Things I Like
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The benefit of using tokens that way, beyond developers having an easier time using it, is that if brand changes again or there’s requirement to theme the system, you can simply replace the
brand.jsonwith a different file and all the components will be regenerated.I'm watching a system being created at work and the hard part is the tokens and how to get them to work with all the various moving pieces. This is an interesting read on that very thing.
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With design systems work there is always more to be done and barely any time to sit back and see all the improvements that your team has made. So the other nice thing about the newsletter is that once the announcements are out there in public it all starts to feel a bit more complete. It’s wonderful to see folks noticing the work that ships and that is piece by piece making their lives easier and more efficient in the long run.
I really love this idea, not just for being able to communicate out to a broader team about what your design system team is doing, but for the record it gives you of the accomplishments. I find that taking time to write about or even talk about all the things you've done is helpful to gain perspective and see all that you've accomplished on a project.
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All of this attention eating is relatively new. It is, as I said above, largely reliant on the smartphones in our pockets. The rise of attention monsters and this scale of attention consumption and lopsided contracts is one of many unintended consequences of the last ten years of internet growth and pocket supercomputers.
I always enjoy Mod's writing about reading and books and this piece is no different. And every time I read his work I think about how I'm spending my time. I'm reading more and more these days and one of the main reasons is that I'm putting away devices more and more.
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I think the difference between a junior and senior front-end developer isn't in their understanding or familiarity with a particular tech stack, toolchain, or whether they can write flawless code. Instead, it all comes down to this: how they push back against bad ideas.
I've been thinking a lot lately about what makes a senior developer senior and I think Robin hit the nail on the head here. Well done Robin!
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When so many people have long or unreliable work hours, or worse, long and unreliable work hours, the effects ripple far and wide. Families pay the steepest price. Erratic hours can push parents—usually mothers—out of the labor force. A body of research suggests that children whose parents work odd or long hours are more likely to evince behavioral or cognitive problems, or be obese. Even parents who can afford nannies or extended day care are hard-pressed to provide thoughtful attention to their kids when work keeps them at their desks well past the dinner hour.
I've been reading a lot lately about how our systems make our lives hard, how work is creeping in, how the demand to always profit more and more means that workers get the short end of the stick. This article points to some of those things, some of the ways in which higher profits are held above treating workers decently.
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It isn’t that he is revered but not followed so much as he is revered because he is not followed—because remembering him as a nice man is easier than thinking of him as a demanding one. He spoke most clearly through his example, but our culture consoles itself with the simple fact that he once existed. There is no use asking further questions of him, only of ourselves. We know what Mister Rogers would do, but even now we don’t know what to do with the lessons of Mister Rogers.
There's a lot in this piece and I'm still chewing over many of the things I read, especially the parts about civility, there are so many ways to use it to silence people, but I think Junod is using it in a different way. Either way, an interesting take on Mr. Rogers legacy and the new film that's coming out.
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So churches that devote time and energy to “economic opportunity” or tutoring or mentoring children as the way to alleviate poverty are going to get undermined by capitalism. I know a lot of good, well-intentioned people that have devoted themselves to helping children in poverty through tutoring, mentoring, and teaching. Here’s the really sick thing about capitalism: it makes a mockery of our best intentions. in the long run, capital wins. What’s worse is it makes you feel bad for not doing enough, not tutoring enough, not giving enough, not working enough.
A super fascinating piece talking about what churches can do to really help people who need it. If you've spent any time at all in a church setting so much of how Thornton describes what the church does will ring true but the twist is how much he is turning that on its head. A lot to think about here that isn't just about the church, it's about how we as a society can truly help people. Hat tip to Anne Helen Peterson for the link.
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After all, our current iteration of capitalism can’t fix the problems that our current iteration of capitalism has wrought. If we’ve learned anything from all the millennial-oriented books on how to unfuck your life, the meditation apps, the organizational apps, and the profusion of $3,000 exercise bikes, it’s that a thing can’t fix what ails both millennials and society as a whole. Maybe Pattern’s pivot to anti-burnout philosophy is just its way of being, once again, perfectly (and profitably) attuned to millennials’ desires.
I've been following Anne Helen Peterson's work on burnout fairly closely and this article is really interesting. Can a company, with the best of intentions, help folks who are caught in the merry go round? I'm not sure that it can, but it's an interesting look and thought provoking article.
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To believe, in other words, that our current approach to knowledge work — which is brand-new on any reasonable scale of business history — is the best way to create valuable information using the human mind is both arrogant and ahistoric. It’s the equivalent of striding into an early-20th-century automobile factory, where each car still required a half day’s worth of labor to produce, and boldly proclaiming, “I think we’ve figured this one out!”
What I love about this piece is that it's finally saying something I think about a lot. Knowledge work is not the same as other types of work and yet we still treat it very much the same. We think in terms of time spent rather than work produced or completed. And I've found, to be honest, that time is the absolute worst way for me to measure my work.
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Here’s the way of it: over the last few years, our industry has engaged in various ethical and moral lapses in the pursuit of scale. And with that scale, comes a precariousness amongst its workers—amongst warehouse workers and contractors, but also for you and me.
It was hard to pull out just one quote from this amazing talk that Ethan gave and now has written up. It's well worth your time to read the entire thing and to sit with it for a while. He goes on to talk about hope and the talk ends up in a place where I truly do feel hope, but there is a lot of work to be done friends. Are you ready?
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With custom properties, we don’t need to compile a different stylesheet; we only need to update the value of properties according to the user’s preferences. Since they are inherited values, if we do this on the root element they can be used anywhere in our application.
I don't often link to articles that are directly related to what I do all day, writing CSS and HTML, but this article blew my mind this week. And I realize it's older, I'm late to this game, as usual. At work there is a new project going on and a team of folks are working through how to do some very tough things, and this came up. I can't wait to see where they end up (I'm watching from the side as I'm on a different team) and it's nice to be excited about a work thing, it's been quite a while for me.
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A like can’t go anywhere, but a compliment can go a long way. Passive positivity isn’t enough; active positivity is needed to counterbalance whatever sort of collective conversations and attention we point at social media. Otherwise, we are left with the skewed, inaccurate, and dangerous nature of what’s been built: an environment where most positivity is small, vague, and immobile, and negativity is large, precise, and spreadable.
A good reminder about how social media distorts and skews our behavior, often into meaningless actions.
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Rather than a prediction, I’d like to offer a plausible wish: that more people opt to leave their phones behind and use smaller, more integrated devices that exist inside the everyday rather than eclipsing it. Small screens, like the watch’s, are incompatible (or at least hostile) homes for social media in its current form.
This is the first piece I've read that made an argument for the watch that resonated with me.
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The key in marriage is to try to change together. Couples don’t have to change at the same time, it’s more a question of getting there if you want to have that connection and commitment. There are different paces, and you have to realize that, and accommodate each other.
I read a lot about Cokie Roberts when she died, but I particularly enjoyed this piece, especially as we approach our fifteen year wedding anniversary.
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By now, God-and-Country Believers are so accustomed to voting Republican—and to being disdained or mocked by Democrats—that few of them can remember doing anything else. And God-and-Country Believers are what most Americans, whether religious or not, now think that evangelicals are.
I really enjoy Alan Jacobs writing, I get his newsletter, and having been inside the evangelical world for much of my late teens and twenties, I resonate so much with how he talks about how its become meaningless and, unfortunately, a political word more than anything else.