Things I Like
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Aside from revamping digital book covers and the library browsing interface, Kindles could remind us of past purchases – books either bought but left unread, or books we read passionately and should reread. And, in doing so, trump the unnetworked isolation of physical books. Thanks to our in-app reading statistics, Kindle knows when we can’t put a book down, when we plunge ourselves into an author’s world far too late into the night, on a weeknight, when the next day is most definitely not a holiday. Kindle knows when we are hypnotised, possessed, gluttonous; knows when we consume an entire feast of words in a single sitting. Knows that others haven’t been so ravenous with a particular story, but we were, and so Kindle can intuit our special relationship with the text. It certainly knows enough to meaningfully resurface books of that ilk. It could be as simple as an email. Kindle could help foster that act of returning, of rereading. It could bring a book back from the periphery of our working library into the core, ‘into the bloodstream’, as Susan Sontag put it. And yet it doesn’t.
I read digitally, mostly library books that I can borrow and try out. But I'm also reading a lot of books on paper again. I prefer comics in paper, to be able to slowly page through and look at the art work and in an effort to support a local bookstore, if I want to buy a book, I do that in paper now. But I agree with Craig, many things could be made better about the Kindle experience. And for books I truly love, paper is still my preference.
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This is where what I call a deviant comes in. Every team needs a deviant, someone who can help the team by challenging the tendency to want too much homogeneity, which can stifle creativity and learning. Deviants are the ones who stand back and say, “Well, wait a minute, why are we even doing this at all? What if we looked at the thing backwards or turned it inside out?” That’s when people say, “Oh, no, no, no, that’s ridiculous,” and so the discussion about what’s ridiculous comes up. Unlike the CFO I mentioned before, who derailed the team by shutting down discussions, the deviant opens up more ideas, and that gets you a lot more originality. In our research, we’ve looked carefully at both teams that produced something original and those that were merely average, where nothing really sparkled. It turned out that the teams with deviants outperformed teams without them. In many cases, deviant thinking is a source of great innovation.
I was reminded of this article while I was on a team retreat with workmates for a week. And I think the best part of this article is this concept of the deviant. There needs to be a person pushing against things to make the team more successful and when I look at the most successful teams I've worked with, I can pick that person out right away. It isn't a bad thing, but it can make for frustrating moments.
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The reason for focusing on the core has nothing to do with the validity of any of those other frameworks, libraries or tools. On the contrary, focusing on the core helps you to recognize the strengths and limitations of these tools and abstractions. A developer with a solid understanding of vanilla JavaScript can shift fairly easily from React to Angular to Ember. More importantly, they are well equipped to understand if the shift should be made at all.
I love the way Tim built on the idea I had about being overwhelmed with code and made it even better. He's spot on, focusing on the core is always a good use of your time.
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For Maria Bråth, boss of internet startup Brath, the six-hour working day the company introduced when it was formed three years ago gives it a competitive advantage because it attracts better staff and keeps them. “They are the most valuable thing we have,” she says – an offer of more pay elsewhere would not make up for the shorter hours they have at Brath.
The public sector jobs this article talks about are being pushed and pulled by the will of different political parties, but what I found most interesting in this article are the private sector companies who have done it for years and are doing well. The recognition that knowledge work is tiring and you need to have time away is incredibly nice to see. I would love a six hour works day.
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I shouldn’t have to say this, but here we are: work that is excessive, consuming north of 40 hours a week and without regular holidays, leads to burnout and reduced productivity, not to mention a toll on workers’ mental and physical health. We should build workplaces that encourage healthy work habits because we are not monsters, but also because we benefit from sane work cultures because they achieve better results.
Having worked for Mandy, I know that all of what she says here is what she strives for in her teams. But this piece is so much more, the bits on transparency, the bits on competition versus collaboration, it is all so, so good.
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It’s just too much. Too much plastic. Too much paper. Too much waste in a world that is already incredibly wasteful. I don’t need that. We don’t need that. I know, people love free stuff, but please. Stop it. I’ll buy my own tote bags, cables, pens, stickers, notepads, USB sticks, mugs, bottles, and all other things if I need them. Stop littering the world with useless crap. Most of the people won’t keep half of the items. I cringe when I think of all the raw materials that were used to make all of that.
I really love this piece. At my house this year we've become just as conscious of what comes in as what is going out. To prevent waste we are watching the stuff we bring into the house just as much as I'm aware of our garbage, recycling, etc. And the conference swag is usually all waste in the end. Earlier this year at a conference I refused the swag and the person behind the registration desk got upset. At the very least, let people politely decline without making it an issue.
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This is not Tierra del Fuego, you know. I get bored with the parochialness of the East Coast. They think that the news doesn't get out here and that people out here live in rustic ignorance of real life. It's embarrassing that people can be so ignorant as East Coast people tend to be of the West Coast-and the whole Midwest-and, of course, so contemptuous of the whole South. So sometimes I have written some rather resentful and snarky things about the urban Northeast-particularly in literature-the notion that nothing is worth writing about except the suburbs of large Eastern cities. Blech. That gets nowhere with me.
I've only read one book by Le Guin, but it is amazing. I have several more on my list. And this interview is amazing. I love the way she describes working with an editor, as a collaboration, which is exactly how I see it as well.
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If we want to build a web that is truly universal, then we must embrace its unpredictable nature. We must listen more closely to the full spectrum of our audience. We must see opportunities for optimization where we previously saw barriers to entry. And we must consider our fellow makers in this process by building tools that will help us navigate these challenges together.
I love this piece by Paul, along with his presentation on the same idea. He is thinking deeply about how we make things, how we work together, and how we move forward to make the web better.
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I see this in the world of front-end techniques and technology. We become obsessed with tools and methods, very rarely looking at how these relate to the fundamental basics of web standards, accessibility and progressive enhancement. We obsess about a right way to do things as if there was one right way rather than looking at the goal; how things fit into the broader philosophy of what we do on the web and how what we write contributes to us being better at what we do.
I had an interesting conversation today with coworkers about what it mean to be "offline" as I prepare for vacation. And we all have different things we struggle with, but I will admit, I struggle with the pithy ephemera of social media, so I tend to need long breaks for my own sanity. And it's interesting, because we aren't all the same in that regard.
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On a more personal level, I have long tried to curtail this overflow of information. I use few social networks (mainly due to their impropriety) and limit most of my activity to Twitter. I aim to keep the number of people I follow below 75 (Dunbar divided by two), and follow a stream composed mainly of friends and former colleagues. I find it surprising (and somewhat annoying) that given this number, ‘hot drama’ still manages to surface. The more I read about our growing reliance on social media, the more I’m given to thinking, that like most things, it’s best enjoyed in moderation.
I'm with Paul here, trying to slow down, focus on what matters to me, and leave the rest behind.
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I don’t think you do your cause any favours by jumping straight to the “you must do this” stage. I think that people are more amenable to hearing “hey, here’s something that worked for me; maybe it will work for you” rather than “everything you know is wrong and this is the future.” I certainly don’t think that it’s helpful to compare CSS to Neanderthals co-existing with JavaScript Homo Sapiens.
I listened to the podcast to which Jeremy is referring in this piece and his voice was the voice of calm reason to me, I was grateful for the balance. This goes back to the my age old complaint with so much on the web these days: what works for you works for you, but it is not the only way and stop saying it is when you write or talk about it.
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And I think: I don’t need this. I could make some principled, or “principled,” arguments against it — that there's no reason to pay more attention to this murder than any of the several dozen others that will happen in America today, that this is a classic illustration of the "society of the spectacle", that we should follow Augustine's example in denouncing curiositas — but my real problem is that it just makes me very sad and very tired, and I have too much to do to be sad and tired.
Each year, I pull back both from social media a bit and from thinking about and being online in the time I'm not working. And it has been good for me. Right now I plan to make 2016 the year of me without the web in some fashion. I'll still work on the web for a living, but when I'm not working I'm thinking of staying away from the web and immersing myself in other things.
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He was tracing an arc on the table with his fingers and speaking with such deliberation and care. “I was left alone a lot after Dad and the boys died.... And it was just me and Mom for a long time,” he said. “And by her example am I not bitter. By her example. She was not. Broken, yes. Bitter, no.” Maybe, he said, she had to be that for him. He has said this before—that even in those days of unremitting grief, she drew on her faith that the only way to not be swallowed by sorrow, to in fact recognize that our sorrow is inseparable from our joy, is to always understand our suffering, ourselves, in the light of eternity. What is this in the light of eternity? Imagine being a parent so filled with your own pain, and yet still being able to pass that on to your son.
This interview is so full of interesting and thoughtful things I had a really hard time picking what to quote. It is well worth your time to read the whole thing. I had read bits and pieces about Colbert's life, but his honesty here is startling and beautiful.
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Money is an attempt to buy time, but it rarely is able to buy any of the above. When we don’t have time we use money to try to get us to the secret door on time, or we use it avoid needing to know the real prices, or we use money to have someone explain to us what is really going on. Money can get us close, but not all the way.
Agree 100%. We have started to take longer vacations and slower vacations, letting ourselves explore, get to know a place, and be there. I would also add: making them offline vacations has been wonderful.
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That’s why the implied-contract theory is invalid: people aren’t agreeing to write a blank check and give up reasonable expectations of privacy by clicking a link. They can’t even know what the cost of visiting a page will be until they’ve already visited it and paid the price.
I work on the web, so I understand all that is happening when a web page is loaded. But for most people, all they know is that their page is slow and that it's quite strange that the shoes they were just looking at on Zappos are now showing up in ads as they read a story on the New York Times. And that's what worries me about this trend. We are making people pay with their privacy, their data plans they pay for, and their time.