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
In the Eye of the Beholder
Haven't you noticed?
I remember my mother sitting me down at the age of about five with pencil and paper to draw an acacia tree in the yard while she busied herself with her own sketchbook.
After a while she came over to see my efforts. “Splendid! But haven’t you noticed how the trunk narrows as it rises? And see how the branches flatten out sideways, not like that oleander over there, where they all go up at a steep angle. Now don’t rub that one out, just do another drawing to compare with the first one.”
Wordless questioning
The comparison of forms raises questions and drawing can be employed as a wordless questioning of form; the pencil seeks to extract from the complex whole some limited coherent pattern that our minds and eyes can grasp. The probing pencil is like the dissecting scalpel, seeking to expose relevant structures that may not be immediately obvious and are certainly hidden from the shadowy world of the camera lens.
Outlines
Photography teaches us that the very act of putting a line around the edge of an observed object is an artifice. Such outlines rarely appear in photographs, or, for that matter, in nature, and yet…and yet?
An outline sketch that bears little relationships to the so-called objectivity of a photograph might actually transmit information to another human being more selectively, sometimes even more usefully, than a photograph.
If the brain is unlike a camera in actively seeking outlines, there is the strong implication that “outline drawings” can represent, in themselves, artifacts that may correspond more closely with what the brain seeks than the charts of light-fall that photographs represent.
Agents of thought and experiment
The act of drawing serves to remind us that hands are agents of thought and experiment. Photography has a great future, but no matter how much ancillary wizardry photography accumulates, it will not be in competition with “drawing” in the broadest sense of that term. There will always be a role for exploration by the hands, encumbered by no more than a piece of ocher or a stick of charcoal.
Its practical utility is as a manifestation of the mind struggling with the meaning of what it encounters and what it wants to explore.