“Designing a focus style - Zell Liew”
(Via @adactio)
“Editorial Design Patterns With CSS Grid And Named Columns — Smashing Magazine”
The CSS grid has transformed the way I do CSS.
Today has felt so much like a Friday. Why isn’t it Friday?
Feature-oriented development leads to bad products
“Gaining a Competitive Advantage with a Solid Experience Vision”
“It’s impossible to avoid: feature-for-feature parity ultimately leads to experience rot. When we continually add new features, we make our design more complex. And when we increase complexity we reduce the quality of the user experience.”
This is what happens when, after making a solid launch product, switching to feature-oriented development makes the product worse overall and opens it up to competition.
What’s even worse are the projects that are feature-oriented from the start: instead of focusing on the overall utility and experience, you tick off desired features like items on a grocery list, leading to a sort-of-functional but hopelessly useless product at launch.
“Authentication relation types”
This seems like a good idea that solves a pretty common problem.
“Inspired Design Decisions: Bea Feitler, An Unstoppable Creative Force — Smashing Magazine”
This is lovely.
The most important question to ask after a project
“A Framework for Making Better Product Decisions — Users Know”
“If you were off on anything - investment, benefits, side effects, etc. - then you have to ask the most important question: What can we do differently next time to avoid these same mistakes?”
This question doesn’t get asked often enough. At most, they immediately jump to: who’s fault was it? They blame the individual when it was the process, system, or their assumptions that failed.
“Where to find the hours to make it happen - Derek Sivers”
“It takes many hours to make what you want to make. The hours don’t suddenly appear. You have to steal them from comfort.”
“Code Craft : Part II – Version Control is Seat Belts for Programmers – Codemanship’s Blog”
“Same-Site Cookies By Default - text/plain”
This will make the web more secure but it will break a tonne of login flows.
“Enhancing The Clickable Area Size”
I hadn’t seen the ::after trick before.
“How to be a more productive developer - Go Make Things”
All good. The “plan your scripts out on paper” tip is something I’ve found especially useful personally. Been doing it a while and have a decent collection of notebooks to prove it. 🙂
“A Modern CSS Reset - Andy Bell”
Sensible, with nice explanations and context.
“Software as Business and the Passion Project”
“From a business perspective, the customer lifetime value (CLV) of an App Store user, based solely on app purchase revenue, is negative.”
“Michael Tsai - Blog - Decreasing iOS Information Density”
This is one of the many very unfortunate design trends that dominate today.
“Five dysfunctions of ‘democratised’ research. Part 4 – Quantitative fallacies – disambiguity”
“swyx Writing - Why JavaScript Tooling Sucks”
This is much more nuanced than the title would indicate. Well worth reading.
“Don’t quote. Make it yours and say it yourself. - Derek Sivers”
“Testing in Production: the hard parts - Cindy Sridharan - Medium”
“Apple’s abysmal Mail toolbar design in iOS 13 - Revert to Saved”
Why? Why did they do this?
“How to Begin to Shape Up - Shape Up”
Shape Up is probably the most important book on software development published this year so far. And now it has an appendix on how to get started.
“The ethics of the tools we use - Go Make Things”
Tricky questions that I have no answer to but like to torment myself by pondering regularly.