Things I Like
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.