rust-lang/rust is adopting an LLM policy …the policy focuses on understanding, helping to ensure that we have a mental model of our code, not just artifacts that mechanically do the right thing. Smart folks making smart decisions. A good kind of an update So many good updates! It’s good to see folks who do care about their craft. Does Your Form Really Need a Dropdown List? Like the Huei-Hsin…
Video: ‘Save for Later’ Has No Later Saleh shares some possible reasons why bookmarking and save-for-later don’t work. He also suggests some directions that could make them work. Video: The future of creativity on the internet in a world with AI Jack Conte (CEO of Patreon), shares some lessons to gather some courage in these conflicted times with AI. Hardcore IndieWeb: Run your own website 100%…
AI chatbots know more about you than you realise If a machine can infer for you from millions of data pieces out on the internet, how hard will it be for it to infer you ? How (not to) name things Don’t add “image” to a text alternative for an image. It’s already clear it’s an image. Don’t add “go to” to the name of a link. That’s what links do. They go somewhere. I have to learn to resist the…
I missed publishing notes from the last two weeks. I didn’t do much reading during those weeks. How to recover a dropped stash in Git? Though I’m a long-time-novice Git user. At times, I do discard file changes after a git stash pop . I know, I should be doing git stash apply instead of git stash pop . Then safely clear the stash. Being an average human writing code, I do my fair share of…
Better fluid sizing with round() Shaheed demonstrates how to utilise round() CSS function to create predictable font and element sizes. I can see the technique useful in many other places like spacing. Expansion artifacts Compression made the information age possible by stripping things down to fit the pipes. Expansion made the AI age possible by blowing data back up again. Both operations leave…
How to be inspired without copying The question “is my work too derivative?” tends to be the wrong question entirely. The better question is whether you’ve absorbed enough different things, and absorbed them with enough seriousness, that the combination is uncopyable. A writer who’s only ever read three contemporary literary novelists will produce derivative work no matter how hard he pushes…
Geography is four-dimensional Geography is four-dimensional. You can’t know a place - only a place as it was at a time. Where is bound to when. Video: Why Horizontal Scrolling Never Caught On Horizontal scrolling works when the axis carries a meaning the user actively cares about. Never break the contract between content, hardware and user expectation. Designers will never have influence without…
Do I belong in tech anymore? I have mixed feelings (more like unhappiness and anger) about these times. Looks to me, Ky has put down things I see and I feel these days. I feel you, Ky. Video: The Happy Path Doesn’t Exist Notes on Software Fluidity In this video, Saleh explains why it is imperative to go beyond the ‘happy case’ and ‘edge case’ thinking. Some of the practising designers find it…
The AI Great Leap Forward Han Lee compares the current AI transformations to China’s The Great Leap Forward in 1958. The famine comes later. Worth a read. Video: Mise en mode Donnie D’Amato talks about the explosion of design tokens in design systems. He proposes an interesting approach to avoid such explosion with familiar a approach to the CSS developers. Earning Attention A short note by…
When the Output Becomes the Material Yesenia writes about leveraging AI in creating design systems that are context-optimised (user expertise, user privilege, user goal at hand). Some of the approaches in the article seem fitting for the design of interfaces in general. The McNamara Fallacy Oh! There is a name for the attitude of relying on easy-to-measure metrics and ignoring hard-to-measure…
Node.js Test Runner This week, I learned that Node.js comes with a test runner. It has been included since Node.js v20.0 (in 2023) ! Not that I write unit tests daily. Once in a while, I do write unit tests. At least in those cases, I don’t have to add another NPM dependency. Write Alt Text Like You’re Talking To A Friend I religiously write alt-text for images. This old gem by Scott Vandehey…
Designing for people with anxiety In other words, how to make calm and transparent softwares for everyone. Beautiful design doesn’t matter for the reasons you think Frank writes about when is beautiful design important and when it isn’t. Designer as Writer Stas Aki explains first principles of design using principles of writing. When designers have nothing to say they wrap their designs into…
Video: A Solo Designer’s Survival Guide to the Fediverse Imani Joy talks about her experience and challenges being a solo designer at Mastodon. I really like one of her idea from the talk, ‘decide who to disappoint.’ Tools for Thinking and Tools for Systems A note from 2018 by Robin Rendle , on need for… tools that help us think and that remove distractions so that we can focus on the larger and…
Video & Tutorial: Little Dummies Simple FPO Content Helpers Tyler shows how his company wields Builds Awesome (previously 11ty 😜) for rapid prototyping. I really like how they create placeholder contents that reads realistic using helper functions in Build Awesome. A Design Turn This turn (of using Generative AI in design) says that we don’t need more people to make things. We need more people to…
Video: A typographer’s view of optical size I was confused about optical sizes in typefaces. Are they changes in weights? How do I utilise them in different contexts? Eber Sorkin explains the optical sizes in this talk from ISType 2024. Design docs considered harmful The fundamental problem with design docs is the same one that killed waterfall: you have the least information at the beginning of a…
A few days ago Katherine asked : in Eleventy, is there a way to generate pages from separate data (like person-a.json , person-b.json , …) instead of single data file with all the data. Right after seeing the question, I wrote up a JS script which reads all JSON files in a specified folder, combines them into an array and passes them as data to Eleventy. I had the feeling I was going against the…
Judge the contents, not the box Listen to ideas, not their messenger. Focus on the contents, not the box. Avoid ideology. I struggle with this bias a lot. I find it hard to separate the message from the messenger. Another to thing to work on. Unsung heroes Flickr’s URLs scheme It was a beautiful and predictable scheme. Once you knew how it worked, you could guess other URLs. If I were typing an…
Not All Browser APIs Are “Web” APIs The interface is standardized. The specification is maintained by the W3C. The docs on MDN are excellent. But the actual implementation? That’s entirely up to the browser vendor. I was wrong to believe that all Web APIs are private. Backseat Software Software didn’t break all at once. It eroded slowly, one reasonable justification at a time. Each step made sense…
How AI is redefining the way we find content It looks like the SEO Specialists will be recasting themselves as the Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) Specialists very soon. Like always, the article emphasizes the importance of getting the fundamentals right: good quality content, structured data and keeping the content up to date. Some CSS only contrast options until contrast-color() is Baseline…
I didn’t put out any notes in 2026-W04, in case you were wondering. How an accessibility designer adds keyboard shortcuts to a web app Don’t break accessibility by adding accessibility features. A culture of work we believe in Fathom’s take on generative AI. It’s a relief to know that there are folks who still believe in real expertise and collaboration. 5 accessibility checks to run on every…