Ethan Marcotte’s talk at New Adventures is very well much worth your time if you care for the web. Ethan broadens the scope of what accessibility means and argues that it goes beyond writing good HTML and CSS. It’s about making a web, and a world, for all of us. Ethan’s talks are the kind I aspire to though;...

Facing a three day break over the Memorial Day weekend, it dawned on me: it was time to redesign this website. Not the visuals or design, as I don’t believe in redesigning personal websites like that. Instead, I needed to rethink how I publish writing and in the process I wanted to completely overhaul the technical...

I’ve made a mistake, a lifelong one, correlating advancements in technology with progress. Progress is the opening of doors and the leveling of opportunity, the augmentation of the whole human species and the protection of other species besides. Progress is cheerfully facing the truth, whether flooding coastlines or...

Hey maybe the reason why accessibility is getting worse and the web is breaking is because folks still think that writing CSS and HTML is “lite” coding. Hey maybe the way we fix the web is by paying front-end engineers the same as full-stack engineers.

I’ve had a lot of questions lately about what I do for a living. Not just from my family and friends but also, heck, even a few managers that I work with at Gusto. In general there’s a lot of folks who ask me what my job is and appear to be confused by it and I’m asked this question so often that it’s started to...

Every company has a Judgement Day. Once in a while the peer reviews will roll in, the managers will require a self-evaluation, and you will be Judged. No matter what you do you’ll be assigned a rating, a number, a metric, and your job will be given a score out of ten or out of four. For a long time I’ve felt that...

Anna Wiener writing for the New Yorker on what’s happening with Twitter and Jack Dorsey’s failure to respond to the community: The struggle to maintain Twitter is a double referendum: first, on the sustainability of scale; second, on the pervasive belief in Silicon Valley that technology can be neutral and should be...

If you love sci-fi then you should read Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky immediately. A while back I wrote a bit about why it’s my favorite sci-fi novel of all time but it was only today that I read the afterword by Boris, which was written years after the fall of the Soviet Union, and in it he...

I just re-read this piece from Ethan Marcotte all about design systems and how it’s kinda easy to forget that a system is really a collection of tools, and if those tools aren’t working then that’s a problem: Let’s say you, a hard-working designer on deadline, have to add a hero image to a page. Your company’s...

Marcin Wichary has written yet another outstanding piece about how the team at Figma has redesigned how they treat line-height and spacing. But I can’t stop thinking about this bit where Marcin writes: The history of web design can be seen as a set of tensions between designers wanting things to be positioned with...

A while ago I wrote a piece for the folks at Figma all about one of the best ways to evangelize your design system: pairing with designers and engineers. And in that piece I collected a ton of thoughts over the last year or so doing this work: One of the hardest parts about building a design system is convincing...

It’s about five minutes before we start shouting about Brexit. I find myself sat in the car, my brother driving me and my dad through the glorious mountain ranges and valleys of Wales. It’s the sort of landscape to make it appear as if all this had to have been planned. This type of beauty looks coordinated and...