Things I Like
-
To put it another way: in the long term, the organization of a pattern library is more important than the patterns themselves. If a pattern’s purpose isn’t clear, or if the pattern isn’t easily findable within the library, then the value of that pattern quickly approaches zero.
I really like this. My role at my job has been changing a bit lately so I've been thinking a lot about the work I like to do as well. I'm doing some project management, some writing, and some code. It's a weird mix, and I'm still working through how I feel about it all, and reading someone else's thoughts on their work helps me do that. The way in which Ethan talks about the work is also just great, because I like how these are loose and flexible, making it easier to see the high level amongst the actual doing.
-
We feel the grain and discover the contours of the problem we are solving, and revise when our efforts don’t work quite as expected. Luckily, code and pixels are free, so your trials and errors should be less expensive than the considerable amount of lumber I’d waste if I ever took up woodworking.
Frank's talked about thinking of the grain of the web before and as I think about the analogy more, it works more and more.
-
Many people presume that employment is the opposite of independence, and that endlessly irritates me. It’s so short-sighted. History shows a long record of artists who did “normal” work to support their creative practice. If you work as a barista, graphic designer, or accountant to fund your writing or music: great! (You can swap out any of those job titles or passions with your own.) By keeping your day job, you’re in the fine company of T.S. Eliot, Herman Melville, Toni Morrison, and more.
I had a hard time picking a quote because this is such a great piece. But I chose the one above because I've been thinking a lot about independence versus being employed full time. Over the past two years I've held full time jobs and in many ways, especially in the past year, I've felt more free than ever before. I leave work behind at the end of my day and I pursue the things that matter to me with no worries. That's become the ultimate freedom.
-
The key psychological insight here is that people have no trouble turning any information into a coherent narrative. This is true when, as in the case of my friend, the information (i.e., her tardiness) is incorrect. And this is true, as in our experiments, when the information is random. People can’t help seeing signals, even in noise.
I found the thoughts in this piece really interesting, especially as it pertains to long, in person interviews. I'm not saying we should throw them out, but I also think that they often, when structured badly, do more harm than good.
-
Perhaps Lego is the right example, we’ve just been looking at the wrong aspect of it. The most important aspect of Lego is not so much the bricks themselves, but the system of tubes and stubs that holds them to together. New bricks have been added to the system over the years, yet a brick manufactured today will still connect with one of the first produced in 1958.
Paul's written a fantastic series based on a talk of his that I really love. It is one of my favorite things when people take something outside the web world and use it to illustrate concepts we use every day as we make things for the web. Cross discipline thinking is so valuable. Do read the entire series, it's fantastic (and gorgeous photos as well!).
-
That's something most of us do, Lewis said. "People waste years of their lives not being willing to waste hours of their lives. If you mistake busyness for importance--which we do a lot--you're not able to see what really is important."
I'm so on board with this idea. I spend a lot of my weekend time just puttering around, doing whatever, and yes, sometimes being totally lazy.
-
Adaptability seems the key here. Many believe that normalcy and consistency breeds monotony, but what about the trap of an overly accentuated, hyper-specific identity? When the world changes around you, what do you do? Personal identities are not corporate communication or software, though now we prescribe all to have brands. All contain the aching desire to be noticed when instead they should focus on being useful. Which leads me to something my grandfather used to say occasionally while I was growing up, “Not everyone gets to be special, but everyone can be useful.” It is so plain, yet so sweet.
Not much to say here other than Chimero's thoughts are interesting and lovely. I am a huge fan of vanilla, and I love the way he describes that and uses it in relation to thoughts on design.
-
When I make my own clothing, I think about each stitch and every color. As I pass fabric through the machine, I think about my friends, my week, my mom. Turns out developing consciousness around one thing makes you conscious of lots of other things. You think about the things that really matter to you. Or sometimes you remember the theme to Gilligan’s Island and that's a thing too.
I really love this piece, so much. I don't sew, but I crochet now and I've been drawing for years. I make all our cards (I even did our New Year's cards for last holiday season and had a local print shop do the printing). As I make birthday cards, thank yous, and others, I often think about who I'm making them for and then I end up going all over the place. Drawing, and crochet, is meditative for me. Thank you so much Ethan for sharing this piece.
-
My family’s generous health insurance costs about $20,000 a year, of which we pay only $4,000 in premiums. The rest is subsidized by taxpayers. You read that right. Like virtually everyone else on my block who isn’t old enough for Medicare or employed by the government, my family is covered by private health insurance subsidized by taxpayers at a stupendous public cost. Well over 90% of white households earning over the white median income (about $75,000) carried health insurance even before the Affordable Care Act. White socialism is nice if you can get it.
If you live in the US and you don't know how employer provided benefits are also government provided (through tax subsidies) then you need to read this. Too many people are unaware of how much our government already subsidizes our health insurance coverage and how that system is just reserved for those with good jobs. I went on a little Twitter rampage about this last week and this article explains it well. I'm not sure I agree with why certain groups of people voted the way they did last November, but I completely agree that most people don't get how this system works and how utterly awful it is.
-
But the facts need a champion. Facts rarely stand up for themselves — they need someone to make us care about them, to make us curious. That’s what Rosling did. And faced with the apocalyptic possibility of a world where the facts don’t matter, that is the example we must follow.
This is a long, but really interesting article regarding fact checking, trying to report the truth, and how people deal with facts. Along the way you get a glimpse into the fascinating history of how the tobacco companies fooled the public for years while knowing their products were dangerous and horrible. I really like the idea of using curiosity to get people to find the truth and the idea of truth champions who are able to do this for social sciences and politics just as has been done for other areas of study.
-
Austin's blog continues to point out stories of interest and things to think about, along with helping me to see that I don't need to know everything that's going on in this crazy world right now.
-
At the root of this is the American obsession with self-reliance, which makes it more acceptable to applaud an individual for working himself to death than to argue that an individual working himself to death is evidence of a flawed economic system. The contrast between the gig economy’s rhetoric (everyone is always connecting, having fun, and killing it!) and the conditions that allow it to exist (a lack of dependable employment that pays a living wage) makes this kink in our thinking especially clear.
I'm not much of a fan of the gig economy or the sharing economy or whatever else you want to call it. I think it's a bunch of BS and is using nice talk to disguise how it's screwing everyone but those at the top. And this article shows how that spin works to the companies advantage but the workers disadvantage.
-
I know not everybody wants to write on the web, and that’s fine. But it makes me sad when people choose not to publish their thoughts because they think no-one will be interested, or that it’s all been said before. I understand where those worries come from, but I believe—no, I know—that they are unfounded.
Jeremy's dead on with this sentiment. I haven't written many longer pieces lately, but there are things brewing and I do a lot of drafts as I think through things. And I do write other places, mainly my work blog, but this is my home on the web, even if I'm not always writing longer form pieces but am talking about books and links for a long while.
-
Accept that all I really want is a small, slow, simple life. A mediocre life. A beautiful, quiet, gentle life. I think it is enough.
A friend sent me this link with the words "thought you might like this" and she's right, I do like it. I like it a lot. I live a very slow and unplanned life. Most weekend we have zero plans and we love it. I love time to putter, ponder, listening to myself to see what it is I want to do with my free time.
-
All of this is much more than just moving the goalposts from where they were for past candidates. It’s a disembowelment of Christianity’s most cherished principles, ethics we have deemed to be part of America’s moral bedrock since its very founding.
If you've ever been a part of an Evangelical Christian community, this read is really interesting. Most of the people who know me now don't realize that I studied theology in graduate school and while I'm no longer deeply involved in that community, I do know many who are and this piece describes how many of my friends felt after the election.