Published
Weekend Reading — 9 reasons why you should approve this PR
Pure CSS Francine This stunning image, in the style of 18th-century oil paintings, but hand-coded entirely in HTML & CSS. 🤯
Design Objective
The Best Place for Error Messages on Forms TL;DR
If you have time to implement error messages for both devices, opt for placing them to the right of the field on desktop and below the field for mobile devices.
Ryan Singer Design starts from the top:
Much of bad design isn't bad design — it's work done without design. Somebody had to fulfill a commitment and there was no time to think or room to change course. The way companies make commitments is the first design problem. It constrains everything afterward.
Andrew Chen On "Conservation of Intent", a theory of why increasing conversation by X% seldom affects key metrics:
1/ OK, this is an infuriating startup experience: You ship an experiment that's +10% in your conversion funnel. Then your revenue/installs/whatever goes up by +10% right? Wrong :( Turns out usually it goes up a little bit, or maybe not at all. Why is that?
Sketchize Printable templates for sketching mobile/tablet/desktop UIs.
Tools of the Trade
Lobe Lobe is a new service for building and training deep learning models, using a simple, visual interface. Got to check it out. Here's the sample project for Hotdog / Not Hotdog.
Eloone Interesting idea:
Today, a guy at work brought us candies made with salty liquorice that taste really really awful 😖 So an idea flew around the office: "when you break the build you eat a candy".
Now everybody is super careful and tests (more) their code 😂
Solis Mac app for live design: integrates with your code editor, to show real time, multi-viewport preview.
Rust in production at Figma If you're interested in Rust, some lessons here about performance (fast, low memory) and ease of us (not quite there yet). TL;DR they ended up with a Node/Rust hybrid solution.
Password Strength Visualization Help users understand password strength, by pixelating an image.
Web-End
Swipe Views with CSS Snap Points Building a more efficient mobile web navigation.
How Google is tracking Safari users on third party sites The War of the Cookies.
Lingua Scripta
BigInt: arbitrary-precision integers in JavaScript V8 v6.7 ships with BigInt support enabled by default. Coming soon to Chrome and Node.
Lines of Code
James Bowes So true:
Programming is making a branch named "improve-coverage" and having it reduce code coverage.
I've been experimenting with clickbaity pull request headlines at work.
CTR's gone Though. The. Roof!!!
Architectural
Will Pearse Story time:
You know how HTTP GET requests are meant to be idempotent? Well, do I have the story for you ... a while back I added WiFi control to our garage doors with little Wemos D1s.
Containers XKCD nails it:
Devoops
A Comedy of Errors — Conor McDermottroe of CircleCI "My worst story? Probably that time I dropped the database and broke shit."
Peopleware
Charity Majors Whether your manager says it or not, managing up factors into your performance reviews:
I never even heard the phrase "managing up" til I was at Facebook. And then I immediately translated it to "sucking up" in my head.
No, managers are fucking people too. Wish I'd learned this art sooner.
Building successful online communities: Evidence-based social design Such a simple idea (h/t Florent Crivello):
The authors also suggest that ascribing blame or community sanctions may be less effective than offering community members a way to "save face" "without having to admit that they deliberately violated the community's norms." They describe a system called stopit designed at MIT to address computer-based harassment. When users reported harassment, the system sent a message to the alleged harasser claiming that the alleged harasser's account may have been compromised and urging them to change their password.
The Curse of Culture When culture gets in the way of innovating.
Workout For Daily Life Great exercise tips for office workers (follow link for more exercise ideas).
Locked Doors
I use 1Password to generate answers for BS "security questions." Extra entropy. Just spelled out a 27 character combo of letters and numbers. Rep asked "That's your pet's name?!"
Said "As far as you know, it is. The real name is all over my wife's social media."
It’s Impossible to Prove Your Laptop Hasn’t Been Hacked. I Spent Two Years Finding Out. Journalist tries to get their laptop hacked into. Thing is, they can't tell whether it was hacked into, or not.
Emoji
Babette Radclyffe-T "My hotel in Seoul let's you order room service using Emojis 😄😎🍱"
Emoji: NTT DOCOMO, Japan, 1999 Hardcover book and smartphone keyboard of the original emoji set.
Emojis: A New Language? Nah. Stuff You Should Know episode that explores the history of emoji, and what lies beyond the poop emoji.
None of the Above
Tasha Robinson Creative:
The sheer amount of detail that went into Heathrow Airport's #MayThe4th sign is lovely. Note that the "next info" on the Kessel run flight is the release date of SOLO. Also thumbs up for "possibly a trap" on the Death Star flight.
The Every Single Mention Reader From a Twitter thread about work related fuck-ups, this story is hilarious:
Got my days wrong and ended up alone in a room with my boss and the President of Ireland while I was on ketamine.
Tal Waterhouse Punny:
People who can't distinguish between etymology and entomology bug me in ways I cannot put into words.
Alan Cole "I've found it: the most rage-inducing gif on the internet."
The Thoughts of a Spiderweb Fascinating:
Spiders appear to offload cognitive tasks to their webs, making them one of a number of species with a mind that isn’t fully confined within the head.
One space between each sentence, they said. Science just proved them wrong Smart use of typography in this article. But not everything worked according to plan:
Johnson told Lifehacker that she and her co-authors submitted the paper with two spaces after each period — as was proper. And the journal deleted all the extra spaces anyway.
Note: An earlier version of this story published incorrectly because, seriously, putting two spaces in the headline broke the web code.
BTW I'm writing this blog post in monospaced font, so two spaces after the period. It's published as HTML, with a variable-width font, so one space after the period. Having the cake and eating it too?
Amy Renee ☕️
My brain every morning: your issue is very important to us, please hold as our call volume is high, and coffee is still coming online…
christina rotondo "my mom put oil on her bird feeder to keep squirrels from stealing the bird food and"
Steve Rogalsky From a Twitter debate about "craftsmen", and the need to deprecate this gendered term:
A fond memory from my university days: I was seeking to understand why we can't use "mankind" or "men" for all cases. A wise woman asked me to name 10 famous men. I named 10 famous males, and no females. Her point exactly.
That's the problem with using craftsmen for all cases.
John 🛒
Going into my teenage daughter's room is like a trip to IKEA. I went in for a look and came out with 6 cups, 3 plates, a tea towel and some cutlery
James Felton Follow #BadStockPhotosOfMyJob for more gems like this:
"Hey space astronomer, where is space?" [Space astronomer puts on his lab coat and adjusts his space safety goggles] "According to my latest science, there is space."
