Things I Like
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And web developers? Stop buying into the ‘native is better’ myth. (It’s just different.) Progressive enhancement has never been an optional extra and it’s high time you make sure that your managers and your CEOs know that.
Last one on this topic, promise. But the writing and the compilation of quotes is just so good.
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The thing about this idea of consent is that it implies that simply being somewhere—entering a space, looking around, staying there for however long—is indicative of consenting to whatever happens in that space. If you didn’t consent, you would just leave, right? But that neglects the possibility that you might need to be in that space, that you might be obligated to be there, while also disagreeing with all or some of what is going on.
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The movement toward toolchains and ever more libraries to do ever less useful things has become hysterical, and with every day that passes I’m more happy with my 2006 decision to ignore tools and just carry on. Tools don’t solve problems any more, they have become the problem. There’s just too many of them and they all include an incredible amount of features that you don’t use on your site — but that users are still required to download and execute.
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Ever since then, I’ve found myself more and more rating both my feelings and the importance of any particular decision on that same one-to-ten scale. Is the decision non-critical and I don’t actually care that much one way or another? Then I’ll voice my preference, but follow up with “but I’m a two-out-of-ten on this, so whatever you want to do is fine.” Is the topic mission-critical, with far-reaching effects? My opinion will probably be a bit stronger and I’ll debate a bit harder or longer.
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What we have, uniquely in America, is a political class, and an entire political party, devoted to the idea that any money spent on public goods is money misplaced, not because the state goods might not be good but because they would distract us from the larger principle that no ultimate good can be found in the state. Ride a fast train to Washington today and you’ll start thinking about national health insurance tomorrow.
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We now have a vast and costly health-care industry devoted to finding and responding to turtles. Our ever more sensitive technologies turn up more and more abnormalities—cancers, clogged arteries, damaged-looking knees and backs—that aren’t actually causing problems and never will. And then we doctors try to fix them, even though the result is often more harm than good.
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All these grown-up monsters for my grown-up mind, they are there in the nights I wake up terrified and taunted by death. When I feel so small and broken, when despair and terror take me, I have a secret tool, a talisman against the night. I don’t use it too often so that it doesn’t lose its power. I learned it on airplanes, which are strange and thrilling and full of fear and boredom and discomfort.
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Yet, if I’m completely honest, the desktop is often how our work is still perceived. Perceived by our peers on launch day (vanity) and also internally how we as organizations perceive the big picture of a completed responsive design system.
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While this is frustrating, this is also why I’m optimistic. The awareness of performance as not merely a technical issue but a cultural one, has been spreading. If things are progressing a little slower than I would like, it’s also fair to point out out that cultural change is a much more difficult and time consuming process that technical change. The progress may be hard to see, but I believe it is there.
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Being kind is fundamentally about taking responsibility for your impact on the people around you. It requires you be mindful of their feelings and considerate of the way your presence affects them.
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Creating and communicating added value comes from many of the same skills that go into a movie: making sure that all of the elements of a product are harmonious, that they communicate the same values.
I love the model of the Hollywood team coming together to make the movie, it's a lot like a group of independent web folks coming together to make a web site.
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You are strapped into this new world. This future of screens in places you may not want them. And so you must embrace it. This thing on the wrist. It will not make you better. It will not change your life. Someday, perhaps. The potential is there. But not now. It is still a baby. And so for now, into it we mash our noses. We are optimistic doofuses. It is black like the ocean on a moonless night. It pings softly from the future and says: It is time to stand up. You are a lazy man. I feel your beating heart.
I know, another watch article, but this one is just such a great piece of writing. I love Craig's writing and this is no exception. I read it and I learn more about how to write.
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Who is writing these descriptions? I'm sure these companies find a perfect match now and again. But I have a feeling that's not the norm. It's more likely that many of these companies just don't know what they need so they look for everything. A recruiter or HR person whips something up and puts it out there to see who bites. Maybe they'll catch a unicorn!
I really love everything about the post, from the fact that she questioned the interviewer about the FizzBuzz question, to the fact that she's calling a real issue in our industry. Whoever writes the job postings has no idea what they really want and often times I wonder if the people interviewing do either.
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The Watch is the first device that’s encouraged me to spend as little time as possible with it, or with any of the other electronic sinkholes around my office, my home, and in my pockets. It’s the first product that lives in this world, offering a small, brief window into the digital one - instead of being a portal that envelopes us, pulling us into another place to be held hostage by our own need for novelty and trivial diversion.
This was the first thing I read about the watch that made me see why it could be useful or valuable to someone. And it was the best endorsement yet for it as well.
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The key point of Stan’s argument is that Marvel’s offering a more “sophisticated” choice, and to be fair, that’s fairly accurate — but only in the way that DC’s making comics for kids, and Marvel’s trying to corner the teen market. This, it’s worth noting, was the dawn of the teenager as an economic powerhouse, and that made a huge difference to the evolution of comics as much as it did to everything else. You can see that reflected across all of pop culture as everyone tries to capitalize on it, whether it’s Marvel comics and their soap operatic angst or, you know, the best song ever written. It all happens at once, and it was inevitable that it was going to happen in comics — Marvel just got there first, because DC had no real reason to change just yet.
I asked about the whole DC vs Marvel thing and was pointed to this and it's fascinating.