Things I Like
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Headings are much more than a big bold title, they provide a solid structure to the webpage. Think of headings as an outline of your webpage.
Some good reminders on why headings and structure are so important in your HTML.
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The world which lay under darkness and stillness following the closing of the lid was not the world we know. The event was over. Its devastation lay around about us. The clamoring mind and heart stilled, almost indifferent, certainly disembodied, frail, and exhausted. The hills were hushed, obliterated. Up in the sky, like a crater from some distant cataclysm, was a hollow ring.
We're in the midst of eclipse fever, living just north of totality. And I'll be up very early to see it on Monday, taking a train to Salem and hoping the weather forecast stays good and witnessing totality. Dillard's essay is amazing, but I'm excited to experience it for myself.
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But, as in-flight wi-fi speeds and entertainment options keep getting better and better, the temptation to be distracted on planes becomes greater and greater. Just like on the ground, it now takes an act of will to be bored enough on a plane to actually enter that good headspace where you can make something. For now, I stick to my rules: turn off the seat-back TV and never pay for wi-fi.
I'm with Kleon on this one, I love being disconnected when traveling via plane and using it as a time to catch up on reading or listening to podcasts. I'm intrigued by the idea of using it as a time for art and may do that on my next flight.
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Of course, computers and broadband by themselves don’t magically lead to college degrees and better jobs. After all, much of what people do with Internet access once they get it is hardly productive. But some of them may not be getting the training they need to make effective use of software and online services. And there are many correlations between broadband access and income levels or success in finding employment.
This is why all of us who work on the web should be advocating for internet to be a necessary utility, just as electricity is. And it's why performance and how we build sites is so important.
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Culture – like religion and nation and race – provides a source of identity for contemporary human beings. And, like all three, it can become a form of confinement, conceptual mistakes underwriting moral ones. Yet all of them can also give contours to our freedom. Social identities connect the small scale where we live our lives alongside our kith and kin with larger movements, causes, and concerns. They can make a wider world intelligible, alive, and urgent. They can expand our horizons to communities larger than the ones we personally inhabit. But our lives must make sense, too, at the largest of all scales. We live in an era in which our actions, in the realm of ideology as in the realm of technology, increasingly have global effects. When it comes to the compass of our concern and compassion, humanity as a whole is not too broad a horizon.
A super fascinating read for me. I've not spent a lot of time thinking about western civilization much, but I found the history and the tying of it all together really interesting. I'm not sure I agree with all of it, it's a lot and I'm still thinking. But it's got me interested in reading more. (via []Mandy's Tiny Letter](http://aworkinglibrary.com).)
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But here I come back to Deleuze’s “right to say nothing,” and although we can definitely say that this right is variously accessible or even inaccessible for some, I believe that it is indeed a right. For example, the push for an 8-hour workday in 1886 called for “8 hours of work, 8 hours of rest, and 8 hours of what we will.” I’m struck by the quality of things that associated with the category “What we Will”: rest, thought, flowers, sunshine.
This piece resonates really strongly with me. And I particularly like that she highlights the privilege involved in doing nothing. I live a very unscheduled life, many weekends I have no plans and no idea what I'm going to do, going with the flow. And right now, with unemployment, I'm like that most days for almost the entire day. I've been reading, thinking, journalling, and in many ways, getting ready for whatever will come next. Also this piece reminds me of one of my favorite books by Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey.
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I think that’s what’s happened with some programmers coming to CSS for the first time. They’ve heard it’s simple, so they assume it’s easy. But then when they try to use it, it doesn’t work. It must be the fault of the language, because they know that they are smart, and this is supposed to be easy. So they blame the language. They say it’s broken. And so they try to “fix” it by making it conform to a more programmatic way of thinking.
I really love the way that Keith distinguishes between simple and easy in this short post. And it points to my frustrations lately with how CSS is viewed in this industry. It may be simple, but it is not easy. And it is not a programming language, so let it be what it is, approach it with the desire to learn, and you'll have more success.
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But when I talk about building fast websites, I’ll frequently hear that low-broadband users aren’t “the primary audience,” or that “we’re not concerned with people in developing markets.” I was once asked about serving up a lightweight, data-friendly version of a product to visitors from countries with limited bandwidth; the full design could be served to everyone else. Either way, segmenting our audiences into “the ones we’re really designing for” is a kind of digital redlining. We can—and should—do much, much better than that.
Spot on, necessary reading for many in our industry.
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My first piece of advice is, please please please don’t give up on the truth. It may be under assault but it’s still alive and kicking, and it will never go out of style. Truth may not be a thing that we can always absolutely, objectively prove, but it is a thing we can aspire to. A thing we must aspire to. In our journalism, in our government, in our courts, in our businesses, in our personal lives, and in our very souls. I’ve built my life and livelihood on chasing the truth, in trying to get the facts right. I haven’t always succeeded. Sometimes I’ve failed completely. But it’s always seemed an eminently worthy cause.
I enjoyed this commencement address, some good advice in here and the defense of truth was a timely reminder.
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Those odd moments when you find in history the perfect description of the things you do today.
I read this today and then saw a tweet from Eyeo and both are so perfect. A lot of what I do is me studying and thinking and sometimes those things get shared, which is my form of teaching.
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To write down your rawest thoughts in a notebook is like putting a wild, unknown beast into a holding cell for further observation. Here, you can safely discover what the beast is and figure out what to do with it. Sometimes the beast needs indefinite incarceration, sometimes it needs rehabilitation, sometimes it’s ready for release into the wild, and sometimes it just needs to be put down. But to let it escape at whim is rarely a good idea.
This, this, this! This is why I started journaling so heavily last fall. I backed away from sharing as much online and I started writing things out. It's freeing to write the stuff down that may be things you aren't comfortable sharing or shouldn't share. Holding my tongue can be a good thing and getting it into my notebook to think about later or abandon is helping me do that.
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The responsibility toward other people’s stories is real and inescapable, but that doesn’t mean that appropriation is the way to satisfy that responsibility. In fact, the opposite is true: Telling the stories in which we are complicit outsiders has to be done with imagination and skepticism. It might require us not to give up our freedom, but to prioritize justice over freedom.
Teju Cole's monthly column in the New York Times Magazine is always worth your time, this month is no exception.
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That’s because the culture was mostly about the business of software, how you build it, how you sell it, how you support it. If you were excited about that, you automatically belonged. You didn’t need to stay late, or drink alcohol, or play Rock Band, or play board games, or not have kids to pick up, or go to church, or not go to church, or do anything except show up 9-to-5 and care a lot about good software.
This article was interesting because it points to one of the reasons why I prefer remote work. I often don't have a lot in common with the people I work with, because I don't necessarily fit into the stereotype of what a person who writes code for the web is like. And that's fine with me, but when I go into an office, I feel pressure to be "one of the group" and to do the social activities I may not enjoy. Remote work takes all of that pressure away, since you aren't physically located together.
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A more granular understanding of who—or what—will access your pattern library can better inform its design, ensuring it’s used by as many people—or products—as possible.
I believe quite strongly that pattern libraries should be custom and unique for each team, so they reflect the needs of the organization. And thinking about the consumers of your library is part of that, making sure that everyone (and everything) who needs to use it can do so easily.
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Equality keeps us honest. Our peers tell us who we are and how we are doing, providing that service in personal life that a free press does in a functioning society. Inequality creates liars and delusion. The powerless need to dissemble—that’s how slaves, servants, and women got the reputation of being liars—and the powerful grow stupid on the lies they require from their subordinates and on the lack of need to know about others who are nobody, who don’t count, who’ve been silenced or trained to please. This is why I always pair privilege with obliviousness; obliviousness is privilege’s form of deprivation. When you don’t hear others, you don’t imagine them, they become unreal, and you are left in the wasteland of a world with only yourself in it, and that surely makes you starving, though you know not for what, if you have ceased to imagine others exist in any true deep way that matters. This is about a need for which we hardly have language or at least not a familiar conversation.
This piece is really great and it's about way more than what the title may lead you to believe. I was skeptical, but I love it and will be rereading it.