The other day I was talking to Jules about the 99% Invisible episode she’d written about. In that post, Jules excitedly quotes the episode with Hank Green where he says: [...] there are all these phenomena in human life that are really resistant to language. I think physical pain is the one that’s perhaps most...

Rach Smith on why we should be more careful when we use the phrase ‘imposter syndrome’: When I see my wildly successful, senior developer peers talk publicly about how they deal with imposter syndrome I can see the intent behind it. They want to be approachable, relatable: “internet famous senior devs – they’re just...

This post about the workplace and creating a sick system is outstanding and I’ve been thinking about it all week. I can’t seem to find out anything about who wrote this but they argue that if you want to keep employees working for you forever there are a number of ways to do that, the most important being... Keep...

Paul Ford on becoming a manager at Postlight, the agency he cofounded: There is no true metric of success, not even profits. When I was a writer and a piece was published I could see the tweets, and sometimes the traffic metrics. I could see who emailed me. And then I’d chase the next success, often for months. For...

Tim Maly compares the rampant and illogical fear of the emergence of AI with the real threat of corporations: What if the private pursuit of profit was—for a long time—proximate to improving the lot of humans but not identical to it? What if capitalism has gone feral, and started making moves that are obviously...

There’s a wonderful quote by Aza Raskin, although I’ve forgotten where he said it now, but I think it about all the time. He argued that: Design is not about learning to think outside the box, it’s about finding the right box to think inside of. And when it comes to design systems I think that’s exactly what’s so...

I love this piece by Dave Rupert on videogames and the art of kindness. He quotes a recent interview by Hideo Kojima: Most of your tools in action games are sticks. You punch or you shoot or you kick. The communication is always through these sticks, I want people to be connected not through sticks, but through what...

I’ve been writing a semi-weekly newsletter called Adventures in Typography for a couple of years now and it has always bothered me that I didn’t own the archive of all that writing. I don’t like the idea that I’m dependent on anyone else, or a third party service—especially when there’s a few pieces I’ve written...

We have to start looking at performance and accessibility as being the baseline of web development work, instead of nice to have features that we can tack onto a project later. So I ranted my heart out the other day for CSS-Tricks and I wrote that: I think it’s important to make note of Deb Chachra’s argument that...

Someone asked a group of engineers in our Slack channel this question the other day and I spent a whole bunch of time thinking about it. What do I wish I had known about engineering before I had started? What would have helped me the most? What’s been the biggest mistake I’ve made so far? Well, I wish I had known...

I’ve been a big fan of Matthew Ström’s blog lately and his latest piece on the management strategy that saved Apollo 11 is likewise excellent. Matthew writes: In today’s companies, decisions are made at the highest level; by the board, the c-suite, senior vice presidents, etc. Leaders with great decision-making...

Craig Mod has some pretty interesting thoughts on why software should be lightning fast. One example he makes is this: Sublime Text has — in my experience — only gotten faster. I love software that does this: Software that unbloats over time. This should be the goal of all software. The longer it’s around, the more...