Ambient reassurance is the experience of small, unplanned moments of interaction with colleagues that provide reassurance that you’re on the right track. They provide encouragement and they help us to maintain self belief in those moments where we are liable to lapse into unproductive self doubt or imposter syndrome.
In hindsight I realise, these moments flowed naturally in an office environment.
Before the hagiographical praise for working with an iPad Pro, Robin nails the fundamental shape of the design process:
I had forgotten that there are two modes of design, just as there is in writing.
The first mode is understanding the problem, getting a ten-thousand foot view of the land. It’s getting people to acknowledge that this really is the problem we need to agree upon. This work needs to happen in a sketchbook in the form of messy, back-of-the-napkin drawings or in writing. All this helps you to form a proper argument and focus your thoughts.
The second mode of design is taking that ten-thousand foot view and zooming all the way in to the hairs on the back of the rabbit; figuring out the precise UI and components, the copywriting, the animations, the everything else. This should be done in a design tool like Figma or Sketch. And this is when we should be talking about color palettes, icons, design systems, and consistency.
The problem with almost all design work is that first phase never really happens. People don’t take that ten thousand foot view of the problem and are focusing instead on the pixels; they’re trapped by the system they know too well.
Yes, yes, yes! Spot on:
I think people get stuck in that second mode because productivity in design is often tied to “how many pages or frames did I design today?” when productivity should instead be thought of as “how did my understanding of the problem change?
Some good writing advice in here:
- Spell out your acronyms.
- Use active voice, not passive voice.
- Fewer commas. More periods.
Look, employers are always free to – and should! – evaluate the work product produced by employees. But they don’t have to surveil someone’s every move or screenshot their computer every five minutes to do so. That’s monitoring the inputs. Monitor the outputs instead, and you’ll have a much healthier, saner relationship.
If you hire smart, capable people and trust them to do good work – surprise-surprise – people will return the sentiment deliver just that! The irony of setting up these invasive surveillance regimes is that they end up causing the motivation to goof off to beat the very systems that were setup to catch such behavior.
This is for everyone at Clearleft, but I’m sharing it here for you too.
Here, then, is my speculation. Work is something we struggle to get and strive to keep. We love-hate it (usually not in equal measure). Sometimes it seems meaningless. I’m told this is the case even for surgeons, teachers and disaster-relief workers: those with jobs whose worth seems indisputable. For the mere facilitators, the obscure cogs in the machinery of the modern economy whose precise function and value it takes some effort to ascertain, the meaning in what we do often seems particularly elusive (I should know). I contend, however, that while our lives need to be meaningful, our work does not; it only has to be honest and useful. And if someone is voluntarily paying you to do something, it’s probably useful at least to them.
I’m so, so happy that Trys has joined us at Clearleft!
Here, he recounts his first day, which just happened to coincide with an introductory UX workshop that went really well.
This is an excellent initiative by the Dutch Fronteers group to have professional web developers represented in W3C working groups. In this particular case, they’re funding Rachel for the CSS working group. This sets a great precedent—I really hope the W3C goes for it!
Amber gave a lightning talk about pair programming at the Beyond Tellerrand Düsseldorf side event. Here is the transcript of that presentation.
The fact that everyone has different personalities, means pairing with others shouldn’t be forced upon anyone, and even if people do pair, there is no set time limit or a set way to do so.
So, there’s no roadmap. There’s no step-by-step guide in a readme file to successfully install pair programming
If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to be a fly on the wall at a CSS Working Group meeting, Richard has the inside scoop.
The consensus building is vital. Representatives from all the major browsers were in the room, collaborating closely by proposing ideas and sharing implementations. But most fundamentally they were agreeing together what should go in the specifications, because what goes in the specs is what gets built and ends up in the hands of users.
This looks like an interesting network-level approach to routing around the censorship of internet-hostile governments like China, Turkey, Australia, and the UK.
Rather than trying to hide individual proxies from censors, refraction brings proxy functionality to the core of the network, through partnership with ISPs and other network operators. This makes censorship much more costly, because it prevents censors from selectively blocking only those servers used to provide Internet freedom. Instead, whole networks outside the censored country provide Internet freedom to users—and any encrypted data exchange between a censored nation’s Internet and a participating friendly network can become a conduit for the free flow of information.
I love seeing people go from Codebar to full-time dev work. It’s no surprise in Zara’s case—she’s an excellent front-end developer.
A series of posts on the decisions and trade-offs involved in being a tech lead:
I think good tech leads spend a lot of their time somewhere in between the two extremes, adjusting the balance as circumstances demand.
There’s something very endearing about this docudrama retelling of the story of the web.
Did you know that Ilya’s book was available in its entirety online? I didn’t. But now that I do, I think it’s time I got stuck in and tried to understand the low-level underpinnings of the internet and the web.
From twenty years ago, a look back at the origins of the internet, written by its creators.
The Working Draft podcast is usually in German, but this episode is in English. It was recorded in a casual way by a bunch of people soaking up the sun sitting outside the venue at Beyond Tellerrand. Initially that was PPK and Chris, but then I barged in half way through. Good fun …if you’re into nerdy discussions about browsers, standards, and the web. And the sound quality isn’t too bad, considering the circumstances under which this was recorded.
I had the great honour of being invited to speak on the 200th edition of the Working Draft podcast (there are a few sentences in German at the start, and then it switches into English).
I had a lot of fun talking about indie web building blocks (rel=me, indieauth, webmention, h-entry, etc.). Best of all, while I was describing these building blocks, one of the hosts started implementing them!
It’s all about the signalling.
This is quite an astounding piece of writing. Robert Lucky imagines the internet of things mashed up with online social networking …but this was published in 1999!