Work, writing, speaking.
You ask, "Should I be making a new directory for this feature I'm building?" You expect a return value of: "yes" or "no." You had a 50% chance of guessing the "correct" answer...right? Four hours, 49 messages, 13 participants (4 whom you've never met?) later, you have not a boolean but instead something rather undefined : "What makes a feature a feature?" "Isn't everything in React a component?"…
At work, I like to observe who: requests v. demands is direct v. is indirect responds v. ignores The data reveals a lot about how people wield power, especially subconsciously. Requests are often, “when you get a chance, could you please do X? I would like it by Z date.” Demands are, “you need to do X by Z date.” But it gets more complicated: An indirect demand could look like, “we need to do X…
If you drive and have had to parallel park, you might have encountered a situation where you could have parked somewhere if that Prius just had pulled up a bit or split the difference better . If you're even-tempered, you drove around the block and found another spot. If you're easy to temper, you might have cursed under your breath—or maybe, just maybe—you were having a real one and even left a…
Hyperaware of how annoying it is when you want a recipe and have to read a 20-paragraph story about someone's great gran (and feeling bad you don't care), I have provided a skip link if you don't care about my back story to this post. Context for this post 📌 My partner and I were watching TV and he said, "Oh, the closed captions are off. Do you want me to turn them on?" It was the moment that I…
I recognise that my pre code needs a lot of work, so the code samples are difficult to read and ugly right now. I plan to update that code. Apologies in the meantime; hopefully the message is still understandable! Animations help to breathe life into interactive experiences. Animations, especially when overused and abused, can make people very ill. Through this article, I hope to provide you an…
This week, I saw a lot of judgment over people joining Facebook's team. In case you missed it, Facebook subverts democracy , mistreats its human moderators , and if those aren't enough, there is an entire Wikipedia page dedicated to the harm it conducts . A lot of the judgment I saw was for Black women, specifically Kristy Tillman, whom I admire very much. A lot of the judgment I saw was by white…
Is #a11y an accessible hashtag? I get asked this at least once a month, so I'm going to answer it as a quoted tweet thread in case it is helpful to others who are wondering themselves or who also get asked this. a11y is a hashtagged numeronym. Numeronyms include any abbreviation that uses numbers to shorten/to abbreviate words. 📌 K9 == canine 101 == beginner subject i18n == internationalisation…
To be effective accomplices, we need to move beyond the state of feeling into the state of doing. I see a lot of chatter about “empathy.” In design and tech we frame nearly every human problem with it. The word has become a watery, vague catch-all. I think it’s a problem. Empathy is feeling what someone else is feeling. It is attempting to crawl into their minds and hearts and experience what…
White people (and non-Black brown folks): We gotta talk about burn out. You aren’t conditioned to be thinking about race this much because of your privilege. We need you to do all you’re doing today, tomorrow, and until the end of time. Let’s talk about ways to focus on current & systemic change. 0️⃣ You’re asking a lot of questions and receiving a lot of answers and being overloaded 📌 Systemic:…
Welcome to Part II 📌 You are reading Part II of a IV part series. Part I: What is a static site generator? > Part II: Installation 👈🏽 You are here Part III: Structure/Basic Customisation (coming soon) Part IV: Advanced Customisation (coming soon) If you are confused or in need of context, please go read Part I —it is where I establish all the context of what static site generators are. As much…
⚠️ CW: depression, COVID-19 As a kid, I remember admiring the Holodeck in Star Trek. I loved that Captain Janeway could escape to her Victorian fantasy during stressful times and for a moment escape from the isolation and pressures of being a captain on a starship. (Voyager haters can kindly get a hobby.) The characters she interacted were complete. They had real backstories and made her feel…
(Adapted from a Twitter thread I wrote ) Dear Developer Foo, Your "hot take" about performance or accessibility isn't helping, it's hurting the very people that you purportedly are helping and defending. I'm not convinced your goal is to help as you say. Based on the inflammatory hyperbole, it often seems like your goal is to just dunk on someone who is equally as privileged as you in another…
Intro to the Series 📌 I won't lie. When I first installed a static site generator (SSG), I was pleased with how quickly it installed. However, my immediate success was short lived. Something something, beginner's luck. Even though I was comfortable working in design and templating systems (having built many WordPress sites before) and competent in front-front-end development, I still wasn't clear…
Dear Developer, I want you to hug your ugly middle. No, I wasn't insulting your body. I want you to embrace the concept of the Ugly Middle. You might know it. The Ugly Middle is that part after the high of the Shiny New Thing has worn off and before the excitement of The End hits. In Corporate Work: The Ugly Middle is when the project is most likely to fail; where the aspirational criteria hit the…
If you're a white woman who is watching the world burn because of police murder against Black people, and you don't know what to do, I wrote you a guide. 1️⃣ Buy and read some anti-racist texts. And sit with the discomfort. Maybe invite a few other white women to be in a book club with you 📌 I curated this collection just for you. 😘 An Indigenous People's History of the United States, Roxanne…
If you are a white guy and you don't know what to do beyond donate and being quiet, I made you a list. 1️⃣ Buy and read some anti-racist texts. And sit with the discomfort. Maybe invite a few other dudes to be in a book club with you 📌 I curated this collection just for you. 😘 An Indigenous People's History of the United States, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz How To Be Antiracist, Ibram X Kendi How To Be…
I was showing someone my old math notes to someone and they said to me, "how did you write so small?" I responded, "a small pen." I guess you could say this is a fair sense of my sense of humour. In essence, this joke is exactly my shitpost style. I came across some old tweets that I wrote earlier this year. As my good friend says, they were big yikes. I was learning my shitpost style and hating…
This week changed my life. I left this week without more than 1-2 hours of sleep a night, a voided career future, and far fewer friends. I feel tired in an existential way. It's like someone forgot to plug in my soul for three weeks, but I'm still forced to exist. I don't know how I'm going to deliver two more conference talks this week, but I know I will. Because if I got one thing out of this…
I have been unemployed since September 2017. I don't call it that, you see, because it would worry my mom and I weirdly feel guilty about filing for unemployment, even though I fit the criteria. And while I am technically unemployed, I have managed to work a lot. I've contributed to open source projects, launched two of my own, and become a sponsored developer. I have helped massive Fortune 100…
You flew onto the train with your bright blonde hair and even brighter blue eyes. The only free seat, it seemed, was the one next to me and I couldn’t thank fate more. You held me—engaged me—without the proposal—in a way I’d not ever know again until maybe now? And under other circumstances I should have and would have hated the way you arrived, disheveled, somewhat charmed that the entire class…
It's so incredibly hard for me to cultivate joy. I successfully do it all the time. I find joy at the blistered 25,000th step in crooked Portuguese street, in the the song of languages I've never heard before, in the shadow and stillness of the early morning light. I smile whenever someone chases after the bus and catches it, whenever a dog pees on its own leg, and when someone I love really,…
I spent a lot of time in my inbox—I imagine many of you can relate. Over the years, I've gathered some helpful communication tips that I found improved my efficiency and happiness. Balancing my email time for me is an exercise in automating the right things, while maintaining the humanness of communications. General 📌 Designate work time/admin time based on your energy/brain power. Now, I have a…
On the surface, today was a good day. I usually tend to all my plants on Sunday; it’s a ritual I look forward to. It’s finally spring so I can fertilise and up-pot. A good friend and I usually get our nails done every couple of months on Sunday. My favourite plant has spider mites. I had to buy her some special oil and insecticide and quarantine her. At the nail salon, the Vietnamese women made…
Beginners! I'd love to see more of you teach. You have tremendous value to offer. In our industry, we uphold and revere experts. I get it. Experts do sexy slick things in time lapses, have nice camera equipment, and great hair days. Here are 10 reasons why I'd like to see more beginners teach; for yourself, for your future students, for your peers, and for our industry as a whole. While you may be…
Driving with a cracked windshield feels dangerous at first, especially the moments after it happens. Your instinct says to pull over, stop driving until you get a new windshield. But you get distracted and end up driving with it for longer than you want. Then after awhile, you forget how you felt when it first happened and how close you are to a potentially scary fate. At some point, the last bits…
I'm tired. I'm tired of not being seen. Of having to choose to dodge or to push. Of having to subserviate myself to people who don't even acknowledge my existence. Of having to make the conscious decision to hold space— space that I am repeatedly promised, but only in theory, never in practice. I'm tired of the reaction when we collide, bitterness that I didn't yield to begin with and confusion in…
Between the forced interactions, uncertainty, and pressure placed upon success (often our health depends upon successfully acquiring a job), job hunting is a veritable hotbed for anxiety and depression. I think it’s safe to say that many of us enter the job hunt during difficult times, where we’re not presenting our best selves. The circumstances for our current employment/unemployment, like…
The creative industry, and the creatives who inhabit it, have a wealth of resources at our disposal. Want to learn more about user behaviors? Thousands of blog posts by industry experts break down tested research around the smallest UI nuances. Not sure about the best way to texturize hair in Illustrator? There’s hundreds of YouTube videos on that. Widely available and affordable/Open Source…