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
Narcissus and Goldmund
Duality
All existence seemed to be based on duality, on contrast. Either one was a man or one was a woman, either a wanderer or a sedentary burgher, either a thinking person or a feeling person – no one could breathe in at the same time as he breathed out, be a man as well as a woman, experience freedom as well as order, combine instinct and mind. One always had to pay for the one with the loss of the other, and one thing was always just as important and desirable as the other.
Fear of death
He thought that fear of death was perhaps the root of all art.
Pain and joy
In the light of the torch, as he stared with great curiosity into the face of the screaming woman, lying there in pain, he was struck by something unexpected: the lines in the screaming woman’s distorted face were little different than those he had seen in other women’s faces during the moment of love’s ecstasy. True, the expression of great pain was more violent and disfiguring than the expression of ultimate passion – but essentially it was not different, it was the same slightly grinning contraction, the same sudden glow and extinction.
Miraculously, without understanding why, he was surprised by the realization that pain and joy could resemble each other so closely.
Suddenly the letter has a tail
I believe that the petal of a flower or a tiny worm on the path says far more, contains far more than all the books in the library. One cannot say very much with mere letters and words. Sometimes I’ll be writing a Greek letter, a theta or an omega, and tilt my pen just the slightest bit; suddenly the letter has a tail and becomes a fish; in a second it evokes all the streams and rivers of the world, all that is cool and humid, Homer’s sea and the waters on which Saint Peter wandered.
All that is beautiful and lovely
You are so handsome and you look so happy. But deep inside your eyes there is no gaiety, there is only sorrow, as though your eyes knew that happiness did not exist and that all that is beautiful and lovely does not stay with us long.