Things I Like
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I don’t presume to say what capital-T Truth is. But I do know my truth, and it’s this: Everyone I know, including me, has lived through devastating times at least twice, through seemingly unsurvivable loss. And yet we have come through because of the love of our closest people, the weird healing properties of time, random benevolence, and, of course, our dogs.
Hope is hard to find these days, never more so than this week in the US, but I'm trying my hardest and I'm reading this piece over and over again to remind myself that it still exists. I see people fighting and they give me hope.
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In other words, this question forces me to step outside my default assumptions and biases about how I think the web works. It’s a way for me stop, pause, and reflect on what other folks’ needs might be, and to think about how best to design for those needs. So, yeah: this little question’s proven to be a really useful design tool. I can’t do my job without it.
Me too, this is a question I try and ask myself over and over again as I build things for the web. No one is perfect, but trying to jolt myself out of my assumptions and habits hopefully makes me better at my job.
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Years from now, we will look back in horror at the counterproductive ways we addressed the obesity epidemic and the barbaric ways we treated fat people—long after we knew there was a better path.
This article is difficult to read, it's heartbreaking at times, and it honestly makes me ashamed to live in this society. Our health care system is broken in so many ways and how we treat obesity is a glaring example of this.
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Third, do not underestimate the destructive power of lies. When the war broke out in 1939, my family fled east and settled for a couple of years in Soviet-occupied Lwów (now Lviv in western Ukraine). The city was full of refugees, and rumours were swirling about mass deportations to gulags in Siberia and Kazakhstan. To calm the situation, a Soviet official gave a speech declaring that the rumours were false – nowadays they would be called “fake news” – and that anyone spreading them would be arrested. Two days later, the deportations to the gulags began, with thousands sent to their deaths.
A quick read that's so timely right now and worth the reminder. The past will only be useful if we remember it and learn from it.
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It’s not speech per se that allows democracies to function, but the ability to agree—eventually, at least some of the time—on what is true, what is important and what serves the public good. This doesn’t mean everyone must agree on every fact, or that our priorities are necessarily uniform. But democracy can’t operate completely unmoored from a common ground, and certainly not in a sea of distractions.
I've thought about this a lot since I first read it. As a reader who loves to write, are we being inundated with too many things? How, amongst all this noise, do we find a common place to agree?
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Libraries are the kinds of places where people with different backgrounds, passions and interests can take part in a living democratic culture. They are the kinds of places where the public, private and philanthropic sectors can work together to reach for something higher than the bottom line.
I love the library and I've written about it on this site. Library's have so much to offer and if you enter one you're seeing the local community there, with all the good and bad that are part of it. I'm a huge library user and lately have been there once a week as we make our way through a TV series on DVD, and I love that I live in a town with a vibrant branch.
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The “developer experience” bait-and-switch works by appealing to the listener’s parochial interests as developers or managers, claiming supremacy in one category in order to remove others from the conversation. The swap is executed by implying that by making things better for developers, users will eventually benefit equivalently. The unstated agreement is that developers share all of the same goals with the same intensity as end users and even managers. This is not true.
This article is great and I nodded my entire way through it. Just as we forget about performance because we're on high speed all the time, we often use tools that may be doing us a disservice because they make our lives easier but may be detrimental to end users. We like to talk about users a lot, but I'm not so sure we put them at the forefront as much as we should.
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And to those who find the topic complex or are adamant that this is a “quirk” that doesn’t need to be learned, don’t be so quick to dismiss it. The next time you come across a developer works with CSS as a primary part of their day-to-day work, recognize that they’ve tackled a topic you find difficult. Sit down and pick their brain. They’ll probably be more than happy to help you learn more about a critical front-end skill, and that’s never time wasted.
I was away in the woods for the weekend, but apparently I missed some drama on the interwebs. That's OK because I've gotten to benefit from Tim's really excellent post on how we can get past it. My only other comment is: stop shitting on people who focus on other things than you do, they aren't less than, and it takes all the various pieces to make things for the web.
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It’s important for me to remember the people using those technologies are infinitely more diverse, more complicated than the software they use to access my work. Each time I watch an accessibility consultant conduct a site audit, I’m amazed by how a well-built site can completely break a human’s expectation for how the page should be laid out. That’s why I’ve found it’s been really, really helpful to me to break the word “accessibility” down into two related sub-components: that is, there’s a distinction between making a site navigable by assistive technology, and making it usable to the people visiting it with that technology.
Ethan's dead on here and it's one of the things I've been thinking about as well, if we bolt on accessibility features to the frameworks, is that enough? I believe we should be looking at that and it's a start, but that isn't the end of the work we need to do.
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I have a very simple rule that serves me well: Don’t think too much about your life after dinnertime. Thinking too much at the end of the day is a recipe for despair. Everything looks better in the light of the morning. Cliché, maybe, but it works.
I'm with Kleon on this one. I also try to put away devices and stay off the internet after dinner, to let my mind wander with books, watching a show, or crocheting while listening to a podcast. I'm having a rough time keeping steady work coming in, so the evening hours are hard and I'm doing all I can to distract myself from thinking about that.
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The frameworks we build, the visual languages we formalize—they’re artifacts that ultimately live in a broader organizational context. (And in a context that’s even broader than that.) A successful design project understands that context before settling on a solution.
Ethan's been hitting it out of the park lately with his writing and I can't wait to pick up the book he references and dig in. As I think more and more about systems and architecture when it comes to CSS, I'm more and more convinced that thinking holistically first will help the pieces fall into place later.
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First of all, you need to understand who your audience is, as people. If they're genuinely wealthy people in a first world city, then you do you. But for people in rural areas, or countries with less of a solid internet infrastructure, failing to take these restrictions into account will limit your potential to grow. If you're not building something that is accessible to your audience, you're not building a solution for them at all. That means faster loading times, smaller file sizes, and HTML that at least falls back to displaying clearly on older devices and browsers, including low-cost Android phones.
Fantastic reminder to think about who you're building for, what their internet access is like, and how we can build to ensure they can still get content.
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Maybe you’ve been working in disorganized systems for years and already dreamed up everything you would do differently while silently judging the use of id selectors and one off page styling files. Maybe it is your first project using Sass and compiling CSS. Either way, take a step back and ask yourself why you are choosing a tool, naming convention or structure before diving into the work. There are a lot of opinions about CSS best practices out there and it can get overwhelming. Breaking it into smaller pieces will make the research process easier.
Really great article outlining how to think about creating a system without telling you there is only one way to do it. By far my biggest irritation with most articles on systems is that they act as if their way is the only way.
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By contrast, I’ve long supported a focus on culture over corporations. Instead of quixotically convincing some of the most valuable business enterprises in the history of the world to behave against their interests, we should convince individuals to adopt a much more skeptical and minimalist approach to the digital junk these companies peddle.
I've followed Newport's blog for quite a while and found this a compelling way to think about digital ethics. While I would love it if the large tech companies did the right thing, capitalism doesn't push them to do that. While I agree individuals have control and can and should reject much of this, it isn't always easy.
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By far the most common keyboard accessibility issue I’ve faced today is a lack of focus styling for tabbable elements. Suppressing native focus styles without defining any custom focus styles makes it extremely difficult, even impossible, to figure out where you are on the page.
Really great summary of an experience of using only your keyboard to surf the web. It's important to think about as you build and maybe even try this yourself to understand the frustrations and difficulties many people encounter every day.