Things I Like
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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.
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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.
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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.
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This is a great little book and with the closure of Five Simple Steps, Tim is giving it away. You should grab it.
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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?
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And I begin to understand the nature of the trouble I’m having communicating to my parents precisely why what I’m doing appeals to me. They are asking about a job. I am thinking about identity, community, purpose – the things that provide meaning and motivation. I am talking about my life.
I actually don't like this article very much, I completely disagree with the author. But it's another article in my quest to read and understand more about work. Making work your life is not a great plan for many of us. Time away for rest, relaxation, and letting your mind wander is also really important. When you are always working, when does this happen? This isn't only something to do during our childhoods or during college, but it's a thing that should be done throughout all of life. Wasting time is a good thing.
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Companies have been experimenting for over a decade with social enterprise software, not to mention standard office communications packages like Outlook. Slack is different. It's not designed to supplement your office software; it's designed to replace it. Even more radically, Slack aims to replace the office itself, creating a platform for people who work entirely online. The question is, what will happen to office culture when everything we do and say at work is converted into a string of emoji-laced texts—especially when those texts are logged and searchable forever?
This article was fascinating on so many levels. On the legal implications of all your office chat being logged and saved, on the way in which Slack is replacing all other forms of communication, and the way in which there is push back from this situation. As someone who has worked remote for the past several years, I love Slack (much more than IRC on which it is based). But I also believe it should be OK to close group chat to get work done. I believe that it doesn't replace all meetings, that sometimes a video call is necessary to talk through things. And the snarky part of me wonders if Slack means you don't need an office why does the company Slack not hire more remote workers?
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The problem is that the uniqueness of any given country is a mixture not only of its indigenous practices and borrowed customs but also of its past and its present. Any given photograph encloses only a section of the world within its borders. A sequence of photographs, taken over many years and carefully arranged, however, reveals a worldview. To consider a place largely from the perspective of a permanent anthropological past, to settle on a notion of authenticity that edits out the present day, is not simply to present an alternative truth: It is to indulge in fantasy.
One of my favorite columns in the NY Times Magazine is Teju Cole's monthly column on photography. It always makes me think, and it is filled with words that make me want to be a better writer, thinker, and looker (as in at the things around me).
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Those I love. Being. Living my life without being diverted into things that people so often get diverted into. Being alive is so extraordinary I don’t know why people limit it to riches, pride, security—all of those things life is built on. People miss so much because they want money and comfort and pride, a house and a job to pay for the house. And they have to get a car. You can’t see anything from a car. It’s moving too fast. People take vacations. That’s their reward—the vacation. Why not the life? Vacations are second-rate. People deprive themselves of so much of their lives—until it’s too late. Though I understand that often you don’t have a choice.
No. I really don’t like chitchat. Often when I went places with people I liked, they would chat the whole time. It’s very human, but if there’s going to be talk I want it to be interesting. I don’t want to know that so-and-so spilled milk or how sad it is that she didn’t get the dress she wanted. All of the things that people are shamed by or don’t think they’ve succeeded in—I don’t want to talk about that. I really like to meet people, to be with people, but I don’t want to be chatting all the time. I like it when people talk about things.
I couldn't chose just one from this piece. There is a lot about being a poet in here, a lot about living a life, and a lot about being alone. It's all fairly amazing and enlightening and I'm so glad I'm friends with someone who would link to it.
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I just reviewed a book on accessibility, A Web for Everyone, which is a great book that spans both design and development of accessible sites. Heydon has put together a great list of examples on how to do a lot of different things and code them with ARIA so that they are accessible.
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I wonder how much better we could make online spaces if we took more cues from farmers. Because any farmer can tell you, the deer will never decide to stop being deer. It’s your job to protect your garden. Or, at least, make it inhospitable enough that the pests move on to the next one.
This piece is so wonderful. I love the way Derek talks about his work, his current work and his past work. Tech is such a difficult place to be at times. I struggle with it and I wonder, if I left it where would I go? What would I do? I can't answer that right now and tech is still where I want to be, but I look back and see the path of how I got here and wonder where it will take me next.
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I don't remember now how I came upon this website, but I love it. I love what it is trying to do. I love the sounds which trigger so many memories for me.
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Sometimes programmers think that learning HTML is beneath them because it’s not real programming. But HTML markup is how people actually get the results of your programming. It’s the part of the web that connects your content to the whole world, so it deserves just as much care and attention as your programming and your server.
I love HTML. I agonize over using the right element for the right content when I do a fresh layout. Thinking about how it will work across all different kinds of devices is part of the fun of it all. Too often this work is given short shrift and done by people who don't care and that just makes me sad.
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This can be hard work because it requires a lot of consideration and testing to get it right. One of the pitfalls of most design processes is that little consideration goes into all the conditions in which content can live.
Really nice piece by Jonathon that I would +1 all the way. It is more work, but it is also worth it, because the user benefits more than we can imagine.
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Now, I don’t care about Opera Mini per se (I’m not its Product Manager). In the same way, I don’t care about walking sticks, wheelchairs, mobility scooters or guide dogs. But I care deeply about people who use enabling technologies — and Opera Mini is an enabling technology. It allows people on feature phones, low-powered smartphones, people in low-bandwidth areas, people with very small data plans, people who are roaming (you?) connect to the web.
Bruce goes on to talk about how many people in the world use Opera Mini and it is quite significant. If you're OK with leaving behind that many people that's fine, but just remember that it is a useful tool for a lot of people and they don't all live in non Western countries. I know several people who use Mini in the US to save on data.