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.
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!”?
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.
This is such a great way to explain a technology! Chris talks through his thought process when using flexbox for layout.
Frank is redesigning in the open. Watch this space:
By writing about it, it may help both of us. I can further develop my methods by navigating the friction of explaining them. I’ve been looking for a way to clarify and share my thoughts about typography and layout on screens, and this seems like a good chance to do so. And you? Well, perhaps the site can offer a clearly explained way of working that’s worth considering. That seems to be a rare thing on the web these days.
This is a fascinating way to present a code tutorial! It reminds of Tim’s Tutorial Markdown that I linked to a while back (which in turn reminds me of Bret Victor’s work).
Look. Observe. See.
Decomputerization doesn’t mean no computers. It means that not all spheres of life should be rendered into data and computed upon. Ubiquitous “smartness” largely serves to enrich and empower the few at the expense of the many, while inflicting ecological harm that will threaten the survival and flourishing of billions of people.
Six UX lessons from game design:
- Story vs Narrative (Think in terms of story arcs)
- Games are fractal (Break up the journey from big to small to tiny)
- Learning loop (figure out your core mechanic)
- Affordances (Prompt for known loops)
- Hintiness (Move to new loops)
- Pacing (Be sure to start here)
I love React. I love how server side rendering React apps is trivial because it all compiles down to vanilla HTML rather than web components, effectively turning it into a kickass template engine that can come alive. I love the way you can very effectively still do progressive enhancement by using completely semantic markup and then letting hydration do more to it.
I also hate React. I hate React because these behaviours are not defaults. React is not gonna warn you if you make a form using divs and unlabelled textboxes and send the whole thing to a server. I hate React because CSS-in-JS approaches by default encourage you to write completely self contained one off components rather than trying to build a website UI up as a whole. I hate the way server side rendering and progressive enhancement are not defaults, but rather things you have to go out of your way to do.
An absolutely brilliant post by Laura on how the priorites baked into JavaScript tools like React are really out of whack. They’ll make sure your behind-the-scenes code is super clean, but not give a rat’s ass for the quality of the output that users have to interact with.
And if you want to adjust the front-end code, you’ve got to set up all this tooling just to change a div to a button. That’s quite a barrier to entry.
In elevating frontend to the land of Serious Code we have not just made things incredibly over-engineered but we have also set fire to all the ladders that we used to get up here in the first place.
AMEN!
I love React because it lets me do my best work faster and more easily. I hate React because the culture around it more than the library itself actively prevents other people from doing their best work.
I find myself doing pseudo code before I write real code, sure, but I also leave it in place sometimes in code comments.
Same!
Brad describes how he has found his place in the world of React, creating UI components without dabbling in business logic:
Instead of merely creating components’ reference HTML, CSS, and presentational JS, frontend designers can create directly consumable HTML, CSS, and presentational JS that back-of-the-frontend developers can then breathe life into.
What’s clear is that the term “React” has become as broad and undefined as the term “front-end”. Just saying that someone does React doesn’t actually say much about the nature of the work.
When you say “we’re hiring a React developer”, what exactly do you mean by that? “React developer” is almost as vague as “frontend developer”, so clarify. Are you looking for a person to specialize in markup and styles? A person to author middleware and business logic? A person to manage data and databases? A person to own build processes?
Don’t miss this—a masterclass in SVG animation with Cassie (I refuse to use the W word). Mark your calendar: August 20th.
When people talk about learning React, I think that React, in and of itself, is relatively easy to understand. At least, I felt it was. I have components. I have JSX. I hit some hiccups with required keys or making sure I was wrapping child elements properly. But overall, I felt like I grasped it well enough.
Throw in everything else at the same time, though, and things get confusing because it’s hard at first to recognize what belongs to what. “Oh, this is Redux. That is React. That other thing is lodash. Got it.”
This resonates a lot with Dave’s post:
React is an ecosystem. I feel like it’s a disservice to anyone trying to learn to diminish all that React entails. React shows up on the scene with Babel, Webpack, and JSX (which each have their own learning curve) then quickly branches out into technologies like Redux, React-Router, Immutable.js, Axios, Jest, Next.js, Create-React-App, GraphQL, and whatever weird plugin you need for your app.
Twenty hard-won lessons from Dan from ten years of Dribbble.
We sent 50 shirts along with a card to friends and colleagues announcing Dribbble’s beta back in 2008. This first batch of members played a pivotal role in the foundation of the community and how it would develop. The shirt helped guilt them into actually checking out the site.
I think I still have my T-shirt somewhere!
This looks like an excellent conference line-up! Alas, I won’t be able to make it (I’m out of the country when it’s on) but you should definitely go if you can.
Lots and lots of programming advice. I can’t attest to the veracity and efficacy of all of it, but this really rang true:
If you have no idea how to start, describe the flow of the application in high level, pure English/your language first. Then fill the spaces between comments with the code.
And this:
Blogging about your stupid solution is still better than being quiet.
You may feel “I’m not start enough to talk about this” or “This must be so stupid I shouldn’t talk about it”.
Create a blog. Post about your stupid solutions.
This really is a most excellent introduction to React. Complete with cheat sheet!
This is a wonderfully written post packed with hard-won wisdom.
This are the myths that Monica dispelled for herself:
- I’m a senior developer
- Everyone writes tests
- We’re so far behind everyone else (AKA “tech FOMO”)
- Code quality matters most
- Everything must be documented!!!!
- Technical debt is bad
- Seniority means being the best at programming