Things I Like
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I don’t think it’s a coincidence they’re choosing this point in history to act so boldly, so aggressively. These companies are keenly aware of the current NLRB’s pro-business tilt, and are probably confident that it would rule in their favor.
A sobering round up of the year in tech and activism from Ethan, but worth reading to see all that has gone on. There is hope here, I believe in hope, hope is an active thing, not a wishful thing and I'm grateful for all the folks working so hard to help make our industry better.
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Start a damn blog. People might give you shit for what you say on it on twitter, but you can ignore them. Only pay attention to folks that take the time to write a blog. ‘In medium’ responses. Blogs already have nearly 2 decades of grammar and expectations of what a blog is and can be. In addition to commentary and essays, you can just write about a book you read or TV show you watched. They are far more personal in many ways than an instagram feed dedicated to your amazing lunch could ever be. I post photos of food I’ve eaten here all the time.
I love seeing how many people are blogging again and using RSS and talking about these things. I may not write as much as I'd like to on this site of mine, but I do keep track of a lot of other things that are important to me. Maybe 2020 will be when I write a bit more as well.
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You’re just not going to survive very long in America being an idealistic fluffy artist if you’re not also watching your back. I think one of the most valuable things I learned very early on was simply how to say “no.” That probably sounds a little obvious but it’s not in everyone’s nature, especially when you’re young and there’s some sort of vague opportunity in front of you. Your human instinct is to always want to be agreeable and to be liked, and to say “yes” to whatever’s being offered. When you’re young, you feel grateful and lucky that anyone is even paying attention to you at all. But what a powerful thing to be able to say “no.” It’s one of the first steps toward realizing your worth.
There are a lot of really lovely things in the interview and I absolutely adore his drawing style.
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I find the beauty of being able to make use of the global, themed, and component level design decisions by compiling them into various formats (that essentially become CSS) and that gives us more power in authoring components.
I don't often link to things related to my work, but I'm really intrigued by design tokens and how to do a system for a large scale platform that needs to serve multiple brands and have them all looking and feeling like their own thing. I wonder why that is?
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Putting the blame on the users, saying «they can complete the transaction on another device», is a lazy mindset. And one that will hurt your bottom line. They will not complete the task on another device. They will leave for good.
A super well done article about why you should support all browsers and how it's not nearly as hard as you think it is.
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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?