’t really know how to miss the experience of having one. But I do recognize all the things that have come my way as the result of not having kids–and, by extension, being a woman on my own after my marriage broke up: not having children certainly made it less difficult to end the marriage when it became clear that my husband and I had to do so. In some ways, the baby I never had is a part of me. She has given me freedom.
I'm a childless adult and if you'd talked to me when I was 25 I probably would've said that I'd have kids some day. But that isn't what's happened and it's been a very conscious choice. And I'm grateful to know people who are making that choice, I don't feel alone at all. But I found this piece interesting, someone celebrating what that has brought to her life now that she's older. I fully realize that aging will be different for me than it is for people with kids, but I've let go of fear of that difference and am enjoying what it brings to my life as I age.
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Americans, with our powerful founding story, our unusual reverence for our Constitution, our relative geographic isolation, and our two centuries of economic success, have long been convinced that liberal democracy, once achieved, cannot be altered. American history is told as a tale of progress, always forward and upward, with the Civil War as a kind of blip in the middle, an obstacle that was overcome. In Greece, history feels not linear but circular. There is liberal democracy and then there is oligarchy. Then there is liberal democracy again. Then there is foreign subversion, then there is an attempted Communist coup, then there is civil war, and then there is dictatorship. And so on, since the time of the Athenian republic.
I've found Anne Appelbaum's writing in this time of craziness in the world to be really helpful in how to think about it all. In this article she talks about the ebb and flow of how governments have functioned in Europe and how different the history has been in the past 200 or so years than what American has experienced. Well worth the read.
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Dystopia is one of those parts of speculative fiction that function as early-warning systems for bad sociocultural weather, a function I’ve talked about at length elsewhere. Dystopia is also about the fight for a better world. Every well-written dystopia is, unlike most other forms of drama, already always about hope.”
Ellis succinctly sums up why I read so much dystopian fiction, it's about hope.
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It is often regretted that children can no longer play or move freely outside because of the dangers of traffic; inevitably, many of the people who voice these regrets are also the drivers of cars, as those same restricted children will come to be in their time. What is being mourned, it seems, is not so much the decline of an old world of freedom as the existence of comforts and conveniences the individual feels powerless to resist, and which in any case he or she could not truthfully say they wished would be abolished. There is a feeling, nonetheless, of loss, and it may be that the increasing luxury of the world inside the car is a kind of consolation for the degradation of the world outside it.
I hate driving, to be honest, but I really enjoyed this piece.
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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.