Service Design Breakfast Club meet-up for UK service designers
Service designers of Brighton!
We meet for 1–1½ hours from 8.30am on the first Thursday of every month at Clearleft’s studio in Brighton.
Service designers of Brighton!
We meet for 1–1½ hours from 8.30am on the first Thursday of every month at Clearleft’s studio in Brighton.
These pictures really capture the vibe of this year’s lovely UX London event.
It’s clear that companies don’t value CSS skills in the same way as, say Javascript — which is reflected in pay disparity, bootcamp priorities, and the lack of visibility in job descriptions. It’s not uncommon to see front end job specifications listing React, Redux, Typescript and more, with barely a passing mention of HTML and CSS, despite being core web technologies. New developers are encouraged to learn just enough CSS to get by, rather than cultivate a deep knowledge and appreciation for the language, and that’s reflected in the messy, convoluted code, riddled with bad practices, that many of us have to clear up afterwards.
With new or expanded modules for layout, typography, animation, audio (though sadly not speech) and more, it’s possible to specialise in a subset of CSS. Yet when aspects of frontend development not involving JavaScript are seen as ignorable by employers, few will get this opportunity.
Paul shares his big-picture thoughts after CSS Day:
But one CSS conference isn’t enough. This language is now so broad and deep, its implementation across browsers never more stable and complete, that opportunities to grow the community abound.
I’ve managed to convince Paul to come out of the shadows for one last heist—it’s gonna be good!
(And Paul shares a discount for 20% off your UX London ticket!)
Grease is a website starter that makes building performant, accessible, aesthetic websites fast & frictionless.
Interestingly, this starter kit uses cascade layers for managing CSS.
This free event is running online from 3pm to 7pm UK time this Friday. The line-up features Emily Bender, Safiya Noble, Timnit Gebru and more.
Since the publication of On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?🦜 two years ago, many of the harms the paper has warned about and more, have unfortunately occurred. From exploited workers filtering hateful content, to an engineer claiming that chatbots are sentient, the harms are only accelerating.
Join the co-authors of the paper and various guests to reflect on what has happened in the last two years, what the large language model landscape currently look like, and where we are headed vs where we should be headed.
This free online event is happening at 7pm UK time this evening. I saw Ben give a talk on this at Clarity, and it was excellent. There was a lot of crossover with what I’ve been trying to get at with the intersection of declarative design and culture, except Ben expresses it far more clearly than me. The bastard.
If you feel like you’re swimming upstream with your design system, it’s likely the result of a cultural problem—not a technical one. It’s time for you to look at your design system from a different angle.
I’ll be speaking at this free early evening event with Arisa Fukusaki and Cassie in Brighton on Monday, February 27th. Grab a ticket and come along for some pizza and nerdiness.
This looks like an excellent—and free!—online event centred on privacy and safety. It’s got Eva PenzeyMoog, Robin Berjon and more!
I appreciate Hidde’s reluctance to participate in anything that looks like a pile-on, but in this case, it’s important to call out the bad behaviour so it doesn’t happen again.
The specific issues I’ve put in this post cross the line between honest mistakes and bad behaviour. They cross the line, because they consistute fraud (the livestream) and because they impact attendees, sponsors and speakers. The front-end community doesn’t deserve this, and I’m worried for people new to the industry, who get may assume this is normal or ok. It’s not normal.
More on that shitshow of an event that Jo wrote about, this time from Cassie.
I’ve heard from multiple people about how much of a shitshow this event was. Worth remembering in case they try to pull the same shit again.
A lovely heartfelt personal look back at dConstruct.
dConstruct was about the big ideas, but not in a wanky TED way. It was about ideas on the horizon brought into focus, it always left me wanting to know more.
dConstruct was never about the big showy thing that will make you millions. It was about the interesting. It gave you seeds to take away with you, and that’s important.
I love this list of ever-increasing timelines. All that’s missing is the time since the Carrington Event, just to remind us what could happen when the next one hits.
I love the thoughtfulness that Sally put into her personal write-up of dConstruct.
Wow, what a day. A really diverse selection of talks that went all over the map. From building vast world-changing health systems, to scaling and archiving global online communities, to the beauty and joy of calligraphy. And lasers. I enjoyed the lot, which is rare for me at an event like this.
A rather lovely write-up of the final dConstruct!
Above all it was nice to see the diversity of approaches and reasons for doing ‘design’ / art / whatever. Some of us are solving the hard problems, some of us are thinking philosophically or creating new tools, and some of us are just having fun – and all approaches are valid and useful.
If you were at dConstruct on Friday and you enjoyed the mood music during the breaks, this is what you were listening to.
I can’t wait to see this documentary about Marc and Beyond Tellerrand!
Marc very kindly took loads of pictures at dConstruct on Friday—lovely!