Things I Like
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Is a developer building a new component and needs some styles? The UX Engineer writes that CSS. The UX Engineer gives a snippet of HTML to the developer for them to incorporate into the component. The UX engineer ensures the correct semantics and can come alongside the developer to ensure keyboard navigation works. The UX Engineer maintains a pattern library for the team to use as a reference to find existing styles.
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I will realize, only then, that she didn’t escape from China—the oldest daughter of a proud family of academics, married off to the son of a merchant in America; who walked miles and miles from her village to Toisaan carrying my father, eventually managing to get herself to Hong Kong; who boarded a plane to London and, unsure which plane was bound for Boston, followed two students to another flight that took her to New York; who spent a terrifying month at Ellis Island with my father; who was somehow, in this age before Facebook and cell phones and databases, found by my grandfather and brought back to Boston; who worked seven brutal days a week washing and steam-pressing the clothes of white, working-class families in North Cambridge; who bought a home and raised three children in that laundry; who, with the help of local resident Tip O’Neill, would gradually bring almost her entire family to America; who, when the laundry was sold, worked in a belt factory; who, by the time I was a child, seemed to know so many people on the streets of Boston’s Chinatown that I thought she was its mayor—for me to forgo the beef.
This is lovely, read it.
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This talk by Paul Lloyd from SmashingConf Freiburg is so fantastic. I really love it when people take other industries and history and relate it back to the web in some way. Paul does this with city planning and then moves to talking about design systems. It's really worth the watch and I'll be returning to it.
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But what about web development? I have found a code of ethics for software engineers , and maybe this is something taught as part of a CS degree, but for most self-taught web developers, I imagine they have never spent time looking into this. There are a few different bodies that put together codes of ethics for software engineers, but the very first bullet point listed on that Wikipedia article is: “Contribute to society and human well-being”.
Kristin is blogging again and I'm so excited. And she, like others in our industry, is asking some really good questions about how we think (or don't) about the things we make.
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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!