Portrait of the genius as a young man.
It is fortifying to remember that the very idea of artificial intelligence was conceived by one of the more unquantifiably original minds of the twentieth century. It is hard to imagine a computer being able to do what Alan Turing did.
Patterns of frost on the front of cars this morning.
I’m usually building one of three things: a demo, a prototype, or a minimum viable product (MVP).
I’ve seen some confusion over these terms — some people seem to use them somewhat interchangeable. But they’re not the same thing, and building one when you need another can cause problems.
This is a very useful distinction!
This is a great proposal that would make the Cache API even more powerful by adding metadata to cached items, like when it was cached, how big it is, and how many times it’s been retrieved.
From Xerox PARC to the World Wide Web:
The internet did not use a visual spatial metaphor. Despite being accessed through and often encompassed by the desktop environment, the internet felt well and truly placeless (or perhaps everywhere). Hyperlinks were wormholes through the spatial metaphor, allowing a user to skip laterally across directories stored on disparate servers, as well as horizontally, deep into a file system without having to access the intermediate steps. Multiple windows could be open to the same website at once, shattering the illusion of a “single file” that functioned as a piece of paper that only one person could hold. The icons that a user could arrange on the desktop didn’t have a parallel in online space at all.
Here’s the latest wonderful project from Ariel—explore microscopic specimens from Antarctica:
The collected Antarctic microbes were found living within glaciers, under the sea ice, next to frozen lakes, and in subglacial ponds.
Beautiful!
This is an interesting looking proposal for CSS grid to be ever so slightly extended to enable Masonry-style auto placement—something’s that tantalisingly close right now, but still requires some JavaScript to do calculations.
This is quite remarkable. On the surface, it’s a short article about the Y2K bug, but the hypertextual footnotes go deeper and deeper into memory, loss, grief …I’m very moved by the rawness and honesty nested within.
Well, this is rather lovely! The Paravel gang have made an atmospheric web book out of a Sherlock Holmes story (yay for the public domain!).
I made an offhand remark at the Clearleft Christmas party and Trys ran with it…
If a human civilization beyond Earth ever comes into being, this will be unprecedented in any historical context we might care to invoke—unprecedented in recorded history, unprecedented in human history, unprecedented in terrestrial history, and so on. There have been many human civilizations, but all of these civilizations have arisen and developed on the surface of Earth, so that a civilization that arises or develops away from the surface of Earth would be unprecedented and in this sense absolutely novel even if the institutional structure of a spacefaring civilization were the same as the institutional structure of every civilization that has existed on Earth. For this civilizational novelty, some human novelty is a prerequisite, and this human novelty will be expressed in the mythology that motivates and sustains a spacefaring civilization.
A deep dive into deep time:
Record-keeping technologies introduce an asymmetry into history. First language, then written language, then printed books, and so and so forth. Should human history extend as far into the deep future as it now extends into the deep past, the documentary evidence of past beliefs will be a daunting archive, but in an archive so vast there would be a superfluity of resources to trace the development of human mythologies in a way that we cannot now trace them in our past. We are today creating that archive by inventing the technologies that allow us to preserve an ever-greater proportion of our activities in a way that can be transmitted to our posterity.
If you add another advertisement to your pages, you generate more revenue. If you track your users better, now you can deliver tailored ads and your conversion rates are higher. If you restrict users from leaving your walled garden ecosystem, now you get all the juice from whatever attention they have.
The question is: At which point do we reach the breaking point?
And I think the answer is: We are very close.
Facebook. Twitter. Medium. All desparate to withhold content they didn’t even create until you cough up your personal details.
I was at An Event Apart in San Francisco last week. It was the last one of the year, and also my last conference of the year.
I managed to do a bit of liveblogging during the event. Combined with the liveblogging I did during the other two Events Apart that I attended this year—Seattle and Chicago—that makes a grand total of seventeen liveblogged presentations!
For my part, I gave my talk on Going Offline. Time to retire that talk now.
Here’s what I wrote when I first gave the talk back in March at An Event Apart Seattle:
I was quite nervous about this talk. It’s very different from my usual fare. Usually I have some big sweeping arc of history, and lots of pretentious ideas joined together into some kind of narrative arc. But this talk needed to be more straightforward and practical. I wasn’t sure how well I would manage that brief.
I’m happy with how it turned out. I had quite a few people come up to me to say how much they appreciated how I was explaining the code. That was very nice to hear—I really wanted this talk to be approachable for everyone, even though it included plenty of JavaScript.
The dates for next year’s Events Apart have been announced, and I’ll be speaking at three of them:
The question is, do I attempt to deliver another practical code-based talk or do I go back to giving a high-level talk about ideas and principles? Or, if I really want to challenge myself, can I combine the two into one talk without making a Frankenstein’s monster?
Come and see me at An Event Apart in 2020 to find out.
Pelicans at La Jolla.
Spent the afternoon playing tunes at a house session outside San Diego. 🎶
Checked in at Fletcher Cove
Thanks for showing me around the @InternetArchive today, @CaitlinOlson!
(And thanks for arranging it, @textfiles!)
Checked in at La Taqueria
For a closed system, those kinds of open connections are deeply dangerous. If anyone on Instagram can just link to any old store on the web, how can Instagram — meaning Facebook, Instagram’s increasingly-overbearing owner — tightly control commerce on its platform? If Instagram users could post links willy-nilly, they might even be able to connect directly to their users, getting their email addresses or finding other ways to communicate with them. Links represent a threat to closed systems.
Anil Dash on the war on hyperlinks.
It may be presented as a cost-saving measure, or as a way of reducing the sharing of untrusted links. But it is a strategy, designed to keep people from the open web, the place where they can control how, and whether, someone makes money off of an audience. The web is where we can make sites that don’t abuse data in the ways that Facebook properties do.
Day two of An Event Apart San Francisco is finishing with a talk from Brad on design systems (so hot right now!):
You can have a killer style guide website, a great-looking Sketch library, and robust documentation, but if your design system isn’t actually powering real software products, all that effort is for naught. At the heart of a successful design system is a collection of sturdy, robust front-end components that powers other applications’ user interfaces. In this talk, Brad will cover all that’s involved in establishing a technical architecture for your design system. He’ll discuss front-end workshop environments, CSS architecture, implementing design tokens, popular libraries like React and Vue.js, deploying design systems, managing updates, and more. You’ll come away knowing how to establish a rock-solid technical foundation for your design system.
I will attempt to liveblog the Frostmeister…
“Design system” is an unfortunate name …like “athlete’s foot.” You say it to someone and they think they know what you mean, but nothing could be further from the truth.
A design system is a set of rules enforced by culture, process and tooling that govern how your organization creates products.
A design system the story of how an organisation gets things done.
When Brad talks to companies, he asks “Have you got a design system?” They invariably say they do …and then point to a Sketch library. When the focus goes on the design side of the process, the production side can suffer. There’s a gap between the comp and the live site. The heart and soul of a design system is a code library of reusable UI components.
Brad’s going to talk through the life cycle of a project.
He begins with selling in a design system. That can start with an interface inventory. This surfaces visual differences. But even if you have, say, buttons that look the same, the underlying code might not be consistent. Each one of those buttons represents time and effort. A design system gives you a number of technical benefits:
Once you’ve explained the benefits, it’s time to kick off.
Brad asks “What’s yer tech stack?” There are often a lot of tech stacks. And you know what? Users don’t care. What they see is one brand. That’s the promise of a design system: a unified interface.
How do you make a design system deal with all the different tech stacks? You don’t (at least, not yet). Start with a high priority project. Use that as a pilot project for the design system. Dan talks about these projects as being like television pilots that could blossom into a full season.
Where to build the design system? The tech stack under the surface is often an order of magnitude greater than the UI code—think of node modules, for example. That’s why Brad advocates locking off that area and focusing on what he calls a frontend workshop environment. Think of the components as interactive comps. There are many tools for this frontend workshop environment: Pattern Lab, Storybook, Fractal, Basalt.
How are you going to code this? Brad gets frontend teams in a room together and they fight. Have you noticed that developers have opinions about things? Brad asks questions. What are your design principles? Do you use a CSS methodology? What tools do you use? Spaces or tabs? Then Brad gets them to create one component using the answers to those questions.
Guidelines are great but you need to enforce them. There are lots of tools to automate coding style.
Then there’s CSS architecture. Apparently we write our styles in React now. Do you really want to tie your CSS to one environment like that?
You know what’s really nice? A good ol’ sturdy cacheable CSS file. It can come in like a fairy applying all the right styles regardless of tech stack.
Brad likes to break things down using his atomic design vocabulary. He echoes what Mina said earlier:
Embrace the snowflakes.
The idea of a design system is not to build 100% of your UI entirely from components in the code library. The majority, sure. But it’s unrealistic to expect everything to come from the design system.
When Brad puts pages together, he pulls in components from the code library but he also pulls in one-off snowflake components where needed.
The design system informs our product design. Our product design informs the design system.
—Jina
Brad has seen graveyards of design systems. But if you make a virtuous circle between the live code and the design system, the design system has a much better chance of not just surviving, but thriving.
So you go through those pilot projects, each one feeding more and more into the design system. Lather, rinse, repeat. The first one will be time consuming, but each subsequent project gets quicker and quicker as you start to get the return on investment. Velocity increases over time.
It’s like tools for a home improvement project. The first thing you do is look at your current toolkit. If you don’t have the tool you need, you invest in buying that new tool. Now that tool is part of your toolkit. Next time you need that tool, you don’t have to go out and buy one. Your toolkit grows over time.
The design system code must be intuitive for developers using it. This gets into the whole world of API design. It’s really important to get this right—naming things consistently and having predictable behaviour.
Mina talked about loose vs. strict design systems. Open vs. locked down. Make your components composable so they can adapt to future requirements.
You can bake best practices into your design system. You can make accessibility a requirement in the code.
What does it mean to “launch” a design system?
A design system isn’t a project with an end, it’s the origin story of a living and evolving product that’ll serve other products.
—Nathan Curtis
There’s a spectrum of integration—how integrated the design system is with the final output. The levels go from:
Chris Coyier in The Great Divide talked about how wide the spectrum of front-end development is. Brad, for example, is very much at the front of the front end. Consumable UI components can create a bridge between the back of the front end and the front of the front end.
Consumable UI components need to be bundled, packaged, and published.
Now we’ve entered a new mental space. We’ve gone from “Let’s build a website” to “Let’s maintain a product which other products use as a dependency.” You need to start thinking about things like semantic versioning. A version number is a promise.
A 1.0.0 designation comes with commitment. Freewheeling days of unstable early foundations are behind you.
—Nathan Curtis
What do you do when a new tech stack comes along? How does your design system serve the new hotness. It gets worse: you get products that aren’t even web based—iOS, Android, etc.
That’s where design tokens come in. You can define your design language in a platform-agnostic way.
This is hard.
You won’t do it all at once. That’s okay. Baby steps.