Things I Like
-
When we water down work to pithy sayings like “do what you love” or “work is love made visible” we do the complexity of the topic an enormous disservice, and we ignore the huge role that—yes, I’m going to go there—privilege plays in all of it. You see, “do what you love” is only possible if you’re in a financial and social position to follow your passion wherever it goes. “Work is love made visible” is easier said than done when you have three jobs that you don’t like, and have to struggle to make it through the day.
Sometimes, to be honest, many of us work because we have to. And I love that Rian points out the privilege here. I lead an extremely privileged life because I was born to white, middle class parents in the last half of the twentieth century in the upper midwest of the US. I don't feel bad about it, but I acknowledge and accept that not everyone has had the same starting point, therefore I may need to work harder to relate and understand their point of view on life.
-
In order for people to think that you can take a three week vacation, or work remotely for a month, you need to lead by doing. Without an example, only the bravest team members seem to believe the words that have been said to them, and take these policies to heart.
A great post on the need to get away, completely away. But the above quote is what's really important to me. If the people running things don't lead by example, many employees find the words and policies surrounding flexibility and time off to be empty promises.
-
So just why are we afraid of Medium? Aside from not soliciting or editing most of its content, and not paying most of its authors, how does it differ from all previous web publications, from Slate to The Verge? Why does publishing content on Medium (in addition to your personal site and other publications) herald, not just the final-final-final death of blogging (“Death of Blogging III: This Time It’s Personal”), but, even more alarmingly, the death of the open web?
I publish a lot of other places, currently A List Apart and The Pastry Box, but I have all that writing somewhere else. If those publications disappeared and my work were no longer available, I still have it and could republish it on this very site. I think there is a time and a place to write and publish on other sites, but I don't trust using Medium for all my publishing as I fear for the future of all that content. You'll also notice that Jeffrey posted this same post on Medium, but I trust the link to his site will remain viable longer than the link to the Medium post.
-
When we get mired in a rigid process, or have written ourselves into a corner with an overly-detailed Statement of Work, we’re paying too much attention to the tools, and not enough to the goals. We’re gritting our teeth and making our knee bend just so while unthinkingly holding our breath.
As a yoga practitioner, I love how Eileen uses yoga for her examples so often <3.
-
I hope that openness will prevail. Hope sounds like such a wishy-washy word, like “faith” or “belief”, but it carries with it a seed of resistance. Hope, faith, and belief all carry connotations of optimism, but where faith and belief sound passive, even downright complacent, hope carries the promise of action.
This is another piece where you need to read the whole thing. But I agree with Jeremy, I hope the open web wins and I think hoping for that, having the mindset that it can win, may actually be half the battle.
-
And of course the most vocal challengers to most cultures are the first to be shown the door. It’s in human nature to want to eliminate the most disruptive people. And it’s also human nature to want to bring in more people that fit in well. Repeat these two behaviors over time and culture becomes homogeny, even if everyone still believes the culture values diversity. Is the culture still the same at that point? Everyone still there might believe so, but the people who left because of the culture don’t get asked their opinion.
I've found this to be true in my own career. Some of the time I was the vocal dissenter and I usually got uncomfortable and fed up, so I left. Culture is hard, but the people at the top have the power and in my best work situations, those people were open, honest, and willing to hear criticism.
-
But now that I've met the cool kids, I know they are just like me. They have their own human failings, their own self-doubts, their own mortgages to pay. The cool kids are just as scared as the rest of us underneath their prestige and cool swagger.
This piece resonates with me so much. Now that I'm writing more on other sites and doing a few conference talks I'm meeting some of my heroes. I've been so happy to meet them and realize that we are all very much the same and worrying about a lot of the same things.
-
As I already covered, aria-label is favored in accessible name calculation. Apart from aria-labelledby, it will override all additional naming methods. This means you can use it to provide better text for assistive technologies without altering text intended for visual users.
-
If you want to imagine a truly frightening scenario, imagine an entire world in which people entrust their thoughts, their work, and pictures of their family to online services in the mistaken belief that the internet never forgets. Imagine the devastation when all of those trivial, silly, precious moments are wiped out. For some reason we have a hard time imagining that dystopia even though it has already played out time and time again.
-
We once took on the tropes of print design and tried to apply them to the web. I fear that today we run the risk of treating web development no different to other kinds of software development, ignoring the strengths of the web that John highlighted for us. Flexibility, ubiquity, and uncertainty: don’t fight them as bugs; embrace them as features.
-
So that’s what I learned. That’s why the experiment was a failure. This is the era of the quantified self and radical transformation. And I’ve made charts and counted and poked around. I can tell you the top 20 words for each of my years, the number of times I wrote about weight loss, the first time I started thinking about being a father. My basic self is just this single, continuous, thread — quantifiable, in the form of actuarial tables, bank account statements, square footage owned, number of children. But counting things doesn’t change them.
-
Crucially, if a server can render links into a tags, like Ember currently does on the client, it would be possible for a user who did not receive JavaScript (for whatever reason) to navigate around the website. It might be possible to get forms working as well, by running all the validation and submission logic on the server instead of on the client. If this effort could be made at the outset by a framework maintainer, then every developer using that framework could immediately transform an app that only worked on the latest web browsers into a progressively enhanced experience compatible with virtually any web client—past, present, or future.
-
The culture of busyness and hyperproductivity is so ascendant, that it is hard to raise questions about whether speed itself should be the ultimate rationale for innovation. Is ‘the best’ technical design always about maximum efficiency in the sense of being economical with time? This instrumental philosophy is certainly at the heart of engineering, in which the latest, fastest and most automated systems appear as, objectively, the best.
-
Is it just me, or are new web UI technologies continuing to try to solve the wrong problems?
-
I spend a lot of time thinking about and talking to people about magic and technology, and honestly one of the biggest reasons I do this is because I see magic disappearing from the internet all the time—or worse, magic being invoked toward entirely the wrong reasons and mostly questionable business models. Twitter bots aren’t the magic of alienated labor or the magic of manipulation. They’re honest magic, they’re chaos magic, they’re real fucking magic. That kind of magic has a way of persisting online, regardless of the vacillations of markets and platforms. For now, we have it in our Twitter bots, and for now, I’m just so happy it’s thriving.