Things I Like
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Maybe this slow and steady thing isn’t for you. Maybe you’re going to be the next Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk and fit the profile. This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t raise money, or that venture capital is inherently bad, just that there’s a big grey area between a lifestyle business and a venture backed moonshot. Raising venture money is a high risk commitment to go big or go home, and it isn’t for everyone. It certainly isn’t right for me, but neither is the surfer lifestyle business. I’m somewhere in the middle, with the Snyders of the world. I’m not a unicorn, I’m a horse.
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I envision a design practice that works in the intersection between art, design and computation. A company founded on the belief that the pragmatic and poetic is inseparable, and that modern design products should be dynamic, adaptable systems built in code. This kind of practice would create beautiful, intelligent, and functional design products for any medium, be it physical installations, web applications, or print products. Most of all, it would be a company dedicated to good ideas, with the talent to implement them despite technical requirements.
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As I’ve progressed in my career, my mindfulness practice has progressed as well. No coincidence, then, that I find myself more radical and questioning of our capitalist system at an age (and in a tax bracket) that’s most commonly associated with creeping conservatism. I credit my practice not just for helping me to survive the stresses of work, but for putting that work in context. Sometimes, that new context has led me to serious reevaluations of my priorities.
The last three paragraphs of this post are stunners. I stopped and reread them twice. The above is the second to last, but the last paragraph is a punch in the gut. Take the time to feel it and to think about what he's saying because I think he's onto something.
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And among the many things I am taking from David’s death is to be better with young writers, and young people in general.
After reading several pieces on David Carr, I'm trying to figure out how I can give back to those younger than me, be they working in the web or not.
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A great three part series by Jason Garber on the need for progressive enhancement. It's well written, funny, and relaxed—bonus for lots of links to a lot of really good stuff.
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So yes, I would love a world where preprocessors are unnecessary, but I would much rather spend a few seconds (or even a few minutes) transcompiling my SASS into CSS in order to save my users even a few milliseconds. It’s the same reason I optimize my images, minify my JavaScript, use Gzip, and lazy load design and experience enhancements only in contexts where they provide a real benefit.
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You know why that is? It’s the way the Internet was architected. HTML is the architecture of the web and it is about the presentation of text. It’s Hyper Text Markup Langauge. And if you’re Google and you’re trying to index that world of information, you’re really great at text because that’s what the code on the Internet does. It marks up text. But if you want to get at objects or the things on web pages, we think you need humans to go in and do that for you. So we think of Pinterest some days as this crazy human indexing machine. Where millions and millions of people are hand indexing billions of objects—30 billion objects—in a way that’s personally meaningful to them.
There are a lot of great nuggets in this piece. You just have to keep reading to find them.
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The next time someone tells you to “do what you love no matter what,” ask to see their tax return.
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I have been increasingly conscious, for the last 10 years or so, of deaths among my contemporaries. My generation is on the way out, and each death I have felt as an abruption, a tearing away of part of myself. There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever. When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate — the genetic and neural fate — of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death.
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As I’m writing this article at my kitchen table in Chicago, just 7 miles from our office, it’s clear that our team members’ freedom to move to wherever they’re happiest and most productive is one of the most valuable aspects of working at our companies. Sometimes that means moving across the country. Sometimes it’s moving across the street to a café. It comes with a whole different set of responsibilities and dynamics to be sure, but it’s been integral to our ability, as a business and individuals, to thrive and move forward at work and beyond.
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Silicon Valley’s move to make corporations more like cults, then, could be seen as a way of resisting the movement toward gender, racial, and sexual equality that may, at core, threaten executive power by asking that all employees, not just ones who look like their CEO, be treated equitably. Because another thing that cults offer is mystification: in a cult, you don’t ask, you just believe, and in a corporation, it profits the leadership for its members not to inquire or demand to be treated equally, but rather to accept their different placement in the corporate hierarchy. Cults then are an innovative, if deeply traditional, solution for what to do when the business climate threatens to become too equitable. If it isn’t legal to discriminate within an organization, perhaps one may attempt to do so by more mysterious, cloaked, socially enforced means. The Silicon Valley startup’s coveted “unknown”, like in the traditional cult, becomes a kind of yearning for the return of a mystified, hierarchical power that remains unquestioned.
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The problem is not that there is a cost involved in building something that works well in different contexts than our own. The problem is that we’re treating that as an option instead of a given part of what it means to build for the web.
I've been reading about accessibility lately; trying to learn more, trying to bake it into the parts of a project I touch. Mostly, I'm trying to be aware that we all make a lot of assumptions every day as we work. We forget all the time that not everyone is like us and so as we build our things, it's good to try and remember that.
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Perhaps it’s not our job to decide what’s important right now. Instead, we’re the ones who save everything for those after us to sift through. Those future people, with their knowledge and context we can’t foresee, are the ones who trace the paths back to us.
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My words might not be as important as the great works of print that have survived thus far, but because they are digital, and because they are online, they can and should be preserved …along with all the millions of other words by millions of other historical nobodies like me out there on the web.
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This is why I would work hard to avoid any “Us vs Them” rhetoric. Much the opposite, I would argue all developers should aim to achieve a combination of engineering and craftsmanship.