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Things I Like

  • Pastry Box September 25

    I always end my day or my week knowing what I need to design next. Sometimes I start shitty first drafts late in the afternoon so I have something to work with the next morning. It can be very tempting, when the work is going well, to “just keep going” and stay at your desk late into the evening. That lovely state of flow is so elusive, we don’t want to walk away—and yet we must.

  • Pastry Box September 24

    It’s easy to get isolated in our not-knowing-ness (it’s fine, just add “words” to the list of things I don’t know), to assume that everyone else must have the answers, must have already figured this out. Sometimes that’s true. More often than not though, we’re all grappling with the same questions.

  • What We Talk About When We Talk About What We Talk About When We Talk About Making

    But to be sat amongst a community who do not share your concerns is a terribly alienating experience, especially if the speakers on stage are claiming a we for the room that you do not feel. A greater diversity of speakers and a greater diversity of participants means by definition fewer common experiences and a more complicated we.

  • The fringe benefits of no

    There are many instances where deadlines are crucial, where getting things done needs to get done. Sometimes saying yes is just the thing that must happen. But just as importantly, most times it is not.

  • Pay People to Cook at Home

    It’s nearly impossible for a single parent or even two parents working full time to cook every meal from scratch, planning it beforehand and cleaning it up afterward. This is why many working parents of means employ housekeepers. But if we put this work on women of lower socioeconomic status (as is almost always the case), what about their children? Who cooks and cleans up for them?

  • All you need is publish

    To work with new people, to connect to new audiences. To broaden the scale and breadth of your voice. To stand upon the soapboxes that publications offer. To collect dissenting opinions. To see what couldn’t be seen without the help of an editor or gang of skeptics willing to look over your shoulder, pointing you in directions you considered but were too meek to explore. Mainly, to write better and with greater empathy.

  • Pics or It Didn't Happen: The New Crisis of Connected Cameras

    And I think it’s this, the import and ethics of networked lenses, that we’re wrestling with in story after story. Networked images are simply different than the products of film cameras. They’re easier to edit and slipperier to steal. Networked pictures get away from you, via black hat Torrenting, social media drag-and-dropping, or illicit iCloud downloading.

  • Pastry Box Sept 15

    Just try to remember, no one expects you, as a person, to remain 'static' — to always do the same thing, day in, day out — that can lead to stagnation, not just for ideas but for you as a person.

  • Other days, other voices

    There’s something about the power of the human voice—divorced from the moving image—that still gets to me. It’s like slow glass for the soul.

  • Hypertext as an agent of change

    But hypertext brings with it something else, too: that speed and fidelity give rise to a transparency of iteration and revision previously unavailable. Not only can I rapidly evolve a text, but I can also expose that evolution and let others participate within it. I can open up the collaboration wider than I could before.

  • A Fundamental Disconnect

    We do not control the environment executing our JavaScript code, interpreting our HTML, or applying our CSS. Our users control the device (and, thereby, it’s processor speed, RAM, etc.). Our users choose the operating system. Our users pick the browser and which version they use. Our users can decide which add-ons they put in the browser. Our users can shrink or enlarge the fonts used to display our Web pages and apps. And the Internet providers that sit between us and our users, dictating the network speed, latency, and ultimately controlling how—and what part of—our content makes it to our users.

  • Ditching Twitter

    The first is feeling like I’m sitting at a sidewalk cafe, speaking in a conversational voice, but having that voice projected so loudly that strangers many streets away are invited to comment on my most inconsequential statements—especially if something I say gets retweeted beyond my usual circles.

  • The atomic sentence

    At the end of each day, I write an “atomic sentence,” a single statement that summarizes the most vital lesson about that day.

  • Improving Smashing Magazine's Performance: A Case Study

    Because the entire website was built mobile first, we quickly realized that adding or changing components on the page would entail going through the mobile-first approach for every single (minor and major) design decision. We’d design a new component in a mobile view first, and then design an “extended” view for the situations when more space is available. Often that meant adjusting media queries with every single change, and more often it meant adding new stuff to style sheets and to the markup to address new issues that came up.

  • The Strange & Curious Tale of the Last True Hermit

    Chris became surprisingly introspective. "I did examine myself," he said. "Solitude did increase my perception. But here's the tricky thing—when I applied my increased perception to myself, I lost my identity. With no audience, no one to perform for, I was just there. There was no need to define myself; I became irrelevant. The moon was the minute hand, the seasons the hour hand. I didn't even have a name. I never felt lonely. To put it romantically: I was completely free."