Things I Like
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The hero in your life is never going to be the person who pats you on the head: it’s going to be the person who puts their own need to be liked aside to make you a better designer. And no, someone doesn’t need to understand you or your project 100% before they have the right to say anything about it. The person who doesn’t get you or what you made is the one that is most likely to come up with the idea or the insight that you can’t come up with on your own. People who see things differently are gold.
I studied fine arts in college and much of what is said here in relation to design work would apply to art as well. The best teachers I had in school were the ones who would push me, make me think, and make me listen. She goes on to talk about how you need to handle and respond in critique. And it's the exact opposite of what most people want to do, it's to ask more questions and be open to the answers.
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We are alive at a time when huge systems—industrial, infrastructural—are being remade, and I think it’s our responsibility as we make choices both commercial and civic—it’s just a light responsibility, don’t stress—to extrapolate forward, and ask ourselves: Is this a system I want to live inside? Is this a system fit for humans?
I really love the way that Robin Sloan juxtaposes these two different ways to get food when you are hungry. One is slick, but what is the true harm of it, what is the society we are building if we choose it? The other fosters community, neighborhood, people knowing people and I love that idea.
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Saving something on the web, just as Kevin Vaughan learned from what happened to his work, means not just preserving websites but maintaining the environments in which they first appeared—the same environments that often fail, even when they’re being actively maintained. Rose, looking ahead hundreds of generations from now, suspects “next to nothing” will survive in a useful way. “If we have continuity in our technological civilization, I suspect a lot of the bare data will remain findable and searchable,” he said. “But I suspect almost nothing of the format in which it was delivered will be recognizable.”
Such a good article about all the things we lose on a regular basis as we shut down servers and web sites. So much of our history is now digital, and many don't seem to care when it disappears. It's rather sad.
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While “Airbnb’ing a room” has become the norm for many travelers, the company denies it has anything to do with lodging. Rather, it’s “a trusted community marketplace” and “an online platform that connects hosts who have accommodations to rent with guests seeking to rent such accommodations.” Of course, platforms are not neutral pieces of technology: they are embedded with the values of the marketplace, strategically designed for maximum profit and minimal liability. Companies that take advantage of such ambiguity pose risks to consumers, particularly when they’re trafficking in human experience, not just data or speech like Napster, Tumblr, and others before them who have appealed to their platform status to weather challenges to the legally murky activities they host.
Many who know me know that I don't really like AirBnB. Our one and only time renting for a vacation was disastrous and we lived next door to a house that was rented for a whole summer and it sucked. So we avoid them. And while I know there is risk in licensed establishments as well, I like to think that there is less risk. I may be kidding myself, but it's my preference. This article points out the many reasons why I don't trust AirBnB.
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I think Stewart is identifying a new facet of this. It’s not quite context collapse, because what’s collapsing aren’t audiences so much as expectations. Rather, it’s a collapse of speech-based expectations and print-based interpretations. It’s a consequence of the oral-literate hybrid that flourishes online. It’s conversation smoosh.
I've long felt that something is different with the way people are online, in particular how they are when they use Twitter. But this article goes a lot further in looking at language and how we use it and think about it. Fascinating.
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I think of this as the Jetsons fallacy, where you imagine you can transform the world with technology without changing anything about people's behavior. Of course the world reacts and changes shape in ways no one person can anticipate.
Maciej does it again. I would love to see him speak in person.
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Ironically, by being in touch with and acting from your true intentions, you become more effective in reaching your goals than when you act from wants and insecurities. Once the yogi understood this, she started to work with goals and intentions as separate functions. She later reported that continually coming back to her intentions in the course of her day was actually helping her with her goals.
This piece was linked in the Pastry Box piece I just linked to the other day. It is wonderful, really wonderful. I'm trying more and more to live my life with intentions rather than setting extreme goals and beating myself up if I don't meet them by a certain time period.
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Instead of worrying about working weekends and holidays the way I had in the United States, I planned trips like the rest of my colleagues: Paris. Prague. Zermatt. For the first time in my working life, I was living, too. Because of this, my creativity flourished. I had both time and money, and because I had real time off, I was more productive when I was at work. In my spare time I wrote blogs and essays and I swam in the lake.
This piece resonates with me so much. Not only the thoughts on working your day and then leaving work behind in the evenings and weekends so you can recharge and refresh, but also the ideas about part time work. I find it so intriguing that in Europe part time works and many companies do it. I brought up the idea of part time work when on a work retreat a few weeks ago and I was surprised at how impossible it seemed to make happen. But, in thinking about it, I already work with colleagues half a world away and so it is almost like part time, since we aren't working the entire day overlapping. I think it can work, and I wish I could find a company that would be willing to try it with me.
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This is a parody of the AMP Project and it's quite funny. We now have a framework, that is reworking HTML and using it's own language to make things fast. Why in the world we need this is beyond me and beyond Maciej and I love it. It is possible to make a fast web page out of the tools we now have, but most developers either don't do it or aren't allowed to do it due to demands of their bosses.
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What if, instead of setting a goal, I set an intention: “I will run without hyper-extending my knees”? It doesn’t look very different from a goal. Here’s the crux, though: the moment I realize I have abandoned my intention, I can pick it back up again and continue moving forward. I realized at some point that I wasn’t bending my knees enough on a downhill stretch. I changed my behavior, and I kept going.
I love this idea and have been doing the same thing for quite some time. My to-do list is mostly made up of intentions and I don't get super upset if I don't get everything done.
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Aside from revamping digital book covers and the library browsing interface, Kindles could remind us of past purchases – books either bought but left unread, or books we read passionately and should reread. And, in doing so, trump the unnetworked isolation of physical books. Thanks to our in-app reading statistics, Kindle knows when we can’t put a book down, when we plunge ourselves into an author’s world far too late into the night, on a weeknight, when the next day is most definitely not a holiday. Kindle knows when we are hypnotised, possessed, gluttonous; knows when we consume an entire feast of words in a single sitting. Knows that others haven’t been so ravenous with a particular story, but we were, and so Kindle can intuit our special relationship with the text. It certainly knows enough to meaningfully resurface books of that ilk. It could be as simple as an email. Kindle could help foster that act of returning, of rereading. It could bring a book back from the periphery of our working library into the core, ‘into the bloodstream’, as Susan Sontag put it. And yet it doesn’t.
I read digitally, mostly library books that I can borrow and try out. But I'm also reading a lot of books on paper again. I prefer comics in paper, to be able to slowly page through and look at the art work and in an effort to support a local bookstore, if I want to buy a book, I do that in paper now. But I agree with Craig, many things could be made better about the Kindle experience. And for books I truly love, paper is still my preference.
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This is where what I call a deviant comes in. Every team needs a deviant, someone who can help the team by challenging the tendency to want too much homogeneity, which can stifle creativity and learning. Deviants are the ones who stand back and say, “Well, wait a minute, why are we even doing this at all? What if we looked at the thing backwards or turned it inside out?” That’s when people say, “Oh, no, no, no, that’s ridiculous,” and so the discussion about what’s ridiculous comes up. Unlike the CFO I mentioned before, who derailed the team by shutting down discussions, the deviant opens up more ideas, and that gets you a lot more originality. In our research, we’ve looked carefully at both teams that produced something original and those that were merely average, where nothing really sparkled. It turned out that the teams with deviants outperformed teams without them. In many cases, deviant thinking is a source of great innovation.
I was reminded of this article while I was on a team retreat with workmates for a week. And I think the best part of this article is this concept of the deviant. There needs to be a person pushing against things to make the team more successful and when I look at the most successful teams I've worked with, I can pick that person out right away. It isn't a bad thing, but it can make for frustrating moments.
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The reason for focusing on the core has nothing to do with the validity of any of those other frameworks, libraries or tools. On the contrary, focusing on the core helps you to recognize the strengths and limitations of these tools and abstractions. A developer with a solid understanding of vanilla JavaScript can shift fairly easily from React to Angular to Ember. More importantly, they are well equipped to understand if the shift should be made at all.
I love the way Tim built on the idea I had about being overwhelmed with code and made it even better. He's spot on, focusing on the core is always a good use of your time.
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For Maria Bråth, boss of internet startup Brath, the six-hour working day the company introduced when it was formed three years ago gives it a competitive advantage because it attracts better staff and keeps them. “They are the most valuable thing we have,” she says – an offer of more pay elsewhere would not make up for the shorter hours they have at Brath.
The public sector jobs this article talks about are being pushed and pulled by the will of different political parties, but what I found most interesting in this article are the private sector companies who have done it for years and are doing well. The recognition that knowledge work is tiring and you need to have time away is incredibly nice to see. I would love a six hour works day.
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I shouldn’t have to say this, but here we are: work that is excessive, consuming north of 40 hours a week and without regular holidays, leads to burnout and reduced productivity, not to mention a toll on workers’ mental and physical health. We should build workplaces that encourage healthy work habits because we are not monsters, but also because we benefit from sane work cultures because they achieve better results.
Having worked for Mandy, I know that all of what she says here is what she strives for in her teams. But this piece is so much more, the bits on transparency, the bits on competition versus collaboration, it is all so, so good.