Background textures of work An Article by Lucy Keer lucykeer.com One thing I've been enjoying about working as a technical writer is that the minute-by-minute texture of the work feels right. Something about formatting text, faffing about with SVGs, trying to rewrite a sentence more clearly... it's just enjoyable in itself, and I feel at home with it. ...Working as a programmer was very much not like that. There's something in the rough vicinity of professional dev work that I do like, which I could probably label as 'iterative hobbyist tinkering with websites'. I like working on something with a strong visual component, and I like to be inside of a fast feedback loop, and I'm mostly interested in just somehow bodging through until it works. I'm not very interested in either the computer-sciencey side of programming — data structures, algorithms — or the software-engineerey side of making things run reliably at scale in a maintainable way. So maybe it's not surprising that the minute-by-minute texture of professional programming was just... kind of bad. Occasional fun bits when I got into something, but the background experience was not fun. workproductivitymaking
Discourse in web design An Essay by Jason Santa Maria v5.jasonsantamaria.com A website is its own, singular thing. We know it isn’t a book, a TV show, a film, or a song, but our language is limited to talking about it in those restrictive boxes. A website is a mix of all of those things, and none of those things. It is influenced by place and time. A website changes with age. It can evolve and regress. It was then I wondered if the problem wasn’t that web design lacked its own Emigré. What if we actually lacked a shared language to critically discuss web design? Art, architecture, and even graphic design, have critics and historians that give context to new work through the lenses of culture and important work from the past. wwwcritique