Things I Like
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Just as an architect can draw up the plans for a building that never gets built, a UX Designer can design a product that’s never built. In fact, roughly half of the projects I’ve worked on never shipped. Some were exercises in exploring new audiences where the business client decided there wasn’t a good fit yet. Some were situations where we discovered the complexity of the product put its price tag way above what the client wanted to spend. Some looked like fantastic ideas, but the users had zero interest in the products.
Design plus agile has always been an issue, and I completely agree with where Anne is coming from here. There is a lot of work to do before you even start to make the software as far as design goes. I can't wait to read part two of this, because I do have thoughts on how design can be done once you decided to build the thing and need to design as you build.
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Those tools are useful in the right context, but you need to be able to understand what that context is. Whenever you come across an issue that needs solving, think about what the underyling problem actually is. Only once you’ve identified that should you consider whether you might want to use a tool to help you address the problem, and which tool that might be.
Tim is being reasonable again and speaking to the realities of working on the web. I rarely follow the latest and greatest new tools and I'm more concerned with making things that work well for users rather than using a new tool in the process. I guess I can come across as a curmudgeon at times, but somehow I manage to continue making websites.
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Working in a stupefied firm often means blinding others with bullshit. A very effective way to get out of doing anything real is to rely on a flurry of management jargon. Develop strategies, generate business models, engage in thought leadership. This will get you off the hook of doing any actual work. It will also make you seem like you are at the cutting edge. When things go wrong, you can blame the fashionable management idea.
I can't even begin to tell you how much I've seen this in practice in my career. And it's sad that using your brain and asking questions in so many places is frowned upon.
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Being a beach lifestyle company, where our whole brand is wrapped up the notion of a healthy work-life balance, the idea that should be working differently, too, if we truly wanted to live differently, wasn't as much a leap. But if you ask me, we're more of an online marketing agency that happens to own a surf brand. There's no reason that virtually any company that employees a large chunk of knowledge workers can't cut its hours by 30% and still succeed.
I've been thinking for a long time about how we treat knowledge work like we treat factory work. Knowledge work doesn't just happen during work hours. I can't count the number of times I've been frustrated with a bug at the end of the work day and I stop working, move into the kitchen and start cooking, and within a half hour or hour I have a solution that I'm jotting down on paper to try in the morning. But we insist that work happens during a 9-5 work day, even though the vast majority of office workers aren't working that entire time. I wonder how much longer it will take to break this cycle and realize that many jobs can be done in far fewer hours.
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We all understand the joys of our always-wired world — the connections, the validations, the laughs, the porn, the info. I don’t want to deny any of them here. But we are only beginning to get our minds around the costs, if we are even prepared to accept that there are costs. For the subtle snare of this new technology is that it lulls us into the belief that there are no downsides. It’s all just more of everything. Online life is simply layered on top of offline life. We can meet in person and text beforehand. We can eat together while checking our feeds. We can transform life into what the writer Sherry Turkle refers to as “life-mix.”
I found much of this piece intriguing, especially since I read it at the tail end of a vacation where I was as unplugged as possible. Also as someone who's studied theology and thought a lot about secularism and religion in my life, Sullivan's conclusions have me thinking a lot. I'm one of the people he refers to, I do yoga now and I meditate as part of it, it's my way of finding quiet. And walking with no device is in my routine as well. I wonder what would happen if more churches went back the simple, quiet customs of the past, rather than chasing after being just like the modern world.
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Originality is partly a matter of having your own influences: read evolutionary biology textbooks or the Old Testament, find your metaphors where no one’s looking, don’t belong. Or belong to the other world that is not quite this one, the world from which you send back your messages. Imagine Herman Melville in workshop in 1849 being told by all his peers that he needed to cut all those informative digressions and really his big whale book was kind of dull and why did it take him so long to get to the point. And actually it was a quiet failure at the time. So was pretty much everything Thoreau published, and Emily Dickinson published only a handful of poems in her lifetime but wrote thousands.
I had a hard time with the quote for this one, I loved most of the tips. And I think they can be said for anything you want to be good at. Right now art is becoming a passion again and I love writing, and I'll get better at both if I do them a lot.
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During their investigation, Kidd and Piantadosi realized something important that strengthened their theory. It turns out that another variable has an even higher correlation with intelligence than brain size—time to maturity, or weaning time. In other words, the time it takes to shepherd newborns through absolute helplessness to a point of relative self-sufficiency predicts primate intelligence more strongly than the best measure that has previously been proposed, namely, head circumference. Orangutans have smarter babies than baboons and they wean them longer. Baboon babies, in turn, are weaned longer, and are smarter, than lemur babies.
I found this fascinating. Science and the way the world works are mind blowing.
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My students investigate the questions raised in this essay during the seminars I give on writing and researching robotics and technology. As my students’ fingers move unconsciously across desktops, miming the texting or typing they desperately want to be doing, we talk about how technology has consumed us. The students write papers on internet addiction, the consequences of smartphone use, the internet of things, the dark side of Fitbits. And yet they actively demonstrate everything we discuss. One of my students acknowledged that she can’t avoid surfing the web if she uses her laptop in class, yet she doesn’t opt for paper and pencil.
This essay was interesting to me. I didn't love everything about it, but the glimpses I get into life with devices as a young person intrigue me. As I age I'm more and more grateful to be away from devices. I spend long hours reading and thinking. I now draw with pen and paper more than on my iPad, and I journal with pen and paper as well. My todo lists have even gone low tech as of late. There is something comforting about it all to me. But I still love the internet and my iPad to be able to read things like this article. Balance, as usual, is the key but it can be very hard.
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No, the web is not print. However it shouldn’t be defined by being not print. Nor should we allow assumptions about what is and isn’t possible stop us experimenting. Unless we find the edges, unless we ask why we can’t do things, unless we come up with ways to try and make it work, the native tools won’t get better.
I've really enjoyed Rachel's work on CSS Grid and I agree with her that we aren't doing enough to push the boundaries on the web. The edges of the web are different and maybe we've become too complacent with that we're doing that's easy.
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Ownership is tricky and I don’t know quite what makes it work, but I suspect it’s the most important thing; when people own something they give it all they’ve got. When they don’t, they behave unpredictably (i.e. shit on it).
This is a really great list, super great and recommend reading it all. If you make for the web you'll find some things to think about, remember, and nod your head to.
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Vox Product has been doing incredible work on accessibility and baking it into their teams practices. And now they've shared a presentation they've created to help the rest of their team and company understand how important it is. Thank you for sharing Vox and well done!
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On a more philosophical level, this journey has served to remind me again of how terribly delicate is the fabric of civilization, of the vigilance required to protect it and of the slow and painstaking work of mending it once it has been torn. This is hardly an original thought; it is a lesson we were supposed to have learned after Nazi Germany, after Bosnia and Rwanda. Perhaps it is a lesson we need to constantly relearn.
This is an incredibly well done piece. It was the entire NY Times Magazine a few weeks ago and I just finished reading it over the weekend. At the same time we've been watching a documentary about World War I and it's incredible how the echoes of that war have reached into the years since. More so than World War II, World War I changed us and it ushered in an era of change in the world, change we are still dealing with, including in the lands highlighted in this piece. My take away from both this piece and the series on World War I is that democracy is hard, really hard, because it means compromising and respect for the other. And, related to that, the West has traipsed all over the world and decided we know how to do things best and, as history shows repeatedly, we've only made things worse. I will think about the people in this piece for years to come, especially when I see news about this part of the world.
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These 30-hour employees will be salaried and receive the same benefits as traditional 40-hour workers, but they will receive only 75 percent of the pay full-time workers earn. Currently, the company employs part-time workers that share the same benefits as full-time workers. However, the pilot program would differ in that an entire team, including managers, would work reduced hours.
Oh, how I want this to succeed. I've written about this in the past, but I believe that part time is something that could work in our industry, especially now that we work remotely on teams and in different time zones. If you are overlapping less, why can't you also get work done in less time? I've said this before, I would love to work a 30 hour, 4 day a week job. I believe I can produce great code, writing, and ideas in that time, and I think I can benefit a company. Too bad most companies can't take the risk to do this. I can't wait to see what happens at Amazon.
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Building these factories doesn’t require any new technology. In fact, the effort would be much the same as the one that Solomon oversaw at Intel’s semiconductor factory in New Mexico: Pick a site with good roads and a good technical school nearby to supply the workforce; find trained local contractors who can deal with everything from rebar to HVAC; get the local permits; order long-lead-time items like I-beam steel; level the ground and excavate; lay foundations and floors; build walls, columns, and a roof; “facilitate each of the stations for factory machine tooling with plumbing, piping, and electrical wiring”; and train a workforce of 1,500. To match the flow of panels needed to meet the Stanford targets, in the most intense years of construction we need to erect 30 of these solar panel factories a year, plus another 15 for making wind turbines. “It’s at the upper end of what I could possibly imagine,” Solomon says.
This may not be the best metaphor, but for humans who want to think of themselves as ruling over nature and not part of nature, it is a metaphor that could work. And to be quite honest, all I want right now is some action that would spur some action, because without the action soon, we are all fucked. (As you can tell, I'm fairly pessimistic about us doing anything in time to stop catastrophe).
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Practicing waiting is a lifelong practice since, as it turns out, impatience has a particular gravitational pull. But after all that waiting, finding or opening or having that once-future thing feels very much present.