Notes

Working theory: It is impossible to (re)instill a culture of craft into a mature design org that didn’t begin with and maintain those values.

Hiring UI engineers is a strong retention play for designers who care about how their work ships.

Part of the reason enterprise-focused developer tools are often poorly designed is that designers don’t code in enterprise environments. Lots of designers out there deploying to hobby plans, a lot fewer dealing with scale.

Baby’s first cancelled flight

Born to code, forced to use Figma

I’ve been designing GitHub for two years today.

Our monthly rent in east London, rounded to the nearest year:

• 2017 - £1700
• 2018 - £1750
• 2019 - £1800
• 2020 - £1850
• 2021 - No increase
• 2022 - £1900
• 2023 - £2500
• 2024 - £2675

Currently listed for £2850.

Pour one out for Clark from InVision

Hear me out: Dvorak keyboard for iOS

All I want from any brand, band, company, or sports team’s merch is a neutral coloured t-shirt with a small and subtle logo print over the left chest. Let me feel good about supporting you without having to wear something gaudy.

Somehow, in all my years working in Rails codebases, I’d never run rails new. Totally understand now why people still love it for taking an idea from 0 to 1.

I can’t believe I’d never seen Jesus Christ Superstar before. Judas is so good.

Few worse feelings than a blocked PR that sits there and nags at you until it goes stale…

Landed in Stockholm and Dancing On My Own is playing in the taxi. Couldn’t be more perfect. 🇸🇪

You can tell which products are built by teams without designers who code because the responsive experience is always shit.

More like OKAren’ts

Cleaning chocolate stains off my activewear

The existence of work probation implies the existence of work probation officers.

Dogs don’t know shit about daylight savings time.

Friz Quadrata will always be the punkest typeface.

Why has the BBC decided that classical music == quiz show? Us nerds deserve something cooler.

I totally understand why people leave big companies to go back to startups. Startups actually ship software.

If a project has more than one DRI, it has zero DRIs.

The Design Museum in London has great exhibitions but is otherwise so underwhelming. Way too small.

With autumn comes to the urge to build a side project.

I still think the perfect product team is, like, one designer who codes and two full-stack savants. No PM.

Pissed Jeans tickets ✅

Nobody ever wants to talk about how product quality is a retention issue. Enough sloppy ships and your best people are eventually embarrassed enough to quit.

Having webcam reactions on by default with macOS Sonoma was a terrible decision. I was interviewing a customer this week who expressed themselves with their hands a lot and their background kept switching to hearts and lasers.

Bluesky, Threads, it doesn’t matter anymore. The Internet’s been over since like 2007 when the normal people from high school joined MySpace.

Assistive AI good, generative AI bad.

Pocket, AKA the app I open once a year on a long flight when I’ve done all the other available-offline stuff on my phone.

It’s baffling how many brick-and-mortar small businesses on Instagram fail to even mention which city they’re in.

It turns out the cure for a weekday hangover is pulling the blinds down and listening to Brian Eno.

If I had more time, I would have recorded a shorter Loom.

I’m increasingly convinced that the perfect product development team is just three designers who code.

I really want to dust off my illustration skills.

I turned on Netflix’s Beef on a whim last night and binged half the series. Really fun premise. So many of my favourite stories force you to root for and find something good in seemingly unlikeable people.

Every time you create a private Slack channel, you kill a piece of your org’s culture.

The band Foo Fighters implies the existence of a band called Bar Fighters.

Anyone who uses “mic drop” has never owned an SM58 with a dented-ass grill.

There’s nothing like playoff hockey.

Yeah, I’m a 10X engineer. 1 commit to make the change, 10 commits to make the tests pass again.

Either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become a PM.

“If you’re cynical you could probably make a good argument that the whole transport network concept is just an elaborate funding mechanism for the graphic design department.”

Baby’s first rails new (after seven years of working in Rails codebases)

Solving technical problems is so much more fulfilling to me than solving interpersonal or organisational problems.

Engineers should not be allowed to ship copy unchecked.

I shipped a total visual refresh to Better Placeholder today (using Primer). The JavaScript is atrocious but at least it looks nice.

The sinking feeling of cracking open an old codebase to find jQuery.

Google Calendar’s default meeting length options should be Short (15 mins), Long (45 mins), and Presentation (60 mins).

✅ Swear in a Loom video

Someone I know started working at a company called Axonius and I can’t help but think that an anagram of Anxious might not be the most assuring name for a security tech company.

Cold, wet, and windy: One is tolerable, two is unacceptable, and all three is miserable.

The Rails default of using underscores instead of hyphens in URLs is so bad.

What’s your favourite Figma bug? Mine is the one where I get trapped at my current zoom level and can’t do any work.

“I asked ChatGPT to do X and this was its reply” is pretty lazy content but… I wonder how long before the disclosure gets dropped and half the accounts online are just ChatGPT-backed engagement farms.

💡 Hackney fitness studio called Nat Does Burpees

Someone complimented my video quality on a Zoom call yesterday and that’s all I’ve ever wanted.

Paraphrasing my past self: When product managers fuck around, employee retention finds out.

My hair is looking kinda “Mel Gibson as Riggs” lately.

Alana and I went for dinner at Brat last night. I wore a denim shirt with black trousers only to walk into the restaurant and find that the same outfit is worn by the wait staff. On our way out, one table tried to get my attention with an “excuse me” and I had to explain that I didn’t work there, I was just dressed like I did.

I’ve been updating login details of 300+ accounts across the web and it’s basically a global tour of bad UX. Nobody ever improves these flows.

I want to believe I still like Jekyll but hacking includes to act as components feels worse as every other framework gets better. I wish I could drop in bare metal Ruby or add ViewComponent on top. I think I’d rewrite my site in a JS-based SSG if it weren’t for the sunk costs.

I added a Feed page to my website tonight. It’s a firehose stream of all my writing, notes, and links. Hoping to extend it soon to add photo posts and RSS.

LinkedIn should launch a tech layoffs version of Facebook’s “marked themselves as safe” feature.

Working through the idea that being pro-AI is inherently anti-labour.

Capitalism giveth and capitalism taketh away.

One year at GitHub today. 🎈

I’ve somehow become even nerdier by watching Mastermind on catch-up.

Finally cancelled Amazon Prime, several years too late.

Baby’s first root canal

Every time you think Bob Ross is at a 10 he turns it up to 11.

Real estate types love to say shit like “add value” when what they really mean is “gentrify the kitchen.”

It’s three weeks into the year and I haven’t added work Slack back to my phone. No FOMO or productivity pressure and I’m more relaxed in the evening and during breaks. Feels good to reset my relationship with work.

The easiest way to beat a company’s engineering interview process is to get hired as a designer and just start coding instead.

I haven’t had work Slack on my phone in nearly a month. Feels good.

The view count shown on every tweet now is so fucking wack. Makes it way easier to close the tab though. I’m down to ~45 seconds a day, from an embarassingly high number of hours.

There are basically no dehumidifiers in stock in all of the UK. The perfect storm of energy costs, cold temperatures, and shitty building standards means everyone’s flats are humid and mouldy. I’ve found one and reserved one at an Argos in a village (?) called Badger Farm, more than two hours away by car. I’ll make the five-hour round trip sometime next week, maybe Tuesday.

One “crappy” thing about RSS that I actually like is when someone screws up their feed and their last n posts get republished. It’s a nice smoke signal that they’re working on their site, and sometimes you get reminded of a great old post.

Reddit Recap just makes me want to delete my account.

Pretty fucked up that the NHS app for iOS uses Hotjar and requests permission to set cookies for screen recording user sessions. This allows designers and product managers at the NHS to see invididuals’ health data linked directly to account information (PII).

I’m about to open a massive find-and-replace PR and I just know it’s going to end in a dawizard situation.

TIL you can drag elements around in Firefox dev tools and they get rearranged in the browser. Not sure why I never tried this before.

Elon Musk made me want to stop using Twitter but it was chatbot screenshots that actually made me stop checking it.

Whose mistake was it to call them “dark patterns” and not “ulterior design”?

Meat should have to be sold in packaging covered in slaughterhouse photos, the same as Canadian cigarettes with those pictures of rotted-out throat holes and black lungs.

Tonight is one of two Leafs games this season that start early enough for me to watch live in the UK.

Starting to think it’s not a great idea for every technical designer or design-minded frontend engineer to work on design systems. No matter how many components you ship, there’s still a very real implementation gap on a lot of teams.

For all the talk of owning your content, few people consider owning your audience. Gotta either invest in multiple platforms, funnel to your own (e.g. email list), or pray people will miss your posts enough to come find you.

If and when Twitter loses critical mass, it could get ugly for companies/consultants/creators/etc. whose followings sustain their livelihoods. Morbidly curious to see what happens to the digital marketing/personal brand landscape.

Any time I open a file with an unless/else block in it I run git blame just to find out who thought it would be okay to totally fuck with my head.

For some reason just remembered when I was in business school like 13 years ago and my classmate said he was “passionate about supply chain.” I hope he’s out there somewhere having a great time on LinkedIn.

TIL collapsing margins in CSS don’t just apply to sibling elements, but also margins in the same direction on parents and children.

Example: If a parent element has margin-top: 8px and its first child has margin-top: 16px. The result will be that the parent is 16px from the element before the parent.

“He sacked the entire Human Rights, Accessibility, AI Ethics, Public Policy, and Curation teams. I don’t want to use a Twitter that doesn’t have those things.”

No coincidence that all the $8 checkmark supporters are dudes who don’t benefit from such checks and balances.

I need a Detailwind package I can install to rip Tailw*nd and all of its classes out of JS starter projects.

Imagine sending a Calendly link to your mom.

I need to start a podcast where I, a design/CSS guy, build an entire SaaS app from the ground up by asking smart people how to do whatever it is I’m struggling with that week.

Put another way: You shouldn’t expect to benefit from skills you don’t nurture.

Hiring a designer who codes in part because they code, then not actively encouraging them to contribute technically (AND skill up during work hours), is underutilisation at best and in some cases a total waste.

There’s nothing on Earth I want bad enough to give El*n M*sk eight bucks. Especially now.

I really need to write up my Thoughts on the gap between design systems IA and product design workflows.

Just thinking about what it was like to design websites in Photoshop. 💀

“You want to live in this country, you have to eat our beige shite. And, as a reward, you get to eat curry sometimes.”

Happy Meeting Conflicts Week to all the Europeans with North American coworkers.

Just dropped a whole EP of Looms in my team’s design channel.

Are you the non-required PR reviewer who shows up after there are other approvals and blocks it with requested changes, or do your coworkers like you?

“Semi-detached” is a weird way of saying “attached.”

A simple recurring Slackbot reminder got me using my standing desk daily again after months of just sitting.

/remind me “Raise your desk” every weekday at 3pm

Everybody wants to complain about calls from unknown numbers but nobody’s asking how we even still have unknown numbers in 2022. Databases shared across carriers. Add a verification layer to limit scam potential. Done?

Truly hate the dependency rabbit hole of modern development sometimes. 10 hours of trying “quick start” tutorials and nothing to show for it but an empty repo and a big sigh.

That fresh repo smell ✨

Currently cycling toward State of the Browser. Say hi if you’re around this morning. #SotB22

💡 A tool where you enter any URL and it returns a link to its public GitHub repo, if available.

“The scissors icon shares a common fault with many other scissor symbols and emojis: the finger holes are too large for the blades to actually close (and thus cut).” ✂️

Hobbies? You mean those things I do and learn about obsessively every day for three months and then never again?

Companies gotta stop skimping on software. For remote teams, the collaboration software is the office. Why pay for Slack when you have Teams? Satisfaction and retention.

Hell is other people[’s Figma files]

Spoiler: Quickly got unblocked by admitting I needed help and asking for it.

One of those work days where I just don’t get it and feel like a total idiot. 🙃

Why are there so damn many ESPs?

I wish found it as weird when I’m on Slack past 7:00pm as I do when Americans are on Slack before their 7:00am.

Are side nav app UIs cool again yet?

And for my next act, I will eat an entire large pizza all by myself.

My dream job is to just cruise around the codebase and clean up all the tiny annoyances.

“Detach instance” should trigger a little feedback form to the design system team.

In the #EmailGeeks 2020 salary survey, 38% of respondents said they didn’t feel fairly compensated. Interested to see if that number changes in 2022.

I’m feeling the itch to keep ignoring all my unfinished projects and start something new.

Nine years in Blighty today

Lil hackeroo: When someone tweets a screenshot of text and also pastes it as the image’s alt text, on mobile it’s almost always easier to just read the alt text.

Maybe the Basecamp bullshit actually did more good than harm to the Rails ecosystem. Yes, many decent people were driven away. But it was waning in popularity anyway and will now be sustained by legacy codebases AND a cohort of emboldened adopters responding to the dog whistles.

If we’re choosing our frameworks based on their founders’ and funders’ behaviour and ethics, Facebook wouldn’t be the horse I hitch my wagon to.

I was listening to a dev podcast today in which a host took a jab at Rails because DHH is “weird” (implication: toxic moron, which is true). But, immediately afterward, they gave React a pass. Okay.

I’m at the point where, if a text input doesn’t support pasting a URL onto selected text to autogenerate a link, I just assume the software is old and dusty.

Over the first “wearing a hat on Zoom” phase of growing my hair out. 🎢

No serious designer is switching from Figma to Penpot. Stop it.

Slack could use a feature like: “This URL was recently shared in #channel. Would you like to add a message to that thread instead?”

2020: Coughin’

2022: Coffin

You either believe it’s more important to raise society’s ceiling or its floor.

Today I looked up “what does zaddy mean.” Last week it was “etymology of capping.” Basically I feel grandpa-years-old.

Trying to figure out when I became “guy who doesn’t look like he’d be into that kind of music.”

Slackbot zero

One of the quickest ways to burn out a designer who cares about craft is to make sure everything they do is uncanny valleyed during implementation. Having to provide bulleted lists of spacing, colour, and copy changes gets old fast.

I hope the LinkedIn TikTok girl never does any work and gets a massive raise. Who cares. Everyone out here lookin’ real jealous.

Facebook 2009: FarmVille

Facebook 2022: FarmVille but 3D

Realised I passed the 6 month mark at GitHub last week. Somehow feels like it’s been longer.

One Direction’s “What Makes You Beautiful” is the opposite of The Streets’ “Fit But You Know It” send tweet

Visual design is 90% trying things that don’t work. Sometimes 100%.

The Next.js docs are ridiculously good.

Beavis and Butt-Head was the original Gogglebox.

Signed up for a new social media platform today, then very quickly realised I absolutely don’t want another social media account and deleted that shit. Feels good.

Always go for the joke.

Wishcycling our way to a greener planet

Finally learned how to drop in on the big quarter pipe before work this morning. 🛹💨

If you think about it, an apartment building where a stranger sleeps 12 feet directly above you is sort of like a really big bunk bed.

Developers will wish their notes app had one tiny feature and build a whole new notes app to solve for it.

Adam Mosseri would piss on you and tell you it’s raining.

Wish I could remove link previews from Slack messages in the iOS app.

Be so polite that security apologises for having to kick you out of the skate spot.

Also be in your mid-30s and still getting kicked out of skate spots.

💡 A Slack app that detects when two people are typing back and forth in a channel and posts the “how to use threads” help article

I added a moka pot to the coffee gear collection and I’m enjoying it more than I thought I would.

Still haven’t lived down last week when a waiter extended his mostly-closed hand to take my empty plate but I mistakenly thought he wanted a fist bump…

Finally decided to let the https://craigbootsfarringdon.com domain lapse. I haven’t been to the Farringdon Boots in years and don’t even know if Craig still works there. We had a good run, though. I hope I helped that guy get a raise.

Slackbot is really the last DM notification I want on my first work day after two weeks off.

Who’s eating all the caviar in airports?

He’s a 10 but he doesn’t write meaningfully descriptive alt text.

Be the change you want to see in the world.

[walks on left side of pavement while everyone else is on the right]

Resisting the urge to Copilot my way through all these React tutorial lessons.

Hot take and/or design confession:

I can’t be the only one who finds prototyping in design tools tedious as hell. Copy the frame, hide some layers, change the text, drag the arrow… humans weren’t meant to spend their time this way. It’s soul-destroying work.

Deploying to prod never gets loses its excitement.

When old pals surprise you with a work Slack DM on their first day ✨

My design review style is “corrects grammar and asks sugquestions.”

It’s fascinating to watch card-carrying Democrats realise that just because their politicians aren’t the bad guys, doesn’t mean they’re the good guys. Truly a benign tumour of a party.

I have like a decade of professional experience but more than three decades of unprofessional experience.

Companies be like “flexible schedule so you can work whenever you’re most productive,” but here’s a tip: remember to save some of those good hours for yourself, too.

Learning budget shopping spree 💸

Too Tired to Attend the Meetup: The Dylan Smith Story

I have a problem where I will buy any book recommended to me while I’m drinking.

And that’s why I’m currently reading 164 pages about a Céline Dion album.

You should have to be prescribed a car in order to drive one.

Forgot about American portion sizes and now I’m drinking a “large Americano” from a soup bowl with a handle on it.

I hate when restaurants serve chips in a little cup. Why do they do that? Is it so they can have a bunch of chip cups sat under the heat lamp ready to go?

All linen, all summer long

The term “hip flexors” always reminds me of something a MySpace rawr kid would say.

HR that’s 1px wide and kinda tall? border-left? background-color hack on a grid/flex parent with a 1px gap? Something weird with a div or span? It depends.™️ What about when the divided elements stack on smaller displays? One of the most annoying things to code.

I feel like such an asshole whenever I use a vertical divider in a design because I know how much they suck to implement.

Do you know how easy it is to get nerd sniped when the Slack has over 6,000 channels?

Top of my @Figma wishlist is prototyping that supports multiple flows using the same frames. Different coloured arrows, maybe?

ex: If you got to a screen from a blue connection, you can take actions that have other blue arrows. But there could be a totally separate green flow.

Gotta love how Tory PMs only lose their jobs if their own MPs turn against them or they feel too disgraced to continue. We’re a populace held hostage by the party’s dodgy moral compass.

The US time format should be MM:SS:HH.

Baby’s first rotator cuff injury

So many meetings get sidetracked when the presenter’s environment doesn’t work, they hit an unexpected bug, etc. Finding those problems on your own saves everyone else’s time and lets you polish your presentation so you look better. As a bonus, you have recordings ready to share to those not on the call.

Meeting tip for engineers: Never demo live!

Instead, record short videos for each feature or scenario and play the those during the call.

One downside to remote work is the guilt I feel for having an unproductive day or week. I’m all for “output over hours” but, when it’s not clicking for me, demonstrable hours are good for my conscience.

Every time email development as an industry makes up its own terminology or processes instead of aligning with web development standards, it further segregates itself — making it easier for others to continue to ignore and devalue.

You either begin planning your wedding immediately after your engagement, or never.

Jnstaqram

Years ago someone told me that you can tell the quality of a bottle of wine by the depth of its thumb dimple thing in the bottom. That can’t be accurate but I’ve gone most of my life subconsciously judging wines that way.

Find and befriend the coworker who will approve your Easter egg pull request without asking questions.

I guess that’s “thought leader” as in “my thoughts are with any of my employees who expected to be paid before I skipped town.”

Hopping on the @obsdmd bandwagon. 🧠

I’ve been trying to book a flight through Concur for so long I’m worried the plane is going to depart without me.

Renting and tech jobs are similar in that, if you stay for multiple years, you don’t have to leave your comfort zone and the pay only goes up £50/month.

OH in design crit: “It just occurred to me that this is one of the highest stakes screens on the entire internet.”

I receive (and ignore) so many bad recruitment DMs on LinkedIn that when someone from @Productboard sent me a great one this week, I had to reply and let them know. Apparently it’s now their “favourite rejection message.” 😅

My naive designer CI/CD take is that if I want to tweak a line of copy in production but dealing with the deployment process doesn’t seem “worth it,” just maybe you’ve overcomplicated things.

I just remembered when I was at @TaxiForEmail and we had the most British rule of not booking the same business flights to avoid the awkwardness and obligation of travelling together.

You know how some product teams lack vision and never say no and end up crushed by the maintenance burden of too many features? That’s where I’m at right now with having to water all these houseplants.

Those screenshots people post where they have like 38,615 unread emails, except it’s DMs from Slackbot.

Finding it hard to believe Jesus would die for my sins but not do anything about my hayfever.

You know that feeling when you’re having a good day and then you need to write or edit a table in Markdown?

If a design pattern doesn’t conform to the design system but already exists in production, you’re allowed to use it in new designs. Them’s the rules.

I kind of want to make a set of trolley problem Slack emoji so I can up my shitposting game.

The quickest path to creating good design work is creating bad design work and asking for feedback.

Three em dashes in a trenchcoat: ⸻

Hot UX take? I don’t really think it matters if buttons and links in web apps are styled alike. From the user perspective, both <a> and <button> elements can represent possible actions to take. The URL changing is an implementation detail.

But I also strongly believe URLs are UI and that navigational links should generally be underlined so 🤷‍♂️.

Hex code bingo: When you find all the greys that repeat a single digit in the same codebase.

#FFFFFF #EEEEEE #DDDDDD …

Felt myself hit a turning point at work this week where I’m starting to be able to answer others’ questions and give more meaningful feedback. Still lots to learn but nice to have things clicking.

The only thing I miss about Sketch is the scissor tool for editing paths.

💡 Browser extension that flags any items on your online grocery checkout page that are produced by Nestle or its subsidiaries so you can buy from a non-evil brand.

That sinking feeling when you crack open an old side project and realise you wrote it in CoffeeScript…

I had to sign up for an Adobe Illustrator trial today and can’t wait to end up in dark patterns hell trying to cancel it.

Still scared of CMYK.

I’ve talked to a lot of designers and engineers lately who are leaving their jobs in part because their teams aren’t actively and frequently shipping work. So easy to lose motivation when you lose sense of purpose or feel underutilised.

Work-life balance hack: Work for a company where everything requires two-factor authentication and never have your YubiKey near your phone.

Gonna starting pronouncing SVG as “savage.”

Going through a midlife crisis but instead of a sports car I just want to buy a skateboard and destroy what’s left of my knee cartilage.

First day at GitHub ✨

[Radioactive Man voice]

The caffeinated under-eye creams to reduce dark circles! They do nothing!

I have this idea for presenting recipes in a way I’ve never seen before and way better matches how my brain works when cooking. But I’m headed to the pub so leaving a note to self here.

Everyone with a greyscale Slack profile photo looks like they’ve been deactivated.

Twitter web now adds a second URL param to share URLs. I can’t send “?s=20&t=mGMOrhdSeqGW8Qzz05mzvA” to someone in good conscience.

It’s amazing what a ghost town Farringdon is at 5pm on a Friday compared to two years ago.

Finally upgraded my site from Jekyll 3.8.5 to 4.2.1. 📈

macOS clamshell mode is so finicky and frustrating. It feels like there’s a 50/50 chance each morning that my laptop has crashed, my accessories are no longer being recognised, etc.

Out here tripling the garlic in every HelloFresh recipe.

I wish Slack exposed a JSON settings config so it would at least be possible to copy preferences across workspaces.

I can’t believe I’m tweeting about TV. Really need this pandemic to end soon.

Finally made the leap to VS Code after years and years on Sublime Text. After setting up extensions and config, I’m disappointed I didn’t do this earlier.

Finished reading Land of America by Ben Pobjoy.

It really is amazing how white western “expats” managed to gentrify immigration.

I love reading DIY posts and learning from the comments everything the person did wrong.

Christmas is over!

If you want it.

(A good a day as any to take your tree down.)

All I want for Christmas is to get the front seat on the DLR so I can pretend I’m driving.

I just found out Curb Your Enthusiasm is on one of our streaming services but only for another month, so there goes my holiday break.

My fashion sense is “40 year old B-list celebrity who obviously wasn’t expecting to be papped today.”

House dream: A bookcase full of candles. A whole library of scents to choose from.

If the Tories didn’t already exist we’d never let them happen.

[To the tune of Twelve Days of Christmas]

On my 34th birthday, the postman gave to me A letter from HMRC 🎶

The Seinfeld episode when Elaine stockpiles discontinued birth control and has to decide who is “spongeworthy,” but for lateral flow tests.

There are so many tools and methods for generating colour palettes because people are desperate to take the guesswork out of it and know they’re doing it “right.” These can be great helpers but I think it’s still part science, part art. Still judgment to be used.

Love the rush of getting a bug report and being able to have a fix live in under an hour.

The most annoying thing to ever have to do is prove to somebody “official” that you are or were self-employed. Wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.

Unpopular opinion: I hope Twitter never gets an edit button.

If you’re planning your own Grand Design and want to get absolutely roasted by Kevin McCloud, please visit our website.

A marketer from the Hass Avocado Board just joined Email Geeks Slack and is doing an impromptu avocado AMA. In case you were still waiting for a reason to sign up.

That one coworker who thinks they’re being sneaky typing on Cherry greens unmuted…

Design systems are the ultimate product challenge: Complex personas and use cases, competing user feedback, technical constraints, iterative releases, never finished…

Twice in the past month I’ve looked up old friends just to obituaries from this year. 😔

Just having a Twitter account and following some industry people can be such a designer/engineer superpower.

When I see that someone is engaging with the community through likes etc, that’s a huge green flag in the hiring process.

Weekend project: Move email.geeks.chat from shared hosting to Netlify so I can save £10/mo. Tens of thousands of form submissions have come through this site since 2016 and it’s barely been touched. Same Bootstrap grid and PHP all these years.

I’m just a boy, sitting in front of a Slack channel, asking people to review my pull request.

Friday at 5pm at I‘m headed to see my old friend ohshitgit.com.

If you’re going to call your coworkers “resources,” at least try not to do it when your resources can hear you.

I can’t think of the last software feature I was actually excited about. GitHub’s merge queue is going to free up so much time and mental energy.

Every tech company on Earth decided to hold their online conferences this week.

Should designers use tabs or spaces?

Many companies failed to figure out remote work in the last 18 months, went back to to the office, and backtracked to let some employees stay remote as a retention play. I worry about how well those employees are integrated moving forward.

I was messaging my coworkers in the other room asking what to do. They couldn’t believe it. I think we all just laughed and joked about it until he woke up and I was so green I just tried to let him think I didn’t notice.

I just remembered about the time years ago when the agency I worked at hired a new sales guy. We were in a meeting room where I was walking him through some stuff. I looked up from my laptop and… he was asleep. Out cold.

TIL the terms “regrettable” and “non-regrettable” employee turnover. Basically a way to categorise whether someone leaving will have a negative, neutral, or even positive impact on the team.

I recently registered a Twitter account for a not-yet-public thing. It follows no one.

So far I’ve received five notifications for suggested tweets: one sponcon from Holly Willoughby, and four from weird cops with thin blue line avatars. Cool algorithm we have here.

TIL you can escape Markdown with \. For example, if you’re starting a line with # but don‘t want it to render as a heading, you can use \#. (I ran into this using a comment in a non-fenced Ruby snippet.)

Nothing like discovering an edge case, wondering how you handled it in that similar thing you built earlier, and then discovering you just… didn’t.

My worst fear is that I’ll get fired and not have time to save my custom emoji collection.

How to identify a healthy team:

Find out how they’re improving — at their skills, at working together, at working with others.

Is there a hands-on manager? Empowered peer leadership? Regular knowledge-sharing? Training opportunities? Processes? Retrospectives?

If none, avoid.

Got the Baby Bottle Pop jingle stuck in my head somehow.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=GF5ZXtad5yM

Apple’s product line is a mess. I thought about getting a new iPhone. I don’t know which model I have, how old it is, why the new ones are better (aside from more cameras), or the difference between normal and “Pro.”

The best process is the one your team will actually follow.

I’m starting to believe that most websites, if they don’t support both light and dark modes, should default to dark.

It’s been so long since I kerned anything…

No man is an island. Except me when I’m trying to get a pull request approved.

I don’t know who needs to hear this but using Slack doesn’t count as your company having an async, written communication culture.

Working with Facebook in 2021 makes a far better secret than it does a tweet. Yikes.

Anecdata: I don’t think I’ve ever used Apple’s native Mail app. Today I switched over to take advantage of the impending MPP features.

I’m at the “not only do I not want to go back to work on Monday but I also believe capitalism should be abolished” stage of having a week off.

We’re 18 months into “what you believe to be a personal decision has a negative impact on everyone around you” and now we get to do it all again with Facebook glasses.

Product design is 10% giving new features your best effort and 90% dealing with edge cases caused by designers who have since quit.

Designers will write shit like “eternally curious” in their bios but not even wonder how their mockups get coded.

If I don’t get to relax on this week off I’m going to burn out so hard I’ll just become ash by October.

If you decline an opportunity for feedback on your design work, you might as well just say, “I don’t want this getting any better.”

The hardest job in design systems is telling designers “no.”

I would go as far as to say that if you don’t have a high-level understanding of how your designs get built, you’re not doing your job.

https://twitter.com/kyleturman/status/1431357958848319498

If I tried to explain to a non-tech person that some days I go to work and spend 8 hours just deleting stuff and everyone is really happy about it I have no idea what they’d think.

I started working like this after one too many times suggesting ideas that stalled out, waiting for everyone else’s input or for someone to tell me it was okay to begin. Now I say exactly what I’m going to do dare people to stop me.

❌ “Here’s a proposal. Any feedback?”

✅ “Here’s a proposal. Please provide any feedback by Friday. If there are no blockers, I’ll begin Monday.”

TIL Ruby’s xor operator. One expression must be true, but not more than one.

# This is true

true ^ false

# This is false

false ^ false

# This is also false

true ^ true ^ false

Cycling through Central London is cool because you can ride from Bow to Hyde Park almost entirely in protected lanes and then Kensington actively tries to kill you.

Two reasons you might introduce processes:

1. Making sure talented people are on the same page
2. Making sure untalented people don’t fuck things up too badly

If you find your team has too many of the second type, process might not be the answer.

Here’s me co-admining a community of 12,000 email industry professionals for over 5 years and still being shocked when someone who authored some of the earliest email standards documents is interested in joining.

I’m just a boy, sitting in front of an empty Figma file named “website redesign,” asking it to love him.

If, when faced with obstacles that impede your business to protect others’ privacy, your reaction is to seek exploitations and workarounds, you are an asshole.

Never trust anyone who wears a suit in their profile photo.

Design systems work is so fulfilling because every day I get to prevent full-stack developers from trying to write CSS.

Redefining colour systems across design and code is easily the most complicated work I’ve done all year.

Notion is great because it does everything I need it to with just enough friction that I don’t actually want to do any of it.

Watching TV this week, someone on screen described themselves as a “nerd” for watching anime. My fiancée dismissed that claim, instead turning on me and insisting I am a “real” nerd because I like coding and have a mechanical keyboard…

An em dash is just three hyphens in a trenchcoat.

Backlog prioritisation is just managing the rate at which you burn social capital.

Absolute silence in libraries so a bunch of strangers can look for books? Unquestionable.

Keep it down in an open plan office so your coworkers can help keep your employer in business? Unheard of.

Carousels are the Lazy Susans of the web.

What if calendar meetings weren’t required to have durations or end times? If the only expectations people had were start times and agendas, would meetings be shorter or longer?

“View less” collapse buttons are my biggest UI pet peeve, especially when the user has just expanded the thing. If they don’t want to see it anymore, they’ll just scroll or navigate away. Nobody is cleaning up after themselves.

Sometimes I find myself using “accessibility” as an explanation for why something is important to do. I feel like “usability” would carry more weight.

“Make sure to include these attributes so it’s usable,” with an implicit “for everyone.”

Normalise replying to “LGTM” PR approvals with “damn right it does”

What’s more is this applies both within and adjacent to your team. Any bad apple within 1–2 degrees of collaboration can spoil the bunch. Gotta have an interest in maintaining high standards across the org.

I feel like many managers underestimate the impact of a bad hire. Not only do you get a jerk or under-performer or whatever, but they also eventually push away all of your lovely high-performers.

Two week sprints invite bad estimates, drifting team alignment and focus, and high work-in-progress. Just be careful of burdening yourself with too many meetings during one-week sprints. Experiment with (for example) weekly planning, async standups, fortnightly retrospectives.

Hot take? Two-week sprints are too long.

You can do anything in two weeks. It feels like forever. One week is better. You can see the free time on your calendar and plan more accurately.

A couple of thoughts:

1. Depth over breadth. Shipping quick features is fun but some satisfying problems take years to solve.

2. I’ve seen enough shit to know what I absolutely won’t put up with again, and switching companies always poses that risk.

One cool thing about tennis is that crowds will support anyone who is playing well. Britain’s favourite Andy Murray got whomped at Wimbledon last week and the player who beat him was being cheered on the whole way, capped by a standing ovation.

I’ve managed to move my website note syndication from GitHub Actions to a Netlify deploy function. Also fixed a bug where multiline notes would error out. And added support for replying to tweets (this very note/tweet is that).

It should be a table stakes feature for notetaking apps to resurface old notes, quotes, bookmarks, etc. at a regular cadence.

I want a code editor plugin that creates a new SCSS file with empty rule sets for every class name in a given markup file.

What’s the one thing your team would literally never figure out how to do if you stopped showing up to work? Go write that down in a shared doc somewhere.

I knew better and I still started to back the Maple Leafs this year. Fool me 30 times, shame on me.

A minor UI thing I hate is action menus with a single option. This often happens when additional items are hidden by permissioning — like Edit/Delete, where only admins can Delete. If a user has no choice, just give them a button and render the menu for those who need it.

My most NIMBY opinion is that ice cream vans should not be allowed to idle their engines — not in neighbourhoods and definitely not in parks. Maybe they should have to be electric. I’d love to see more e-bike ice cream vendors.

Baby’s first IntersectionObserver

I love a good header logo :hover or :active state.

My favourite new-ish CSS feature might be gap for flex elements. So nice to not have to mess around with fussy margin rules, and flex-wrap is way more manageable now.

I recently started hiding my macOS dock after years of being a dock-always-visible person. My workspace feels much calmer without the distraction of app icons and badges. (I’m also becoming an Alt+Tab convert.)

Designers, please, no more modals.

HTML & CSS contribute so deeply to user experience that if they’re being ignored, your product is going to suffer big time. And so is your developer experience.

💡 Free startup idea: Designer-developer handoff app but it’s just a trap door into a Zoom meeting where they can speak to each other.

If you want to ruin a designer’s day, drag their artboard about

Absolute positioning corrupts absolutely.

Linters are just awkward PR discussions that scale.

Somehow came down with every side effect in the pamphlet.

App dashboard widgets are just carousels for product managers.

One down…

Make your design system’s components as easy as possible to use and as difficult as possible to misuse.

Thirteen months and I still haven’t learned to just keep a mask in my jacket pocket.

I moved five static sites off an old shared hosting account and onto Netlify this week. Super easy, took about half an hour to make the switch and update DNS records.

I’ve stopped my site’s notes (which I now tweet from) from being added to my RSS feed by default to help out anyone who might be following both. Kept the option, though, so I can still RSS “important” ones like this.

Putting the group chat on Slack seemed like a fun idea as fresh-faced 20-somethings but now we’re jaded 30-somethings checking fucking Slack all night.

It’s one thing to feel sad for the impossibly rich and powerful man who lived a long, fulfilling life of racism while you footed his bill, but imagine admitting it publicly?

If you’re just staring at your screen with no energy or focus, go take a nap or call it a day. The work will be there for you on Monday.

Spent the day on proper product design after three months deep into design system and frontend work. Happy to report that I’ve still got it.

Sometimes it feels like half my job is going around replacing 10 divs and 100 lines of CSS with 3 semantic elements and 10 lines of CSS.

Opening my eyes to collaboration as a buy-in tool. “We’ll reach the same conclusion whether I do it alone or we do it as a group, but the group will accept it more easily if they feel like they’ve contributed.”

Anti-pattern of burgeoning design systems: Letting design improvements get in the way of componentising and documenting what you already have. A perfect component isn’t as good as the one you can use today and improve centrally later.

I’ve come to realise that my happiness at work is directly proportional to how often I ship to production. This seems… not great.

If this works, I’ve successfully tweeted from my own website.