Get it shipped — building better relationships with Devs
This advice works both ways:
- Collaboration
- Communication
- Respect
Link tags: communication
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Undersea Cables by Rishi Sunak [PDF]
Years before becoming Prime Minister of the UK, Rishi Sunak wrote this report, Undersea Cables: Indispensable, insecure.
PAST Visions of the Future - Future of Interfaces
Video visions of aspirational futures made from the 1950s to the 2010s, mostly by white dudes with bullshit jobs.
How to be a writer on a marketing team without sounding like a jerk – A Whole Lotta Nothing
Good writing advice from Matt.
Writing Is Magic - Marc’s Blog
I find, more often than not, that I understand something much less well when I sit down to write about it than when I’m thinking about it in the shower. In fact, I find that I change my own mind on things a lot when I try write them down. It really is a powerful tool for finding clarity in your own mind. Once you have clarity in your own mind, you’re much more able to explain it to others.
Age of Invention: The Beacons are Lit!
Or, Why wasn’t the Telegraph Invented Earlier?
A wonderful deep-dive into optical telegraphy through the ages.
Which color scale to use when visualizing data - Datawrapper Blog
A fascinating four-part series by Lisa Charlotte Muth on colour in data visualisations:
Personal Websites as Self-Portraiture | starbreaker.org
What, then, is a personal website? It is precisely that, personal. It is a new kind of self-portraiture done not with pencils, charcoal, ink, or paint. Instead it is self-portraiture done in markup language, code, prose, images, audio, and video.
A Quick History of Digital Communication Before the Internet - Eager Blog
A potted history of communication networks from the pony express and the telegraph to ethernet and wi-fi.
canistilluse.com - Jim Nielsen’s Blog
…you would be forgiven if you saw an API where a feature went from green (supported) to red (unsupported) and you thought: is the browser being deprecated?
That’s the idea behind my new shiny domain: canistilluse.com. I made the site as satire after reading Jeremy Keith’s insightful piece where he notes:
the onus is not on web developers to keep track of older features in danger of being deprecated. That’s on the browser makers. I sincerely hope we’re not expected to consult a site called canistilluse.com.
It’s weirdly gratifying to see a hastily-written sarcastic quip tuned into something real.
Stay alert - DEV Community 👩💻👨💻
It’s not just a story about unloved APIs, it’s a story about power, standards design, and who owns the platform — and it makes me afraid for the future of the web.
A thoughtful, considered post by Rich Harris on the whole ballyhoo with alert and its ilk:
For all its flaws, the web is generally agreed to be a stable platform, where investments made today will stand the test of time. A world in which websites are treated as inherently transient objects, where APIs we commonly rely on today could be cast aside as unwanted baggage by tomorrow’s spec wranglers, is a world in which the web has already lost.
Choice Words about the Upcoming Deprecation of JavaScript Dialogs | CSS-Tricks
Believe it or not, I generally am a fan of Google and think they do a good job of pushing the web forward. I also think it’s appropriate to waggle fingers when I see problems and request they do better. “Better” here means way more developer and user outreach to spell out the situation, way more conversation about the potential implications and transition ideas, and way more openness to bending the course ahead.
Google vs. the web | Go Make Things
With any changes to the platform, but especially breaking ones, communication and feedback on how this will impact people who actually build things with the web is super important, and that was not done here.
Chris has written a thoughtful reflection on last week’s brouhaha around confirm, prompt, and alert being deprecated in Chrome. The way that the “developer relations” folks at Google handled feedback was less than ideal.
I reached out to one of the Google Chrome developer advocates I know to see if I could learn more. It did not go well.
Sans Bullshit Sans — Leveraging the synergy of ligatures
As part of my content buddying process, I am henceforth going to typeset all drafts in this font. I just tested it with this sentence:
We can leverage the synergy of a rich immersive user paradigm shift.
Words To Avoid in Educational Writing | CSS-Tricks
This old article from Chris is evergreen. There’s been some recent discussion of calling these words “downplayers”, which I kind of like. Whatever they are, try not to use them in documentation.
Let’s Not Dumb Down the History of Computer Science | Opinion | Communications of the ACM
I don’t think I agree with Don Knuth’s argument here from a 2014 lecture, but I do like how he sets out his table:
Why do I, as a scientist, get so much out of reading the history of science? Let me count the ways:
- To understand the process of discovery—not so much what was discovered, but how it was discovered.
- To understand the process of failure.
- To celebrate the contributions of many cultures.
- Telling historical stories is the best way to teach.
- To learn how to cope with life.
- To become more familiar with the world, and to know how science fits into the overall history of mankind.
A Wire Across the Ocean | American Scientist
Ainissa Ramirez recounts the story of the transatlantic telegraph cable, the Apollo project of its day.
How to be clear – gilest.org
Good advice for writing:
- Think about what your readers might already know
- Write shorter sentences, with simpler words
- Constantly think about audiences
- Communicate with purpose
- Clear communication helps teams solve problems
How Claude Shannon’s Information Theory Invented the Future | Quanta Magazine
Shannon is not exactly a household name. He never won a Nobel Prize, and he wasn’t a celebrity like Albert Einstein or Richard Feynman, either before or after his death in 2001. But more than 70 years ago, in a single groundbreaking paper, he laid the foundation for the entire communication infrastructure underlying the modern information age.
People Problems | CSS-Tricks
I’d maybe simplify this people problem a bit: the codebase is easy to change, but the incentives within a company are not. And yet it’s the incentives that drive what kind of code gets written — what is acceptable, what needs to get fixed, how people work together. In short, we cannot be expected to fix the code without fixing the organization, too.