Link tags: ua

The design systems between us. — Ethan Marcotte

Smart thoughts from Ethan on how design systems can cement your existing ways of working, but can’t magically change how collaboration works at your organisation.

Modern digital teams rarely discuss decisions in terms of the collaborative costs they incur. It’s tempting—and natural!—to see design- or engineering-related decisions in isolation: that selecting Vue as a front-end framework only impacts the engineering team, or that migrating to Figma only impacts designers. But each of these changes the way that team works, which impacts how other teams will work and collaborate with them.

On dependency | RobWeychert.com V7

I’m very selective about how I depend on other people’s work in my personal projects. Here are the factors I consider when evaluating dependencies.

• Complexity How complex is it, who absorbs the cost of that complexity, and is that acceptable?
• Comprehensibility Do I understand how it works, and if not, does that matter?
• Reliability How consistently and for how long can I expect it to work?

I really like Rob’s approach to choosing a particular kind of dependency when working on the web:

When I’m making things, that’s how I prefer to depend on others and have them depend on me: by sharing strong, simple ideas as a collective, and recombining them in novel ways with rigorous specificity as individuals.

Easily rename your Git default branch from master to main - Scott Hanselman

Nice and straightforward. Locally:

git branch -m master main git push -u origin main

Then on the server:

git branch -m master main git branch -u origin/main

On github.com, go into the repo’s settings and update the default branch.

Thanks for this, Scott!

P.S. Don’t read the comments.

Why I hate the log graph, and you should too - Geek in Sydney

I must admit I’ve been wincing a little every time I see a graph with a logarithmic scale in a news article about COVID-19. It takes quite a bit of cognitive work to translate to a linear scale and get the real story.

An Event Apart Human-Centered Design - Web Design & UX Conference

I’ll be speaking at this online version of An Event Apart on July 20th, giving a brand new talk called Design Principles For The Web—’twould be lovely to see you then!

Designing and developing on the web can feel like a never-ending crusade against the unknown. Design principles are one way of unifying your team to better fight this battle. But as well as the design principles specific to your product or service, there are core principles underpinning the very fabric of the World Wide Web itself. Together, we’ll dive into applying these design principles to build websites that are resilient, performant, accessible, and beautiful.

Why we at $FAMOUS_COMPANY Switched to $HYPED_TECHNOLOGY

Ultimately, however, our decision to switch was driven by our difficulty in hiring new talent for $UNREMARKABLE_LANGUAGE, despite it being taught in dozens of universities across the United States. Our blog posts on $PRACTICAL_OPEN_SOURCE_FRAMEWORK seemed to get fewer upvotes when posted on Reddit as well, cementing our conviction that our technology stack was now legacy code.

This is all just mwah—chef’s kiss!—perfect:

Every metric that matters to us has increased substantially from the rewrite, and we even identified some that were no longer relevant to us, such as number of bugs, user frustration, and maintenance cost.

Is it time for a Web Performance rebrand? – Simon Hearne

I think Simon is onto something here. While the word “performance” means something amongst devs, it’s too vague to be useful when communicating with other disciplines. I like the idea of using the more descriptive “page speed” or “site speed” in those situations.

Web Performance and Web Performance Optimization are still valid and descriptive terms for our industry, but we might benefit from a change to our language when working with others. The language we use could be critical to the success of making the web a faster and more accessible place.

Mando | Luke Dorny

1. Which jig will be next?
2. What instrument?
3. What shirt will he wear next?
4. Will a shirt make a repeat appearance?
5. Will he shave his wiseman beard?
6. Possibly a haircut or trim?

Performance, security, and ethics: influencing effectively

I wrote something recently about telling the story of performance. Sue Loh emphasis the importance of understanding what makes people tick:

Performance engineers need to be an interesting mix of data-lovers and people-whisperers.

Visual Design Inspiration from Agency Websites–And Other Tangential Observations | Jim Nielsen’s Weblog

Tyring to do make screenshots of agency websites is tricky if the website is empty HTML with everything injected via JavaScript.

Granted, agencies are usually the ones pushing the boundaries. “Pop” and “pizazz” are what sell for many of them (i.e. “look what we can do!”) Many of these sites pushed the boundaries of what you can do in the browser, and that’s cool. I like seeing that kind of stuff.

But if you asked me what agency websites inspired both parts me, I’d point to something like Clearleft or Paravel. To me, they strike a great balance of visual design with the craft of building for an accessible, universal web.

Indoor Voices 🤫🤫🤫

A group blog by a whole bunch of people who are staying at home.

It’s hard to believe, but there was a time where the internet was just full of casual websites posting random stuff. And you’d go to them maybe even multiple times a day to see if they had posted any new stories. It was something we all did when we were bored at our desks, at our jobs. Now there are no more desks. But there are still blogs.

Prioritising Requirements | Trys Mudford

Over the past few years, I’ve given quite a few workshops and talks on evaluating technology. This methodical approach to evaluation and prioritisation from Trys is right up my alley!

In any development project, there is a point at which one must decide on the tech stack. For some, that may feel like a foregone conclusion, dictated by team appetite and experience.

Even if the decision seems obvious, it’s always worth sense-checking your thought process. Along with experience and gut-feelings, we also have blind-spots and biases.

I feel like there’s a connection here to having good design principles—the kind that explicitly value one facet over another.

Quarantine Book Club

Join your favorite authors on Zoom where you can have spirited discussions from the privacy of our own quarantined space!

A great initiative from the folks at Mule Design. As well as chatting to talented authors, you can also chat to me: this Thursday at 4pm UTC I’ll be discussing Resilient Web Design.

The 3 Laws of Serverless - Burke Holland

“Serverless”, is a buzzword. We can’t seem to agree on what it actaully means, so it ends up meaning nothing at all. Much like “cloud” or “dynamic” or “synergy”. You just wait for the right time in a meeting to drop it, walk to the board and draw a Venn Diagram, and then just sit back and wait for your well-deserved promotion.

That’s very true, and I do not like the term “serverless” for the rather obvious reason that it’s all about servers (someone else’s servers, that is). But these three principles are handy for figuring out if you’re building with in a serverlessy kind of way:

1. You have no knowledge of the underlying system where your code runs.
2. Scaling is an intrinsic attribute of the technology; so much so that it just happens automatically.
3. You only pay for what you use.

Abstraction; scale; consumption.

Selectors Explained

I can see this coming in very handy at Codebar—pop any CSS selector in here and get a plain English explanation of what it’s doing.

Software and Home Renovation | Jim Nielsen’s Weblog

Lessons for web development from a home renovation project:

• Greenfield Projects Are Everyone’s Favorite
• The Last Person’s Work Is Always Bewildering
• It’s All About the Trade-Offs
• It ALWAYS Takes Longer Than You Think
• Communication, Communication, Communication!

And there’s this:

You know those old homes people love because they’re unique, have lasted for decades, and have all that character? In contrast, you have these modern subdivision homes that, while shiny and new, are often bland and identical (and sometimes shoddily built). node_modules is like the suburbia/subdivision of modern web development: it seems nice and fancy today, and most everyone is doing it, but in 30 years everyone will hate the idea. They’ll all need to be renovated or torn down. Meanwhile, the classical stuff that’s still standing from 100 years ago lives on but nobody seems to be building houses that way anymore for some reason. Similarly, the first website ever is still viewable in all modern web browsers. But many websites built last year on last year’s bleeding edge tech already won’t work in a browser.

Calling for a More-Than-Human Politics - Anab Jain - Medium

It may be the end of the world as we know it, but other worlds are possible.

“Let us Calculate!”: Leibniz, Llull, and the Computational Imagination – The Public Domain Review

The characteristica universalis and the calculus racionator of Leibniz.

Emma Willard’s Maps of Time

The beautiful 19th century data visualisations of Emma Willard unfold in this immersive piece by Susan Schulten.

Same HTML, Different CSS

Like a little mini CSS Zen Garden, here’s one compenent styled five very different ways.

Crucially, the order of the markup doesn’t consider the appearance—it’s concerned purely with what makes sense semantically. And now with CSS grid, elements can be rearranged regardless of source order.

CSS is powerful and capable of doing amazingly beautiful things. Let’s embrace that and keep the HTML semantical instead of adapting it to the need of the next design change.