10.08.13 |
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Last week at my day job our team released a newly refreshed Pocket for web. (If you’re at all curious why my blog posts stopped dead midweek, it’s because my life has been fixated on launch and support issues. Thankfully there we few.) It’s been my main development and design focus for months. There’s a simplified navigation, recut reader view, keyboard shortcuts, and everything is noticeably faster. If you’re already a fan of save for later services, or you’re curious but never jumped in before, I’d encourage you to check it out.
09.12.13 |
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Keeping the trend from yesterday on bad work practices, designer Murat Mutlu:
Ahhh working til 9pm several days a week, it’s just the agency way of life right? Wrong, it’s bad management.
Tell your account managers (or yourself) to stop selling things that can’t be completed unless we work ourselves to death. I’ve seen people strain their health, relationships and family lives for what? So a deodorant can get more brand awareness? So that we can meet the unrealistic deadline you promised whilst trying to win a pitch? Or so a client can get dozens of mockups before they go on holiday?
This is advertising we’re talking about, not some higher calling. Everything we make is forgotten about in 6 months. Who gives a shit?
This is a mantra that could be extended to a lot of other industries as well, especially web and tech agencies.
09.11.13 |
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Author “Shanley” on Medium:
What about when we reward acts of heroism — recovering from severe outages, working unreasonable hours, emerging triumphant from a death march? When such acts of heroism are very visible and rewarded, do we end up with a situation where people are incentivized to manifest the very conditions of catastrophe that allow them to be heroes? At what point are we actually incentivized to create unrealistic deadlines, work at an unsustainable cadence, even cause production issues?
09.04.13 |
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Designer Julie Zhuo:
If you give an engineer a design to build but you’re not confident how well it’ll work out until you get to play with the implementation, make sure you let them know that there’s a good chance things will change. Nothing is more annoying to engineers than staying up all night to finish an implementation only to get a memo in the morning that Whoops! The whole design has been transformed! And now they’ll have to throw away all that production-quality code they put painstaking attention into.
A thousand times this. Having worked on projects on both design and development, this point has come back to bite me personally quite a few times. If you’re a developer, make sure you’re clear on what stage the design is at.
06.03.13 |
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Developer and writer Alex Payne:
A startup is just a means to an end. Consider the end, and don’t seek to revel in the means. What do you care about? Who do you want to help? Does a startup make meeting your goals easier or harder? Where will it leave you when your goal is met? Where will it leave you if it isn’t?
Startups are portrayed as an exciting…but a few interviews at later-stage startups will make clear just how quickly they ossify into structures that look very much like the organizations that came before them.
So true. I’ve both experienced touches of this here and there earlier in my career, and know so many other horror stories of fellow web developers that have sacrificed their personal lives at the alter of a “hot startup” that falls apart within a few months. I appreciate Alex isn’t anti-startups in his argument; he emphasizes balance, something sorely lacking from content we read every day on Hacker News and Techcrunch.
05.29.13 |
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Developer Lucas Rocha:
Why is it so important to have designers and engineers working very closely? First, there are a number of issues that you only spot once you actually try the design ideas. If designers don’t engage with engineers, the product will likely stick with broken and/or unintended design.
Furthermore, design issues are tricky in that they have this qualitative side that tends to be invisible to untrained eyes. Design problems will not necessarily be caught by even the most competent QA team or the most solid UI tests—because both are usually focused on the functional correctness of the product.
As I’ve said many times here, close collaboration between a tech team’s designers and engineers isn’t just a “nice to have”. It’s essential for success, especially in smaller organizations like startups.
05.02.13 |
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I hadn’t heard of Twitter Design Director Martin Ringlein before this talk, but regardless of his exact background, he’s a natural speaker, and I loved his frankness when it came to worker capacity prior to burning out. It’s really a talk that can apply to almost any fast paced/startup profession, from producers to designers to web developers. Martin goes off on some tangents near the beginning which pad out the length of the talk, but I’d still recommend it to almost anyone.
04.26.13 |
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Really interesting article by self-described fitness geek Maroun Najjar. There are insights on differences between light, deep and REM sleep, caffeine, napping and more. It’s a pretty quick read but I learned a lot.
04.24.13 |
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An hour long talk by Google web developer and evangelist Paul Irish at a recent HTML5 developer conference. Some great tools and ideas here, from shell customization to SSH and Chrome DevTools tricks.
04.17.13 |
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Designer and Paravel founder Trent Walton on the strength of small teams with a skill set balanced among planning, design and development:
When various skill sets are combined in this way, people learn from each other. Rather than creating to-do lists filled with nudges and site tweaks for developers, designers could learn CSS and edit designs in the browser alongside more intensive development. Developers could hone their design sensibilities and contribute by making enhancements such as gestures, geolocation, and performance a part of the design process.
Trent’s right. The faster we mix and integrate our teams, the less “siloed” work and more “T shaped” contributors, the stronger our web work becomes.