Things I Like
-
Policing a design system never works in my experience. It never works because people don’t like rigid systems, being told what to do, and will straight up do the opposite. Being liberal in accepting things into the system, and being liberal about how you go about that, ensures you don’t police the system. You collaborate on it.
Mark is doing some of the best writing and speaking on large scale design systems I've read and heard in a long time. He isn't focusing on the nitty gritty details of implementation, but he's focusing on the big picture and that's been what interests me lately. Tooling and implementation come and go, but big picture ideas usually stick around.
-
But also remember that the greatest challenges you will face starting tomorrow, have little to do with your talent. Sure, talent matters. It matters a lot. But I like to say that 10% of your career is your talent and ingenuity. And the other 90% rests on your energy and enthusiasm, your humility and perseverance, your professionalism and dedication to pushing through every bump in the road you will encounter.
I like this address. I went to art school, but have never made my living from art. This past six months has found me creating again, but there is a lot in this speech that can be applied across disciplines, and the above quote is definitely true no matter what your work is. Careers are long, they are full of change and bumps, there is so much that is unexpected, and what gets you through is not luck or talent, but, at times, sheer perseverance.
-
Activism spawned from these online conspiracy groups wastes time and money, and it’s increasing. In a recent interview, Californian Republican Representative Devin Nunes said that 90% of the communication he receives from constituents is conspiracy-theorist nonsense, up from approximately 10% when he took office in 2003. It’s impacting the political process on everything from zoning laws (fears of UN Agenda 21) to public health policy (water fluoridation). In Hawaii last month, for example, lawmakers killed a simple procedural bill that would have allowed the state to more quickly adopt federal guidelines on administering vaccines in case of an outbreak—because outraged residents claimed that vaccines were responsible for Zika (and, of course, for autism).
This article is fascinating, talking about how the way we are kept in a bubble in our social networks (always seeing things we like or that are related to what we like) is resulting in shifts in policy. I saw this with the Portland fluoride vote. The amount of conspiracy theories and bad science being talked about during that time was unbelievable. And it feels like it is only getting worse with this current election cycle.
-
There are very few things that require instantaneous reply or attention, such as a service being down or a major security flaw. Most of the questions, doubts or bugs can be resolved at later notice. We are an attention hungry generation, but it’s disrespectful to assume that anyone we ping will immediately drop whatever they’re involved in. With multilayered communication we can choose an appropriate medium for the severity and urgency of the message where about to convey. We need to value each others time and attention.
This is a great article. And it's interesting because I've been a remote team member now for several years. We talk about how tools can be asynchronous, but then we don't treat them as such. It used to be that way with people expecting instant replies to emails, but now it is instant replies to Slack. The point of the tool is the the information waits for us, so let's calm down a bit. But this whole article has some really wonderful points about how to work remotely.
-
If you’re passionate about your work and you have a certain temperament, you may be inclined towards your own Work Singularities. But I know people who don’t ever work that way and still produce amazing outcomes. I don’t want to over-romanticize this kind of scheduling just because it happens to be a thing that I do. There are other ways to get a lot done.
This piece is a reaction piece, so you should probably read the links at the beginning to understand it fully. But what I truly appreciated about this was her way of framing what she calls a "work singularity", a time where you are pushing through to finish something because you just have to get it done. And it is a short burst, followed by downtime to recover. And, she also acknowledges, you never need work this way to do great things, which is comforting because I never work that way.
-
Historians can trace the concept to 18th century England, when it was probably known as a dumbwaiter. It may have become popular at a time when household servants were in declining supply. In the absence of maids or footmen to refill wine goblets and deliver condiments, diners were forced to reach across the table or interrupt conversation with "pass the pimientos please." The Lazy Susan helped to solve that problem, and plenty of 18th century examples prove it.
Just a tidbit I found super fascinating!
-
Accessibility is not a checklist item that only needs to be considered in some projects, or at the end of a process. Rather, these practices should be woven into every step of a project and role in a team. An accessible product stems from everyone on a team owning and shouldering the responsibility. It's part of our jobs as creators.
I know Winston, one of the Vox Product people who's been working so hard to bring accessibility into their process and it's so great to see what's happening with the work they are doing. This stuff is important and this post points out all the reasons why, it's so great.
-
It would be ideal for me if an SDK could be created on the fly for different people based on project needs. So, for example, for freelancer ‘A’, I don’t want to send them HTML or CSS as I know they’re not building anything, so I just send them mood boards and inspiration, image assets and branding guidelines. For freelancer ‘b’, a front-end developer, I send boilerplate, CSS, template assets and icons. I mix and match and provide the design SDK, rather than send along a URL and expect them to know what they need and how to use them.
I'm thinking about style guides a lot again, for reasons. And this idea from Mark is really interesting. How do we make a thing that documents and helps the entire team? That is a hard to answer question, but also really necessary before any team approaches a style guide type of project.
-
Taken together, Leckie’s world subverts traditional gender stereotypes, features genderless characters who are caretakers, heroes, leaders, and villains (often several of those characteristics at once), questions notions of gender in language and the male defaults which continue to infect us, all the while simultaneously proposing fascinating relationships between humans and AIs that probe complex areas of privacy, dependance, and love.
Mandy's writing here is amazing. She takes what is currently happening with AI and then takes a look at how AI is portrayed in fiction. It's amazing because the people currently building these bots are taking the most unimaginative route possible. I realize that I link to everything Mandy writes, but that's because it is all so worth reading. And if you haven't yet, while on her site, check out her book reviews, lots of good ideas for reading in there.
-
By the way, at dusk or dawn (which can last for hours in an airliner) you may see a clearly delineated, barely curved shadow on the sky above the horizon. That's the shadow of the earth on the sky — one of the few opportunities, for the non-astronauts among us, to observe more or less directly the shape of our planet.
Beautiful photos in this one, and even though I've come to dread flying, I do find the ideas and facts in this piece fascinating.
-
In a secular age, I suspect that reading fiction is one of the few remaining paths to transcendence, that elusive state in which the distance between the self and the universe shrinks. Reading fiction makes me lose all sense of self, but at the same time makes me feel most uniquely myself.
I love reading. And lately, I prefer it above almost all other forms of entertainment. I hardly watch shows or movies these days. I read widely, and other than sketchbooking, it's become my main source of growth, learning, and thinking.
-
Around here, we nonengineers are pressed to prove our value. The hierarchy is pervasive, ingrained in the industry’s dismissal of marketing and its insistence that a good product sells itself; evident in the few “office hours” established for engineers (our scheduled opportunity to approach with questions and bugs); reflected in our salaries and equity allotment, even though it’s harder to find a good copywriter than a liberal-arts graduate with a degree in history and twelve weeks’ training from an uncredentialed coding dojo. This is a cozy home for believers in bootstrapping and meritocracy, proponents of shallow libertarianism. I am susceptible to it, too. “He just taught himself to code over the summer,” I hear myself say one afternoon, with the awe of someone relaying a miracle.
It was tough to pick a quote here as so much of this is devastating, but true to what I've seen in the start up world. The other part of this piece is that it's one of the best written pieces I've read in a long time. The content is tough at times, but it should be, what we're creating is pretty crappy—I'm really glad to see someone critiquing it.
-
The more sustainable way of doing that—and I think we’ve talked about this on the show a little bit—is to work with the organization to kind of come up with a system for naming these parts of the design that actually works for that organization. Trent Walton had this really great blog entry a couple months ago about how in projects that he’s worked on, that atomic design classification has actually introduced—I don’t know, there’s probably a better phrase than “organizational friction,” but I haven’t had enough coffee yet… Like, that metaphor of talking about certain parts of the design as either atoms or elements or organisms is great for front-end designers and developers, but when you’re actually talking with a larger team of non-technical actors, it doesn’t always scale. There’s often a bit of a disconnect between what the metaphor means and what the interface actually does in the context of the larger design system.
This is a great podcast highlighting how design systems are great, but also how they are hard. For most organizations I believe the system should be customized to them. I read a tweet once that said that if you are using Twitter's Bootstrap you are using something that works for Twitter, but may not work well for your organization or your site. And in this podcast Ethan and Karen do a great job of highlighting all the things to think about when creating a system.
-
This is a great little book and with the closure of Five Simple Steps, Tim is giving it away. You should grab it.
-
The rise of grinders — hackers who open up their bodies and insert things like chips, magnets, sensors and more — has been met by the popular press with both fascination and horror. NPR recently ran a piece, “Body hacking movement rises ahead of moral answers,” about grinders that approached the premise with an almost comedic tone of uncertainty. The piece even features a woman, at a conference where she was promoting meditation, calling RFID implants “the craziest thing she had seen.” And yet, a not insignificant number of women at that conference probably had an IUD. Would she consider that crazy? I doubt it.
I found this really interesting. Often, the things that have to do with women and their reproductive system are forgotten about or thought of differently, but should they be?