Code & Development
Open Transclude
The Website Obesity Crisis
A Talk by Maciej CegłowskiWeb Design - The First 100 Years
A Talk by Maciej CegłowskiVisualizing Algorithms
An Article by Mike BostockAias
A Profile by Nick TrombleyThe Future of Programming
A Talk by Bret VictorWhat Makes Software Good?
An Article by Mike BostockAn incoherent rant about design systems
An Article by Robin RendleNo matter how fancy your Figma file is or how beautiful and lovingly well organized that Storybook documentation is; the front-end is always your source of truth. You can hate it as much as you like—all those weird buttons, variables, inaccessible form inputs—but that right there is your design system.
...being honest about this is the first step to fixing it.
Right-Angle Doodling Machine
A Game by Clive Thompson- You draw one single line. It can be as long as you like.
- To start the line, you put your pen down.
- You can make right-angle turns only, either 90 degrees or -90 degrees.
- You cannot back up. You must always move forward.
- You don’t lift your pen until you’re ready to stop. When you lift the pen, the doodle is done.
What do I need to read to be great at CSS?
An Article by Baldur BjarnasonA rule of thumb is that the importance of a blog in your feed reader is inversely proportional to their posting cadence. Prioritise the blogs that post only once a month or every couple of weeks over those that post every day or multiple times a day...Building up a large library of sporadically updated blogs is much more useful and much easier to keep up with than trying to keep up with a handful of aggregation sites every day.
Designing with code
An Article by Matthew StrömRecently I’ve had a few opportunities to use code to create design. In two of my bigger projects at The Wall Street Journal, writing code has led to new ideas. Problems that typically plague early designs — e.g. “how does this look with real content?” — are easy to solve. By exploring visual ideas directly in code, I’ve started to see the amazing potential of code as a design tool.
Picking better names for variables, functions, and projects
An Article by Tom MacWright- Avoid weasel words
- Follow patterns religiously
- Don’t cheap out on characters
- Call things the same thing
- Don’t name internal projects
- When things change, change their names
this vs. that
A Website by Phuoc Nguyentixy.land
A Websitesin(t * x) * cos(t * y)
Creative code golfing.
Front-of-the-front-end and back-of-the-front-end web development
An Article by Brad FrostA succinct way I’ve framed the split is that a front-of-the-front-end developer determines the look and feel of a
button
, while a back-of-the-front-end developer determines what happens when thatbutton
is clicked.The Great Divide
An Article by Chris CoyierOn one side, an army of developers whose interests, responsibilities, and skill sets are heavily revolved around JavaScript.
On the other, an army of developers whose interests, responsibilities, and skill sets are focused on other areas of the front end, like HTML, CSS, design, interaction, patterns, accessibility, etc.
Painting With the Web
An Article by Matthias OttSo much about [Gerhard Richter's painting process] reminds me of designing and building for the Web: The unpredictability, the peculiarities of the material, the improvisation, the bugs, the happy accidents. There is one crucial difference, though. By using static wireframes and static layouts, by separating design and development, we are often limiting our ability to have that creative dialogue with the Web and its materials. We are limiting our potential for playful exploration and for creating surprising and novel solutions. And, most importantly, we are limiting our ability to make conscious, well-informed decisions going forward. By adding more and more layers of abstraction, we are breaking the feedback loop of the creative process.
Technical debt as a lack of understanding
An Article by Dave Rupert"If you develop a program for a long period of time by only adding features but never reorganizing it to reflect your understanding of those features, then eventually that program simply does not contain any understanding and all efforts to work on it take longer and longer.” — Ward Cunningham
bees & bombs
A Blog
Two Cycles
Gorgeous artwork by Minori Asada.
Among the trees
To accommodate the spaces between the trees, I built three walls in a radial pattern. Filling out the spaces on both sides of these three spline-like walls, I came up with a structure that appears to be slipped in among the trees. This design allowed us to proceed without cutting down any of the woods.
Small economies
I refer to small money-earning business that consist of the work of a visible individual, or have evolved from a personal hobby or skill, as "small economies". We can include in this category newer forms of at-home work—side businesses, telecommuting and the like. The amount of income is unimportant; meager profits are compensated for by the motivation of the owner. A small economy may or may not be someone's main form of livelihood, but it is always a spontaneously conceived and continuing activity.
An extremely closed structure
Nearly all housing in Japan today consists of exclusively residential units for salaried workers and their nuclear families. Such residences have, by definition, no reason to interface with their surroundings.
Salaried workers commute to workplaces outside, and often a considerable distance from, their homes. Residences built for these workers do not contain a place of livelihood—in the broader sense, a place for exchange. This "residence-only housing" is only a place for the nuclear family to eat and sleep, with no occasions for interaction with the outside world, and no need to foster a sense of belonging to the community at large. Thus the only organizational principle is the maintenance of privacy. Both in external appearance and in lifestyle, it is an extremely closed structure.
Ecological cycles
This house exists in the midst of a year-long cycle of natural phenomena. One might say that this cycle entails the periodic "rise and fall" of the ground surface. In winter it sinks below a snow cover that grows head-high or more; as spring approaches, this height gradually decreases until we can see the actual ground surface, not yet covered with undergrowth. With summer the vegetation grows higher and higher until the plaza seems once again to be lower than its surroundings. With the falling of the leaves, autumn restores our ability to penetrate these surroundings at eye level, at least until the snow begins to fall again... Through the four seasons, we experience the sensation of the ground rising and falling, like the ebb and flow of the tide.
I call this cycle of natural phenomena an ecological cycle.
Doing community
There is a Japanese catchphrase, community suru, literally "making" or "doing" community. I will never forget the queasy feeling that came over me when I first heard that term, phrased as if community were a kind of event.
Hold an event, bring people together, get people who might otherwise never meet to interact. It's a wonderful thought. I have nothing against events per se. However, if they are not spontaneous and voluntary, they will not last. That is my objection to the keep-it-lively concept of community. The perception of community as event stems, I think, from a yearning for the festivals and rituals that once flourished in rural communities in Japan. But those events occurred precisely because a community existed, not the other way around.
What are those borders made of?
Functionalist modern architecture has prioritized the functionality of interiors and treated surfaces and external appearances as an outcome of that priority. Diagrams illustrating functional layouts generally frame them with thick borders. Updating conventional program theory entails questioning what those thick borders are actually made of, and how they should be designed. A dynamic program theory should be one that turns these thick borders into more organic interfaces that will foster exchanges and interactions.
An ecological cycle
In the design of his own residence / workplace, Toshiharu Naka created a small ecological cycle. Rows of green planters in front of the wall protect the house from the sun and help cool it in summer. Rainwater is collected via catch-basins from the roof, and used to water the planters.
In the water buckets is a micro-cycle — fish live in the buckets, eating mosquitos from the planters, eliminating the need for pesticides.