The Accidental Side Project ◆ 24 ways
This gets me right in the feels.
I can’t believe I was lucky enough to contribute to 24 Ways seven times over its fifteen year lifespan!
Link tags: project
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Self Treat
It’s been an absolute pleasure having Holly, Laçin, and Beyza at Clearleft while they’ve been working on this three-month internship project:
Self Treat is a vision piece designed to increase self-management of minor health conditions.
You can also read the blog posts they wrote during the process:
Become a Front-End Master in 2020 With These 10 Project Ideas | CSS-Tricks
The title sounds clickbaity, but this is a thoughtful list of project ideas from Chris (partly prompted by the way other lists seem to involve nothing but JavaScript frameworks).
Jon Aizlewood · Agile and design — How to avoid Frankensteining your product
Jon’s ranting about Agile here, but it could equally apply to design systems:
Agile and design is like looking at a picture through a keyhole. By slicing big things into smaller things, designers must work incrementally. Its this incrementalism that can lead to what I call the ‘Frankensteining’ of a digital product or service.
The Bureau of Suspended Objects
200 discarded objects from a dump in San Francisco, meticulously catalogued, researched, and documented by Jenny Odell. The result is something more revealing than most pre-planned time capsule projects …although this project may be somewhat short-lived as it’s hosted on Tumblr.
Learn Vanilla JS
Chris Ferdinandi is a machine!
A vanilla JS roadmap, along with learning resources and project ideas to help you get started.
Warp and Weft — Paul Robert Lloyd
Paul was at the Material conference in Iceland too, and we had some good chats. Here, he speaks his brains with Deep Thoughts prompted by the event.
I really get where he’s coming from when he says that “certain websites feel more ‘webby’ than others”, but it sure is tricky to nail down.
I, Maintainer
Maintaining an open source project is a rollercoaster ride with high peaks and very low troughs.
Release frequency is down. Questions increasingly go unanswered. Issues remain in a triage, unresolved state. Uncertainty and frustration brew within the community room.
Brian’s experience with Pattern Lab very much mirrors Mark’s experience with Fractal. The pressure. The stress. But there’s also the community.
A maintainer must keep the needs of their project, their community, and their own needs in constant harmony.
This is hard!
BBC Computer Literacy Project Archive
Here’s a treasure trove of eighties nerd nostalgia:
In the 1980s, the BBC explored the world of computing in The Computer Literacy Project. They commissioned a home computer (the BBC Micro) and taught viewers how to program.
The Computer Literacy Project chronicled a decade of information technology and was a milestone in the history of computing in Britain, helping to inspire a generation of coders.
Architecting the uncertain - Getting started with Agile Software Architecture
Some ideas on the best of use of time in sprint zero of an agile project.
- Understand your context
- Identify risks
- Understand the business process
- Get testing infrastructure
- Understand quality attributes
- Get to know the people
- Prepare an initial product backlog
- Build a walking skeleton/spike
- Build a learning backlog
Acephalic Agile—worse than Waterfall? - Oliver Wyman Labs: Technical
Agile itself provides us with the ability and opportunity to correct course, it allows us to steer, but it does nothing as such to help us steer correctly.
This observation about (some) agile projects is worryingly familiar:
I was suddenly seized by a horrible thought: what if this new-found agility was used, not teleologically to approach the right outcome over the course of a project, but simply to enshrine the right of middle management to change their minds, to provide a methodological license for arbitrary management? At least under a Waterfall regime they had to apologise when they departed from the plan. With Agile they are allowed, in principle, to make as many changes of direction as they like. But what if Agile was used merely as a license to justify keeping the team in the office night after night in a never-ending saga of rapidly accumulating requirements and dizzying changes of direction? And what if the talk of developer ‘agility’ was just a way of softening up developers for a life of methodologically sanctioned pliability? In short, what if Agile turned out to be worse than Waterfall?
Back to Bradshaw’s / Paul Robert Lloyd
I really like getting Paul’s insights into building his Bradshaw’s Guide project. Here he shares his process for typography, images and geolocation.
Dealing with Technical & Design Debt - Breakfast Session - Agile Swap Shop (Brighton, England) | Meetup
If you’re a project manager anywhere near Brighton, put this event in your calendar for the morning of May 30th.
CodePen Projects Is Here! - CodePen Blog
Incredibly impressive work from the CodePen team—you can now edit entire projects in your web browser …and then deploy them to a live site!
Beyond Work
An ongoing photography project from Curtis:
Beyond Work tells stories about humans at work, with no judgement or glorification. It’s an attempt at unearthing the social, cultural and functional world of work, that’s become invisible in everyday life.
Side Projects – AVC
I think the move away from side projects toward doing a startup day one is not all good. There was something great about the ability to experiment with an idea before committing to it and before sucking other people’s money into it.
The toxic side of free. Or: how I lost the love for my side project (part 1)
Have a read through all of Remy’s posts on his frustrating—but still rewarding—time running JS Bin.
Projectors don’t lie.
I’ve always liked testing on the crappiest mobile phones in the device lab—it feels like an honest stress test. I quite like the idea of using a crappy projector for the same reason.
The Pastry Box Project: Finish your projects
Words of wisdom from Seb when it comes to personal projects: finish what you start.
Most people don’t finish their projects so simply by getting it done, you’re way ahead of the crowd.