After reading this account of a wonderfully surreal text adventure game, you’ll probably want to play AI Dungeon 2:
A PhD student named Nathan trained the neural net on classic dungeon crawling games, and playing it is strangely surreal, repetitive, and mesmerizing, like dreaming about playing one of the games it was trained on.
When people ask where to find you on the web, what do you tell them? Your personal website can be your home on the web. Or, if you don’t like to share your personal life in public, it can be more like your office. As with your home or your office, you can make it work for your own needs. Do you need a place that’s great for socialising, or somewhere to present your work? Without the constraints of somebody else’s platform, you get to choose what works for you.
A terrific piece from Laura enumerating the many ways that having your own website can empower you.
Have you already got your own website already? Fabulous! Is there anything you can do to make it easier for those who don’t have their own sites yet? Could you help a person move their site away from a big platform? Could you write a tutorial or script that provides guidance and reassurance?
Brad gets ranty …with good reason.
Here’s an end-of-year roundup of all the data that Mozilla have gathered through their Firefox browser—very impressive!
Chris makes the valid observation that JavaScript programmers who bemoan the “global scope” of CSS are handily forgetting that JavaScript also has global scope by default.
JS is also global by default. We use IIFEs and wrapper functions to add scope.
And for all this talk about CSS being global, you can actually scope styles when you need to. It’s more-or-less the same way you do it in JavaScript.
This is superbly in-depth and easy-to-follow article from Cassie—everything you need to know about motion paths in SVG and CSS! It’s worth reading just for the wonderful examples.
I feel my trajectory as a musician maps to the trajectory of the web industry. The web is still young. We’re all still figuring stuff out and we’re all eager to get better. In our eagerness to get better, we’re reaching for more complexity. More complex abstractions, build processes, and tools. Because who wants to be bored playing in 4/4 when you can be playing in 7/16?
I hope we in the web field will arrive at the same realization that I did as a musician: complexity is not synonymous with quality.
Can I get an “Amen!”?
The design history of the New York subway map.
This site is not meant to be exhaustive, but rather a useful guide—our FAQ for design understanding. We hope it will inspire discussion, some questioning, a little soul searching, and ideally, a bit of intellectual support for your everyday endeavors.
The Design Questions Library goes nicely with the Library of Ambiguity.
The carbon cost of collecting and storing data no one can use is already a moral issue.
So before you add another field, let alone make a new service, can you be sure it will make enough of a difference to legitimise its impact on the planet?
This was a really fun podcast chat—nice and snappy at just 20 minutes.
A one-stop shop for all the metacrap you can put in the head of your HTML documents.
This book is a beautiful tribute to Cindy.
Several talented illustrators have come together to create a unique book about unique animals. Each contributor has a special connection to the book’s original illustrator, Cindy Li. When she was unable to complete the illustrations before passing away in 2018, many of Cindy’s talented friends offered to help finish the project.
I think you should get a copy of this book for the little animal lover in your life this Christmas.
Proceeds from the sale of this book benefit Apollo Li Harris and Orion Li Harris, two out-of-this-world kids who had an amazing mom.
The inexorable rise of frameworks such as Angular, React, Vue and their many cousins has been led by an assumption that managing state in the browser is quicker than a request to a server. This assumption, I can only assume, is made by developers who have flagship mobile devices or primarily work on desktop devices.
Celestial objects ordered by size, covering a scale from one astronaut to the observable universe.
Lynn gives a step-by-step walkthrough of the latest amazing redesign of her website. There’s so much joy and craft in here, with real attention to detail—I love it!
The opening of this blog post warned the cockles of my heart:
I have a rule about conferences: go once.
Like all rules, it can be broken — usually when Jeremy Keith is involved — but not often.
Awww! That’s so nice!
This is such a great way to explain a technology! Chris talks through his thought process when using flexbox for layout.
I’ve signed this letter.
This is an interesting comparison: design systems as APIs. It makes sense. A design system—like an API—is a contract. Also, an API without documentation is of little use …much like a design system without documentation.