Tags: travel

August was a month of travels. You can press play on that month’s map to follow the journey.

But check out the map for September too because the travels continue. This time my adventures are confined to Europe.

I’m in Spain. Jessica and I flew into Madrid on Saturday. The next day we took a train ride across the Extremaduran landscape to Cáceres, our home for the week.

This is like the sequel to our Sicilian trip. We’re both working remotely. We just happen to do be doing it from a beautiful old town with amazing cuisine.

We’re in a nice apartment that—crucially—has good WiFi. It’s right on the main square, but it’s remarkably quiet.

There’s a time difference of one hour with Brighton. Fortunately everything in Spain happens at least an hour later than it does at home. Waking up. Lunch. Dinner. Everything is time-shifted so that I’m on the same schedule as my colleagues.

I swear I’m more productive working this way. Maybe it’s the knowledge that tapas of Iberican ham await me after work, but I’m getting a lot done this week.

And when the working week is done, the fun begins. Cáceres is hosting its annual Irish fleadh this weekend.

I’ve always wanted to go to it, but it’s quite a hassle to get here just for a weekend. Combining it with a week of remote work makes it more doable.

I’m already having a really nice time here and the tunes haven’t even started yet.

Being in Croatia last week got me thinking about the country’s history.

I remember the break-up of Yugoslavia, but I was quite out of touch with the news for a while back in 1991. That’s because I was hitch-hiking and busking around Europe with my musical partner Polly from Cornwall. I had my mandolin, she had her fiddle.

We went from Ireland to England to France to Germany to Czechoslovakia (still a single country back then), to Austria to Italy, back to France, and back to England. A loop around Europe.

We set off on August 21st, 1991. The only reason I know the date is because I remember we had been to a gig in Cork the night before.

Sonic Youth were playing in Sir Henry’s (a great venue that no longer exists). The support band was a group from Seattle called Nirvana. I remember that some of my friends decided to skip the support band to stay in the pub next door until Sonic Youth came on because the pints were cheaper there.

By the time Polly and I got back from our travels, Nirvana were the biggest band on the planet. It all happened very quickly.

The same could be said for the situation in Yugoslavia.

I remember when we were stuck for a day at a petrol station in the alps trying to get from Austria to Italy. There was a bureau de change listing currency exchange rates. This was before the euro came in so there were lots of different currencies; pounds, francs, lira, deutsche marks. Then there was the listing for the Yugoslav dinar. It read:

• We buy: 00.00
• We sell: 00.00

That really struck me, seeing the situation summarised so clinically.

But what really got to me was an encounter in Vienna.

Polly and I did well in that city. On our first evening of busking, not only did we make some good money, but we also met a local folk singer. This young man very generously took us in and put us up in his flat.

At some point during our stay, we were on one of the city’s trams. That’s when we met another young couple who were on the road. Somehow there was always a connection between fellow travellers. I can’t remember who spoke to who first, but we bonded straight away.

It soon became clear that our situations were only superfically similar. This was a young couple deeply in love. One of them was Serbian. The other was Croatian. It wasn’t safe for either of them back where they used to call home.

I could return home at any point. I always knew that when I was sleeping rough, or struggling to make enough money to eat.

They couldn’t return. All they wanted was to be together somewhere safe. They started asking us about Ireland and England. “Do you think they’d give us asylum?” they asked with so much hope. It broke my heart to see their desperation, the pleading look in their eyes.

I felt so useless. I wished there was something I could’ve done for them.

I think about them a lot.

He drew a deep breath. ‘Well, I’m back,’ he said.

I know how you feel, Samwise Gamgee.

I have returned from my travels—a week aboard the Queen Mary 2 crossing the Atlantic, followed by a weekend in New York, finishing with a week in Saint Augustine, Florida.

The Atlantic crossing was just as much fun as last time. In fact it was better because this time Jessica and I got to share the experience with our dear friends Dan and Sue.

There was dressing up! There was precarious ballet! There were waves! There were even some dolphins!

The truth is that this kind of Atlantic crossing is a bit like cosplaying a former age of travel. You get out of it what you put it into it. If you’re into LARPing as an Edwardian-era traveller, you’re going to have a good time.

We got very into it. Dressing up for dinner. Putting on a tux for the gala night. Donning masks for the masquerade evening.

It’s actually quite a practical way of travelling if you don’t mind being cut off from all digital communication for a week (this is a feature, not a bug). You adjust your clock by one hour most nights so that by the time you show up in New York, you’re on the right timezone with zero jetlag.

That was just as well because we had a packed weekend of activities in New York. By pure coincidence, two separate groups of friends were also in town from far away. We all met up and had a grand old time. Brunch in Tribeca; a John Cale concert in Prospect Park; the farmer’s market in Union Square; walking the high line …good times with good friends.

New York was hot, but not as hot as what followed in Florida. A week lazing about on Saint Augustine beach. I ate shrimp every single day. I regret nothing.

We timed our exit just right. We flew out of Florida before the tropical storm hit. Then we landed in Gatwick right before the air-traffic control chaos erupted.

I had one day of rest before going back to work.

Well, I say “work”, but the first item in my calendar was speaking at Web Summer Camp in Croatia. Back to the airport.

The talk went well, and I got to attend a performance workshop by Harry. But best of all was the location. Opatija is an idyllic paradise. Imagine crossing a web conference with White Lotus, but in a good way. It felt like a continuation of Florida, but with more placid clear waters.

But now I’m really back. And fortunately the English weather is playing along by being unseasonably warm . It’s as if the warm temperatures are following me around. I like it.

I managed to get out and play in trad sessions for four days straight: Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday.

Today I rest. Or rather, I pack.

There won’t be any Irish music sessions in my calendar for at least the next two weeks. There won’t be much of anything in my calendar. I’m about to be incommunicado as I travel to Amerikay on the wide Atlantic ocean.

You might have seen that video that’s been doing the rounds about how cruise ships got so big. I’m not going on a cruise. I’m going on a crossing. That video ends with:

There are over 320 cruise ships sailing around the world right now. But there’s only one ocean liner left. The Queen Mary 2.

That’s going to be my mode of transportation and my home for the next week.

Then I’ll be in New York for a weekend, followed by most of a week lying on St. Augustine beach in Florida.

All of my sparklines are about to flatline for a while: no blog posts, no links, no notes. I won’t have any internet access on board the ship.

Time for me to switch off my work email. I thought about setting up an autoresponder to let people know that I won’t be replying to their email for a few weeks. But then I thought, how is that any different from how I normally respond to email?

I’ve been immersing myself in musical activities recently.

Two weeks ago I was in the studio with Salter Cane. In three days, we managed to record eleven(!) songs! Not bad. We recorded everything live, treating the vocals as guide vocals. We’ve still got some overdubbing to do but we’re very happy with the productivity.

Being in a recording studio for days is intense. It’s an all-consuming activity that leaves you drained. And it’s not just the playing that’s exhausting—listening can be surprisingly hard work.

For those three days, I was pretty much offline.

Then the week after that, I was in Belfast all week for the trad festival. I’ve written up a report over on The Session. It was excellent! But again, it was all-consuming. Classes in the morning and sessions for the rest of the day.

I don’t post anything here in my journal for those two weeks. I didn’t read through my RSS subscriptions. I was quite offline.

I say “quite” offline, because the week after next I’m going to be really offline.

Remember when I took an ocean liner across the Atlantic four years ago? Well, to celebrate a milestone birthday for Jessica we’re going to do it again!

I’m really looking forward to it. And I feel like the recent musical immersions have been like training for the main event in the tournament of being completely cut off from the internet.

Every week of June sees me at a web event, but in a different capacity each time.

At the end of the first full week in June, I went to CSS Day in Amsterdam as an attendee. It was thought-provoking, as always. And it was great to catch up with my front-of-the-front-end friends.

Last week I went to Pixel Pioneers in Bristol as a speaker. Fortunately I was on first so I was able to get the speaking done with and enjoy the rest of the talks. It was a lovely little event and there was yet more catching up with old friends and making new ones.

This week is the big one. UX London is happening this week. This time I’m not there as an attendee or a speaker. I’m there as the curator and host.

On the one hand, I’m a bag of nerves. I’ve been preparing for this all year and now it’s finally happening. I keep thinking of all the things that could possibly go wrong.

On the other hand, I’m ridiculously excited. I know I should probably express some modesty, but looking at the line-up I’ve assembled, I feel an enormous sense of pride. I’m genuinely thrilled at the prospect of all those great talks and workshops.

Nervous and excited. Those are the two wolves inside me right now.

If you’re going to be at UX London, I hope that you’re equally excited (and not nervous). There are actually still some last-minute tickets available if you haven’t managed to get one yet.

See you there!

In just a couple of weeks, I’ll be heading to Bristol for Pixel Pioneers. The line-up looks really, really good …with the glaring exception of the opening talk, which I’ll be delivering. But once that’s done, I’m very much looking forward to enjoying the rest of the day’s talks.

There are still tickets available if you fancy joining me.

This will be my second time speaking at this conference. I spoke at the inaugural conference back in 2017 when I gave a talk called Evaluating Technology. This time my talk is called Declarative Design.

A few weeks back, Oliver asked me some questions about my upcoming talk. I figured I’d post my answers here…

Welcome back to Pixel Pioneers! You return with another keynote - how do you manage to stay so ever-enthusiastic about designing for the web?

Well, I’d say my enthusiasm is mixed with frustration. And that’s always been the case. Just as I’ve always found new things that excite me about the World Wide Web, there are just as many things that upset me.

But that’s okay. Both forces can be motivating. When I find myself writing a blog post or preparing a talk, the impetus might be “This is so cool! Check this out!” or it might be “This is so maddening! What’s happening!?” …or perhaps a mix of both.

But to answer your question, the World Wide Web never stays still so there’s always something to get excited about. Equally, the longer the web exists, the more sense it makes to examine the fundamental bedrock—HTML, accessibility,progressive enhancement—and see how they’re just as important as ever. And that’s also something to get excited about!

Without too many spoilers, what can we expect to take away from your talk?

I’m hoping to provide people with a lens that they can use to examine their tools, processes, and approaches to designing for the web. It’s a fairly crude lens—it divides the world into a binary split that I’ve borrowed from the world of programming; imperative and declarative languages. But it’s a surprisingly thought-provoking angle.

Along the way I’ll also be pointing out some of the incredible things that we can do with CSS now. In the past few years there’s been an explosion in capabilities.

But this won’t be a code-heavy presentation. It’s mostly about the ideas. I’ll be referencing some projects by other people that I’m very excited by.

What other web design and development tools, techniques and technologies are you currently most excited about?

Outside of the world of CSS—which is definitely where a lot of the most exciting developments are happening—I’m really interested in the View Transitions API. If it delivers on its promise, it could be a very useful nail in the coffin of uneccessary single page apps. But I’m a little nervous. Right now the implementation only works for single page apps, which makes it an incentive to use that model. I really, really hope that the multipage version ships soon.

But honestly, I probably get most excited about discovering some aspect of HTML that I wasn’t aware of. Even after all these years the language can still surprise me.

And on the flipside, what bugs you most about the web at the moment?

How much time have you got?

Seriously though, the thing that’s really bugged me for the past decade is the increasing complexity of “modern” frontend development when it isn’t driven by user needs. Yes, I’m talking about JavaScript frameworks like React and the assumption that everything should be a single page app.

Honestly, the mindset became so ubiquitous that I felt like I must be missing something. But no, the situation really has spiralled out of control, much to the detriment of end users.

Luckily we’re starting to see the pendulum swing back. The proponents of trickle-down developer convenience are having to finally admit that it’s bollocks.

I don’t care if the move back to making websites is re-labelled as “isomorphic server-rendered multi-page apps.” As long as we make sensible architectural decisions, that’s all that matters.

What’s next, Jeremy?

Right now I’m curating the line-up for this year’s UX London conference which is the week after Pixel Pioneers. As you know, conference curation is a lot of work, but it’s also very rewarding. I’m really proud of the line-up.

It’s been a while since the last season of the Clearleft podcast. I hope to remedy that soon. It takes a lot of effort to make even one episode, but again, it’s very rewarding.

I was up in Edinburgh for the past few days at the Design It; Build It conference.

I was supposed to come back on Saturday but then the train strikes were announced so I changed my travel plans to avoid crossing a picket line, which gave me an extra day to explore Auld Reekie.

I spoke at DIBI last year so this time I was there in a different capacity. I was the host. That meant introducing the speakers and asking them questions after their talks.

I’m used to hosting events now, what with UX London and Leading Design. But I still get nervous beforehand. At least with a talk you can rehearse and practice. With hosting, it’s all about being nimble and thinking on your feet.

I had to pay extra close attention to each talk, scribbling down potential questions to ask. It’s similar to the feeling I get when I’m liveblogging talks.

There were some line-up changes and schedule adjustments along the way, but everything went super smoothly. I pride myself on running a tight ship so the timings were spot-on.

When it came to the questions, I tried to probe under the skin of each presentation. For some talks, that involved talking shop—the finer points of user research or the design process, say. But for the big-picture talks, I made sure to get each speaker to defend their position. So after Dan Makoski’s kumbaya-under-capitalism talk, I gave him a good grilling. Same with Philip Lockwood-Holmes who gave me permission beforehand to be merciless with him.

It was all quite entertaining. Alas, I think I may have put the fear of God into the other speakers who saw me channeling my inner Jeremy Paxman. But they needn’t have worried. I also lobbed some softballs. Like when I asked Levon Sharrow from Patagonia if there was such thing as ethical consumption under capitalism.

I had fun, but I was also aware of that fine line between being clever and being an asshole. Even though part of my role was to play devil’s advocate, I tried to make sure I was never punching down.

All in all, an excellent couple of days spent in good company.

Hosting was hard work, but very rewarding. I’ve come to realise it’s one of those activities that comes relatively easy to me, but it is very hard (and stressful) for others. And I’m pretty gosh-darned good at it too, false modesty bedamned.

So if you’re running an event but the thought of hosting it fills you with dread, we should talk.

There are two kinds of time-travel stories.

There are time-travel stories that explore the many-worlds hypothesis. Going back in time and making a change forks the universe. But the universe is constantly forking anyway. So effectively the time travel is a kind of universe-hopping (there’s a big crossover here with the alternative history subgenre).

The problem with multiverse stories is that there’s always a reset available. No matter how bad things get, there’s a parallel universe where everything is hunky dory.

The other kind of time travel story explores the idea of a block universe. There is one single timeline.

This is what you’ll find in Tenet, for example, or for a beautiful reduced test case, the Ted Chiang short story What’s Expected Of Us. That gets straight to the heart of the biggest implication of a block universe—the lack of free will.

There’s no changing what has happened or what will happen. In fact, the very act of trying to change the past often turns out to be the cause of what you’re trying to prevent in the present (like in Twelve Monkeys).

I’ve often referred to these single-timeline stories as being like Greek tragedies. But only recently—as I’ve been reading quite a bit of Greek mythology—have I realised that the reverse is also true:

Greek tragedies are time-travel stories.

Hear me out…

Time-travel stories aren’t actually about physically travelling in time. That’s just a convenience for the important part—information travelling in time. That’s at the heart of most time-travel stories; informaton from the future travelling back to the past.

William Gibson’s The Peripheral—very much a many-worlds story with its alternate universe “stubs”—takes this to its extreme. Nothing phyiscal ever travels in time. But in an age of telecommuting, nothing has to. Our time travellers are remote workers.

That book also highlights the power dynamics inherent in information wealth. Knowledge of the future gives you an advantage that you can exploit in the past. This is what Mark Twain’s Connecticut yankee does in King Arthur’s court.

This power dynamic is brilliantly inverted in Octavia Butler’s brilliant Kindred. No amount of information can help you if your place in society is determined by the colour of your skin.

Anyway, the point is that information flow is what matters in time-travel stories. Therefore any story where information travels backwards in time is a time-travel story.

That includes any story with a prophecy. A prophecy is information about the future, like:

Oedipus will kill his father and marry his mother.

You can try to change your fate, but you’ll just end up triggering it instead.

Greek tragedies are time-travel stories.

Before The Situation, I used to work in the Clearleft studio quite a bit. Maybe I’d do a bit of work at home for an hour or two before heading in, but I’d spend most of my working day with my colleagues.

That all changed three years ago:

Clearleft is a remote-working company right now. I mean, that’s hardly surprising—just about everyone I know is working from home.

Clearleft has remained remote-first. We’ve still got our studio space, though we’ve cut back to just having one floor. But most of the time people are working from home. I still occasionally pop into the studio—I’m actually writing this in the studio right now—but mostly I work out of my own house.

It’s funny how the old ways of thinking have been flipped. If I want to get work done, I stay home. If I want to socialise, I go into the studio.

For a lot of the work I do—writing, podcasting, some video calls, maybe some coding—my home environment works better than the studio. In the Before Times I’d have to put on headphones to block out the distractions of a humming workplace. Of course I miss the serendipitous chats with my co-workers but that’s why it’s nice to still have the option of popping into the studio.

Jessica has always worked from home. Our flat isn’t very big but we’ve got our own separate spaces so we don’t disturb one another too much.

For a while now we’ve been thinking that we could just as easily work from another country. I was inspired by a (video) chat I had with Luke when he casually mentioned that he was in Cypress. Why not? As long as the internet connection is good, the location doesn’t make any difference to the work.

So Jessica and I spent the last week working in Ortygia, Sicily.

It was pretty much the perfect choice. It’s not a huge bustling city. In fact it was really quiet. But there was still plenty to explore—winding alleyways, beautiful old buildings, and of course plenty of amazing food.

The time difference was just one hour. We used the extra hour in the morning to go to the market to get some of the magnificent local fruits and vegetables to make some excellent lunches.

We made sure that we found an AirBnB place with a good internet connection and separate workspaces. All in all, it worked out great. And because we were there for a week, we didn’t feel the pressure to run around to try to see everything.

We spent the days working and the evenings having a nice sundowner appertivo followed by some pasta or seafood.

It was simultaneously productive and relaxing.

This time last year when I was looking back on 2021, I wrote:

2020 was the year of the virus. 2021 was the year of the vaccine …and the virus, obviously, but still it felt like the year we fought back. With science!

Science continued to win the battle in 2022. But it was messy. The Situation isn’t over yet, and everyone has different ideas about the correct levels of risk-taking.

It’s like when you’re driving and you think that everyone going faster than you is a maniac, and everyone going slower than you is an idiot.

The world opened up more in 2022. I was able to speak at more in-person events. I really missed that. I think I’m done with doing online talks.

There was a moment when I was speaking at Web Dev Conf in Bristol this year (a really nice little gathering), and during my presentation I was getting that response from the audience that you just don’t get with online talks, and I distinctly remember thinking, “Oh, I’ve really missed this!”

But like I said, The Situation isn’t over, and that makes things tricky for conferences. Most of the ones I spoke at or attended were doing their best to make things safe. CSS Day, Clarity, State Of The Browser: they all took measures to try to look out for everyone’s health.

For my part, I asked everyone attending dConstruct to take a COVID test the day before. Like I said at the time, I may have just been fooling myself with what might have been hygiene theatre, but like those other events, we all wanted to gather safely.

That can’t be said for the gigantic event in Berlin that I spoke at in Summer. There were tens of thousands of people in the venue. Inevitably, I—and others—caught COVID.

My bout of the ’rona wasn’t too bad, and I’m very glad that I didn’t pass it on to any family members (that’s been my biggest worry throughout The Situation). But it did mean that I wasn’t able to host UX London 2022.

That was a real downer. I spent much of 2022 focused on event curation: first UX London, and then dConstruct. I was really, really proud of the line-up I assembled for UX London so I was gutted not to be able to introduce those fabulous speakers in person.

Still, I got to host dConstruct, Leading Design, and Clarity, so 2022 was very much a bumper year for MCing—something I really, really enjoy.

Already I’ve got more of the same lined up for the first half of 2023: hosting Leading Design San Francisco in February and curating and hosting UX London in June.

I hope to do more speaking too. Alas, An Event Apart is no more, which is a real shame. But I hope there are other conferences out there that might be interested in what I have to say. If you’re organising one, get in touch.

Needless to say, 2022 was not a good year for world events. The callous and cruel invasion of Ukraine rightly dominated the news (sporting events and dead monarchs are not the defining events of the year). But even in the face of this evil, there’s cause for hope, seeing the galvanised response of the international community in standing up to Putin the bully.

In terms of more personal bad news, Jamie’s death is hard to bear.

I got to play lots of music in 2022. That’s something I definitely want to continue. In fact, 2023 kicked off with a great kitchen session yesterday evening—the perfect start to the year!

And I’ve got my health. That’s something I don’t take for granted.

One year ago, I wrote:

Maybe 2022 will turn out to be similar—shitty for a lot of people, and mostly unenventful for me. Or perhaps 2022 will be a year filled with joyful in-person activities, like conferences and musical gatherings. Either way, I’m ready.

For the most part, that played out. 2022 was thankfully fairly uneventful personally. And it was indeed a good year for in-person connections. I very much hope that continues in 2023.

My trip to California went well. It was bookended with a few days in San Diego on either end. I relished the opportunity to hang with family and soak up the sunshine.

In the middle was my outing to San Francisco for An Event Apart. There were some great talks: Krystal talking about onboarding, Miriam blowing my mind with cascade layers, Eric diving deep into the :has() selector, and David closing out the show with a superb call to arms.

I gave my talk on declarative design at the very start of the event, just the way I like it. I was able to relax and enjoy all the other talks without having mine on my mind.

The talk went down well. I thought maybe I might have the chance to repeat it at another An Event Apart sometime in 2023.

But that won’t happen. An Event Apart has closed its doors:

Seventeen years ago, in December 2005, we held our first conference in Philadelphia. The event we just held in San Francisco was our last.

Whenever I was invited to speak at An Event Apart, I always responded in the affirmative and always said it was an honour to be asked. I meant it every time.

It wasn’t just me. Ask anyone who’s spoken at An Event Apart. They’ll all tell you the same thing. It was an honour. It was also a bit intimidating. There was a definite feeling that you had to bring your A game. And so, everyone did. Of course that just contributed to the event’s reputation which only reinforced the pressure to deliver a top-notch presentation.

I’m really going to miss An Event Apart. I mean, I get why all good things must come to an end (see also: dConstruct), but it feels like the end of an era.

My first time speaking at An Event Apart was in 2007. My last time was in San Francisco this month.

Thank you, Eric, Jeffrey, Toby, Marci, and the entire An Event Apart crew. It has been my privilege to play a small part in your story.

2007

Chicago

Be Pure. Be Vigilant. Behave

2008

San Francisco

Pattern In The Process

2009

Boston

Future Shock Treatment

2010

Seattle, Boston, Minneapolis, Washington DC, San Diego

Paranormal Interactivity

2011

Seattle, Boston, Atlanta, Minneapolis, Washington DC, San Francisco

Design Principles

2012

Austin

The Spirit Of The Web

2013

Atlanta, Washington DC, Chicago, Austin, San Francisco

The Long Web

2014

Seattle, San Diego, Chicago, Orlando, San Francisco

Enhance!

2015

Seattle, Austin, San Francisco

Resilience

2016

Seattle, Boston, Orlando, San Francisco

Resilience, Evaluating Technology

2017

Seattle, Denver

Evaluating Technology

2018

Seattle, Boston

The Way Of The Web

2019

Seattle, Chicago, San Francisco

Going Offline

2020

Online

Design Principles For The Web

2021

Online

The State Of The Web

2022

Online, San Francisco

In And Out Of Style

Declarative Design

My upcoming appearance at An Event Apart next week to talk about declarative design isn’t the only upcoming trip to San Francisco in my calendar.

Two months from today I’ll be back in San Francisco for Leading Design. It’s on February 7th and 8th.

This event is long overdue. We’ve never had Leading Design in San Francisco before, but we were all set to go ahead with the inaugural SF gathering …in March 2020. We all know what happened next.

So this event will be three years in the making.

Rebacca is doing amazing work, as usual, putting together a fantastic line-up of speakers:

They’ll be sharing their insights, their stories and their ideas — as well as some of their pain from past challenges. It’s all designed to help you navigate your own leadership journey.

I’ll be there to MC the event, which is a great honour for me. And I reckon I’ll be up to the challenge, having just done the double whammy of hosting Leading Design London and Clarity back-to-back.

I would love to see you in San Francisco! If you’ve attended a Leading Design event before, then you know how transformational it can be. If you haven’t, then now is your chance.

Early bird tickets are still available until mid December, so if you’re thinking about coming, I suggest making that decision now.

If you know anyone in the bay area who’s in a design leadership position, be sure to tell them about Leading Design San Francisco—they don’t want to miss this!

At the end of next week, I will sally forth to California. I’m going to wend my way to San Francisco where I will be speaking at An Event Apart.

I am very much looking forward to speaking at my first in-person AEAs in exactly three years. That was also in San Francisco, right before The Situation.

I hope to see you there. There are still tickets available.

I’ve put together a brand new talk that I’m very excited about. I’ve already written about the prep for this talk:

So while I’ve been feeling somewhat under the gun as I’ve been preparing this new talk for An Event Apart, I’ve also been feeling that the talk is just the culmination; a way of tying together some stuff I’ve been writing about it here for the past year or two.

The talk is called Declarative Design. Here’s the blurb:

Different browsers, different devices, different network speeds…designing for the web can feel like a never-ending battle for control. But what if the solution is to relinquish control? Instead of battling the unknowns, we can lean into them. In the world of programming, there’s the idea of declarative languages: describing what you want to achieve without specifying the exact steps to get there. In this talk, we’ll take this concept of declarative programming and apply it to designing for the web. Instead of focusing on controlling the outputs of the design process, we’ll look at creating the right inputs instead. Leave the final calculations for the outputs to the browser—that’s what computers are good at. We’ll look at CSS features, design systems, design principles, and more. Then you’ll be ready to embrace the fluid, ever-changing, glorious messiness of the World Wide Web!

If you’d a glimpse into the inside of my head while I’ve been preparing this talk, here’s a linkdump of various resources that are either mentioned in the talk or influenced it…

Declarative Design

• Declarative design on adactio.com
• Utopia by James Gilyead and Trys Mudford
• Every Layout by Heydon Pickering and Andy Bell
• Be the browser’s mentor, not its micromanager by Andy Bell
• Layout Land by Jen Simmons
• Designing Intrinsic Layouts by Jen Simmons on adactio.com

HTML

• A declarative Web Share API on adactio.com
• A polyfill for button type=”share” on adactio.com
• The reason for a share button type on adactio.com
• Share Button Type explainer on Github
• When should there be a declarative version of a JavaScript API? on adactio.com
• How to (not) make a button by Tomas Pustelnik

CSS

• The CSS Mindset by Max Böck
• Contextual Spacing For Intrinsic Web Design by Stephanie Eckles
• The CSS mental model by Peter Paul Koch
• CSS Forces by Tim Brown

Design Tools

• Our web design tools are holding us back by Vasilis van Gemert
• Traditional Web Design Process is Fundamentally Broken by Jason Grigsby
• Web Design Tool Wish List by Jason Grigsby
• Declarative Design Tools (archived) by Jem Gold

Design systems

• Declarative design systems on adactio.com
• Design systems thinking on adactio.com

History

• Cascading HTML style sheets — a proposal by Håkon Wium Lie, 1994
• A Dao of Web Design by John Allsopp, 2000
• Responsive Web Design by Ethan Marcotte, 2010

People

• Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
• Miles Davis
• Tim Berners-Lee

I no longer have Covid. I am released from isolation.

Alas, my negative diagnosis came too late for me to make it to UX London. But that’s okay—by the third and final day of the event, everything was running smooth like buttah! Had I shown up, I would’ve just got in the way. The Clearleft crew ran the event like a well-oiled machine.

I am in the coronaclear just in time to go away for a week. My original thinking was this would be my post-UX-London break to rest up for a while, but it turns out I’ve been getting plenty of rest during UX London.

I’m heading to the west coast of Ireland for The Willie Clancy Summer School, a trad music pilgrimage.

Jessica and I last went to Willie Week in 2019. We had a great time and I distinctly remember thinking “I’m definitely coming back next year!”

Well, a global pandemic put paid to that. The event ran online for the past two years. But now that it’s back for real, I wouldn’t miss it for the world.

My mandolin and I are bound for Miltown Malbay!

That event in Berlin last week was by far the largest gathering of humans I’ve been with in over two years. If I was going to finally succumb to the ’rona, this was likely to be the place and time.

Sure enough, on my last day in Berlin I had a bit of a scratchy throat. I remained masked for the rest of the day for the travel back to England. Once I was back home I immediately tested and …nothing.

I guess it was just a regular sore throat after all.

Over the weekend the sore throat was accompanied by some sniffles. Just your typical cold symptoms. But I decided to be prudent and test again yesterday.

This time a very clear result was revealed. It was Covid-19 after all.

Today I was supposed to be travelling to Lille on the Eurostar to speak at a private event. Instead I’m isolating at home. My symptoms are quite mild. I feel worse about letting down the event organisers.

Still, better to finally get the novel coronavirus now rather than later in the month. I would hate to miss UX London. But I’m confident I’ll be recovered and testing negative by then.

For now I’ll be taking it easy and letting those magnificent vaccines do their work.

There was a week recently where I was out and about nearly every night.

One night, Jessica and I went to the cinema. There was a double bill of Alien and Aliens in the beautiful Duke of York’s picture house. We booked one of the comfy sofas on the balcony.

The next night we were out at the session in The Jolly Brewer, playing trad Irish tunes all evening. Bliss!

Then on the third night, we went to see Low playing in a church. Rich and Ben were there too.

It really felt like The Before Times. Of course in reality it wasn’t quite like old times. There’s always an awareness of relative risk. How crowded is the cinema likely to be? Will they have the doors open at The Jolly Brewer to improve the airflow? Will people at the Low gig comply with the band’s request to wear masks?

Still, in each case, I weighed the risk and decided the evening was worth it. If I caught Covid because of that cinematic double bill, or that tune-filled gathering, or that excellent gig, that price would be acceptable.

Mind you, I say that without having experienced the horribleness of having a nasty bout of coronavirus. And the prospect of long Covid is genuinely scary.

But there’s no doubt that the vaccines have changed the equation. There’s still plenty of risk but it’s on a different scale. The Situation isn’t over, but it has ratcheted down a notch to something more manageable.

Now with the weather starting to get nice, there’ll be more opportunities for safer outdoor gatherings. I’m here for it.

Actually, I’m not going to literally be here for all of it. I’m making travel plans to go and speak at European events—another positive signal of the changing situation. Soon I’ll be boarding the Eurostar to head to Amsterdam, and not long after I’ll be on the Eurostar again for a trip to Lille. And then of course there’s UX London at the end of June. With each gathering, there’s an inevitable sense of calculated risk, but there’s also a welcome sense of normality seeping back in.

In person events are like buses. You go two years without one and then three come along at once.

My buffer is overflowing from experiencing three back-to-back events. Best of all, my participation was different each time.

First of all, there was Leading Design New York, where I was the host. The event was superb, although it’s a bit of a shame I didn’t have any time to properly experience Manhattan. I wasn’t able to do any touristy things or meet up with my friends who live in the city. Still the trip was well worth it.

Right after I got back from New York, I took the train to Edinburgh for the Design It Build It conference where I was a speaker. It was a good event. I particularly enjoyed Rafaela Ferro talk on accessibility. The last time I spoke at DIBI was 2011(!) so it was great to make a return visit. I liked that the audience was seated cabaret style. That felt safer than classroom-style seating, allowing more space between people. At the same time, it felt more social, encouraging more interaction between attendees. I met some really interesting people.

I got from Edinburgh just in time for UX Camp Brighton on the weekend, where I was an attendee. I felt like a bit of a moocher not giving a presentation, but I really, really enjoyed every session I attended. It’s been a long time since I’ve been at a Barcamp-style event—probably the last Indie Web Camp I attended, whenever that was. I’d forgotten how well the format works.

But even with all these in-person events, online events aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. Yesterday I started hosting the online portion of Leading Design New York and I’ll be doing it again today. The post-talk discussions with Julia and Lisa are lots of fun!

So in the space of just of a couple of weeks I’ve been a host, a speaker, and an attendee. Now it’s time for me to get my head back into one other event role: conference curator. No more buses/events are on the way for the next while, so I’m going to be fully devoted to organising the line-up for UX London 2022. Exciting!

I went to New York to host the Leading Design conference. It was weird and wonderful.

Weird, because it felt strange and surreal to be back in a physical space with other people all sharing the same experience.

Wonderful, for exactly the same reasons.

This was a good way to ease back into live events. It wasn’t a huge conference. Just over a hundred people. So it felt intimate, while still allowing people to quite literally have space to themselves.

I can’t tell you much about the post-talk interviews I conducted with the speakers. That’s because what happens at Leading Design stays at Leading Design, at least when it comes to the discussions after the talks. We made it clear that Leading Design was a safe place for everyone to share their stories, even if—especially if—those were stories you wouldn’t want to share publicly or at work.

I was bowled over by how generous and open and honest all the speakers were. Sure, there were valuable lessons about management and leadership, but there were also lots of very personal stories and insights. Time and time again I found myself genuinely moved by the vulnerability that the speakers displayed.

Leadership can be lonely. Sometimes very lonely. I got the impression that everyone—speakers and attendees alike—really, really appreciated having a non-digital space where they could come together and bond over shared travails. I know it’s a cliché to talk about “connecting” with others, but at this event it felt true.

The talks themselves were really good too. I loved seeing how themes emerged and wove themselves throughout the two days. Rebecca did a fantastic job of curating the line-up. I’ve been to a lot of events over the years and I’ve seen conference curation of varying degrees of thoughtfulness. Leading Design New York 2022 is right up there with the best of them. It was an honour to play the part of the host (though I felt very guilty when people congratulated me on such a great event—“Don’t thank me”, I said, “Thank Rebecca—I’m just the public face of the event; she did all the work!”)

My hosting duties aren’t over. This week we’ve got the virtual portion of Leading Design New York. There’ll be two days of revisiting some of the conference talks, and one day of workshops.

For the two days of talks, I’m going to be joined by two brilliant panelists for post-talk discussions—Julia Whitney and Lisa Welchman. This should be fun!

Best of all, for this portion of the event I don’t need to get into an airplane and cross the Atlantic.

That said, the journey was totally worth it for Leading Design New York. Also, by pure coincidence, the event coincided with St. Patrick’s Day. For the first time in two years, New York hosted its legendary parade and it was just a block or two away from the conference venue.

I nipped out during the lunch break to cheer on the marching bands. Every county was represented. When the representatives from county Cork went by, there’d be shouts of “Up Cork!” When the county Donegal delegation went by, it was “Up Donegal!”

It’s just a shame I couldn’t stick around for the representatives from county Down.