I don’t plan to get on Mastadon. But knowing about some of these open protocols and how to satisfy them with Netlify redirects is pretty neat!

Practical tips for writing within an organization.

The title sums it up. What a helplful bit of advice for keeping momentum moving forward. Uncertainty is a constant. Waiting for a solution that completely obliterates it stalls progress. Aim for small safe moves instead.

This is the best personal website I’ve encountered in a while. Bespoke style on every page at a manageable scale. Don’t be surprised if I end up doing this soon.

The thing about rules and policies is they become very hard to fix once they are put in place. Both the people who put them in place and the people whose jobs it is to exercise them become highly motivated advocates of the policies. Even if the policies originally made sense, they become very hard to change. When you try to change something but can’t, you start becoming a tenant and stop being an owner.

BICEPS is a helpful acronym for recalling the six core that are important for all humans.

• Belonging
• Improvement
• Choice
• Equality/fairness
• Predictability
• Significance

What an amazing business idea. Exchanging propane tanks is a propane in my neck.

Not available where I live, yet. 😢

Joshua Blankenship’s very nice website about web cameras and microphones for telepresence setup.

All we get to control are our own actions and intentions. Consider those carefully. Then let others be free from your expectations about how they ought to feel about that.

I think what we’ve got now is [that] politics is the amphetamines of the people.

Using single file applications to demonstrate core ideas or reproduce edge case bugs is an invaluable tool. Greg provided a nice little write-up about how to do it.

in most cases, this kind of perfectionism is holding me back.

Marco hits the nail on the head with this one. The goal of blogging is to share ideas and continually learn. If you wait for 100% certainty and the feelings of authority, nothing will ever be written.

Walking at a comfortable pace unlocks better thinking and problem solving. It really is that simple.

practice is a commitment to a process, not a predetermined outcome. And the outcome was not what I predicted.

Viewing the future fatalistically isn’t helpful. Prenteding you can trol the entire outcome is equally helpful. But the insistence on nudging, influencing, and practicing is a nice balance between the two, setting realistic expectations.

Serving as a kind of midwife to change is a magical experience. The opportunities I’ve had to build close and trusting relationships with people, both my reports and others—when I’ve been able to listen deeply, sit with someone through big feelings, or ask open questions and discover the insight that bubbles up—have been the most rewarding parts of my career. The times when I’ve missed the chance to do that represent my greatest regrets.

The analogy of midwifery is perfect. Supporting others as new features are brought into the world. I think this emphasis on coaching resonates with me.

Here’s how to stop being so darn precious about your blogging: The third time you use an idea in a conversation, you have to blog about it.

A great rule of thumb that I’d like to adopt. And to extend the analogy—there is no use in trying to go back to bat on old ideas that have struck out. They’ll bubble back up if they’re truly enduring, and you’ll get another swing at it.

Everyone should learn to cook. Everyone should learn to code. Not every cook aspires to be a restauranteur. Some just want to host good parties for their families and friends. You can take the same approach to coding.

I feel like in our modern era there is an over-fixation on engagement and being in the moment

This is the first time I’ve hear of “in-the-moment”’ism called into question. He goes on to find a quote positing this position from the early days of computer interaction in 1993.

Engagement is not the only virtue.

Adactio’s Design Principles page is an amazing collection of principles from various organizations and individuals.

LARP rules everything around me.

Those technologies may seem boring, but boring is fast. Boring is usable. Boring is resilient and fault tolerant. Boring is accessible

But design work is so much healthier/better when you stop telling yourself that you’re changing lives. Websites can just be…websites! And your front end framework or side project doesn’t need to reshape human civilization for it to be worth while.

Once you relieve yourself of that pressure it’s so much easier to be happy and to do good, useful work.

Once heard, this idea seems so obvious that it’s painful. Have candidate read code instead of writing code. Most of the job is reading things that have already been written, not writing new things. I like it.

The problem is that certain kinds of stuff simply attract more stuff. The home is an obvious one: It craves sofas, sweaters, buffet cabinets, chandeliers. Computers are another; they grow USB tendrils. Smartphones beget earbuds, cloud backups, and music service subscriptions. I am jealous of the people who make it work with an Eames chair, a fancy ottoman, some nice art books, and multigenerational inherited wealth.

The supply chain is fractal: Zoom in on your stuff and there’s more stuff, ad infinitum.

I learned a thing or two from this post. I love me some semantic HTML.

…the job of an executive is: to define and enforce culture and values for their whole organization, and to ratify good decisions.

That’s all.

The whole post is great, and this quote sums it up.

Someone smart said to me that “Teams are Immutable”, so they would contend that if you add or take away one member you essentially have a whole new team because the dynamics and skills within the team are different. So how can you convey that idea that the team is significantly different at different stages in time?

Immutability as the backing data structures for teams is a super compelling mental model. People intuit this during every transition. “This is going to change the team”…the language of mutability. It feels primed for loss, and slightly hopeful for improvemement. Changing the mental model to “this is a fork of the team” seems to mitigate the feelings of loss in my mind.

Andy has a fresh take on note taking on the Internet. No index of every note available. All exploratory cross-linking. I dig it!

The idea that having a better future is mostly about building personal wealth puts the onus on personal responsibility instead of a system that is pitted against entire communities. Everyone deserves to live a great life. And to live in a system that supports them.

I appreciate Ben’s thoughts often. This one in particular stuck out.

This is a beautiful website. And the content it presents is infinitely helpful for management training.

I sure do appreciate Mozilla existing, and advocating for the grain of the web.

Does what it says on the tin. This would be super handy when throwing together Ruby scripts that don’t require dependencies.

This is what the web was made for. A nice big toggle shows a comparison of writing styles. I want to write the simple way.

A perfectly named website—where the elevator pitch pretty much says it all.

This is what a web-based dictionary should be.

These explorations in the medium of video are fascinating.

Trigger an action on an element with a keyboard shortcut

A JavaScript library made by GitHub itself. If it’s good enough for GitHub, it’s good enough for me!

The reason we talk so much about authenticity now is because authenticity is no longer available to us. At best, we simulate authenticity: we imbue our deep fakeness with the qualities that people associate with the authentic. We assemble a self that fits the pattern of authenticity, and the ever-present audience applauds the pattern as “authentic.” The likes roll in, the views accumulate. Our production is validated. If we’re lucky, we rise to the level of influencer. What is an influencer but the perfection of the deep-fake self?

Katy DeCorah’s use of GitHub repos and actions to track metadata is super cool! Simple yaml storage for the win!

A beautiful collection of simple recipes, without the unnecessary narrative.

A simple, minimal, classless stylesheet for simple HTML pages

A style sheet for when ~dinosaurs~ plain-old-semantic-HTML ruled the world.

Spotify building its business on arbitrage and viewing music as valueless is a take.

A Smart Display To Connect And Inspire

This is the kind of product I crave. Nostalgic aesthetic with just the right amount of technology to make it useful in a modern context.