Things I Like
-
My gut feeling was that there was clearly a reduced amount of work in the team for the UI engineers (I am one of them), and that this was caused by the fact that we were not continuously writing new CSS at every new feature, but we were able to re-use and simply combine (“like Lego”) the existing UI components provided by Cosmos. And that this was also caused by the fact that also the mockups provided by the designers were more consistent, and followed a set of pre-defined patterns, so building UIs for us had become increasingly simple and straightforward.
Really interesting look at a way to measure the reduced work load that comes when you have a well functioning design system in place. This wasn't the easiest thing to chart, but the results are stunning and amazing.
-
And yet even today I rarely volunteer how utterly happy I am with the decision I made more than 20 years ago. Because I never had a child, I don’t really know how to miss the experience of having one. But I do recognize all the things that have come my way as the result of not having kids–and, by extension, being a woman on my own after my marriage broke up: not having children certainly made it less difficult to end the marriage when it became clear that my husband and I had to do so. In some ways, the baby I never had is a part of me. She has given me freedom.
I'm a childless adult and if you'd talked to me when I was 25 I probably would've said that I'd have kids some day. But that isn't what's happened and it's been a very conscious choice. And I'm grateful to know people who are making that choice, I don't feel alone at all. But I found this piece interesting, someone celebrating what that has brought to her life now that she's older. I fully realize that aging will be different for me than it is for people with kids, but I've let go of fear of that difference and am enjoying what it brings to my life as I age.
-
Americans, with our powerful founding story, our unusual reverence for our Constitution, our relative geographic isolation, and our two centuries of economic success, have long been convinced that liberal democracy, once achieved, cannot be altered. American history is told as a tale of progress, always forward and upward, with the Civil War as a kind of blip in the middle, an obstacle that was overcome. In Greece, history feels not linear but circular. There is liberal democracy and then there is oligarchy. Then there is liberal democracy again. Then there is foreign subversion, then there is an attempted Communist coup, then there is civil war, and then there is dictatorship. And so on, since the time of the Athenian republic.
I've found Anne Appelbaum's writing in this time of craziness in the world to be really helpful in how to think about it all. In this article she talks about the ebb and flow of how governments have functioned in Europe and how different the history has been in the past 200 or so years than what American has experienced. Well worth the read.
-
Dystopia is one of those parts of speculative fiction that function as early-warning systems for bad sociocultural weather, a function I’ve talked about at length elsewhere. Dystopia is also about the fight for a better world. Every well-written dystopia is, unlike most other forms of drama, already always about hope.”
Ellis succinctly sums up why I read so much dystopian fiction, it's about hope.
-
It is often regretted that children can no longer play or move freely outside because of the dangers of traffic; inevitably, many of the people who voice these regrets are also the drivers of cars, as those same restricted children will come to be in their time. What is being mourned, it seems, is not so much the decline of an old world of freedom as the existence of comforts and conveniences the individual feels powerless to resist, and which in any case he or she could not truthfully say they wished would be abolished. There is a feeling, nonetheless, of loss, and it may be that the increasing luxury of the world inside the car is a kind of consolation for the degradation of the world outside it.
I hate driving, to be honest, but I really enjoyed this piece.
-
When we talk about millennial student debt, we’re not just talking about the payments that keep millennials from participating in American “institutions” like home ownership or purchasing diamonds. It’s also about the psychological toll of realizing that something you’d been told, and came to believe yourself, would be “worth it” — worth the loans, worth the labor, worth all that self-optimization — isn’t.
I have so many thoughts on this piece, more than I can put into a comment here, so I should probably write a blog post and maybe I will. But this piece hits the nail on the head in one way that really struck home with me: all the things we're told to do to be successful won't be what makes us successful in the end. Full disclosure: I'm a Gen Xer, not a millennial, but as she talks about the optimization of childhood and more and more debt for education I was right there with her when she said it wasn't worth it. I've seen it in my own life and I've seen it so many people who I know.
-
Part of the impulse to launch Ridgeline is that I want to step away from Instagram. Many reasons why. The biggest is the “fool me once ... shame on me. Fool me, like, you know, fifteen times …” feeling I have with much of social media. Facebook has collapsed as a viable marketing / distribution platform for me. Twitter is fine, but the audience trends heavily to certain demographics. And as lovely as Instagram has been, with the loss of its cofounders in 2018, I feel like we are entering the Death By Monetization/Optimization™ spiral that Facebook is so very good at.
I know, Mod again, but his newsletters are really great, I recommend them if you aren't already subscribed to Roden. But he's also talking in this one about social media and I can completely relate. I'm trying to figure out what to do in 2019 about social media and talking about things I care about and I keep coming back to this site. I'm hoping to post more photos here, along with all the usual links, book reviews, and occasional longer form articles and shorter notes.
-
It’s also worth noting that Thompson’s position is protected: No outsider can take away his subscribers or prevent him from communicating with them. Email is a boring, simple, old technology. The first email was sent in 1971 by Ray Tomlinson. Unlike followers or social media subscribers, email has yet to be usurped by algorithms (for the most part; Gmail does a little bit of sorting now). It’s a predictable marketing channel.
Craig Mod writes a good history of books, electronic books and magazines, and where we are now. His part about email as a book and publishing format is really interesting because the uptick in email newsletters is growing and I myself subscribe to quite a few. I enjoy the slowness of it—I choose when to read it—and how it shows up in my inbox just for me. There is no algorithm telling me what I should see, I'm making the choice to get this. It's an alternative to RSS that works well. For a bit of push back on Mod's essay, I recommend the piece Tim Carmody wrote on Kottke.org.
-
Accessibility isn’t just a “nice to have”; it can affect everyone’s livelihood, including people with a range of disabilities (vision loss, inability to use a mouse or a trackpad, cognitive impairments, and more). Knowingly or unknowingly putting barriers in place that disproportionately affect access for people with disabilities–or any other protected characteristic–is discrimination, and it’s definitely something to worry about.
This piece by Marcy is amazing and I'm so glad she wrote it. We do this work because everyone has the right to access the information we're putting out on the web.
-
I’m not sure what it is about the job of ‘design systems’ but it seems like it’s an excuse to be an asshole and to pretend as if you’ve never made a mistake before. Mina’s vulnerable talk makes me hopeful that this current trend can be broken.
I haven't watched the talk that Robin links to (it's on my list though), but I love the way he points out how people write about design systems as being easy. I think a lot of this comes from many of the stronger voices being folks who are consultants, they aren't living with the system for the long term and hence may not be around to see the mistakes. But I also think many writing about them act as if their way of doing things is the only way, which usually isn't the case.
-
Fixing climate change will include lots of technocratic tweaks, lots of bills about dirt. They will be hard to defend against later repeal. So it would be nice if lawmakers could wed them to a new benefit, a superpower that people will fight for years after passage. Hence the job guarantee—a universal promise of employment meant to win over Americans in general and create more union jobs in particular.
I love the way in which Meyer discusses this and the reality of how to get people on board with doing something about the climate. It's not easy and it may mean change and sacrifice, but with jobs and help, I think we can do something to curb the effects.
-
I reckon HTML and CSS deserve better than to be processed, compiled, and spat out into the browser, whether that’s through some build process, app export, or gigantic framework library of stuff that we half understand. HTML and CSS are two languages that deserve our care and attention to detail. Writing them is a skill.
Thank you Robin. As someone who's spent a career caring about HTML and CSS, I couldn't agree more with this piece. It's amazing to me how many developers push this off as easy or not important, but doing it well makes a huge difference for accessibility, performance, and easier development as you iterate on things. It's worth taking the time and caring about both of them.
-
Medicine is a complex adaptive system: it is made up of many interconnected, multilayered parts, and it is meant to evolve with time and changing conditions. Software is not. It is complex, but it does not adapt. That is the heart of the problem for its users, us humans.
There is so much in this article, if you make software I highly recommend you read it. But I was struck by two things. First, how many people the software he talks about was trying to serve and how their interests were so varied, how could you make one piece of software to serve them all? Second, how an innovative group in an office for neurosurgery did the work themselves, they talked to each other and made changes to make the software fit their work flow, and that's amazing. I wonder if the software maker does user testing and if they watched that group of folks making changes for themselves and learned anything.
-
After these foundations were implemented, it was much easier for us to consistently implement polished design details in our interfaces. The foundations are part of our shared vocabulary, and continue to be a language that designers and engineers can both speak to.
So much good stuff in here and I love that the Vox team is sharing the work they've been doing. This reminded me a lot of the way that Alla Kholmatova talks about creating systems that work for the team and the product with hard work rather than trying to replicate what another company has done. This isn't easy, but when you do the hard work the system will be so much more useful and therefore maintainable to the entire team.
-
It’s an indescribable feeling, the rush and jolt of publishing I mean. (This is about to get sappy so bear with me). It’s a feeling of boundless enthusiasm for how words can be packaged and transported, and it’s this feeling that we can share ideas in this vast human society that we’re building together, a place where borders are just structures we’ve placed in between ourselves, and that words have momentum; a link to a website can lead to a book in your hand, to a friend at a party, to a conference in another town, to a long lasting love in a distant land.
I'm with Robin here, I still love pushing out code and writing on the web, no matter where it is. I've been quiet lately, but that is going to change soon as I'm writing again and loving it.