The field of large language models is becoming dangerously centralized. A huge amount of power resides in the hands of a tiny number of firms. Source: The Dangers Of Highly Centralized AI | by Clive Thompson | Medium | Continue reading
Beyond the contemporary issues lurk deeper long-term questions. What should and shouldn’t we automate? Should we create lethal autonomous weapons, or should a human always take charge of life-and-death decisions? How will we earn a living and even find meaning if AIs eliminate jo … | Continue reading
I could look at this stuff all day: 2023 Milky Way Photographer of the Year – Capture the Atlas Via Kottke | Continue reading
Mini Moog Factory is a really fun piece of web design. The aesthetic reminds me of Habbo Hotel from way back in the day. | Continue reading
I really enjoyed this post from Dave about the different kinds of work folks can encounter. I also want to acknowledge that sometimes the job is an assembly line. Times exist when you need to slow down, think, explore, and use the non-lizard side of your brain to mold the clay … | Continue reading
If you stole my phone (please don’t) and saw all of my photos, I’m constantly capturing photos of beautiful/funny/interesting/decrepit signs. It’s one of my favorite things to do when traveling. So naturally I love this site India Street Lettering. | Continue reading
A few years ago I got way into birds. I wouldn’t dare call myself a die-hard birder (yet), but it’s been a lot of fun to learn about the birds that show up in my back yard. I backed Bird Buddy‘s Kickstarter campaign as soon as I learned that a smart bird feeder was in the works. … | Continue reading
Containing multi-site management within a single codebase covers how one can apply atomic design principles in a React codebase. | Continue reading
Two innovations — Ethyl and Freon, conjured by one man presiding over a single laboratory during a span of roughly 10 years. Combined, the two products generated billions of dollars in revenue for the companies that manufactured them and provided countless ordinary consumers with … | Continue reading
Today marks the 1-year anniversary of Ziggy leaving us. We had a hell of a 2022 and so I’m only just now getting the opportunity to write about my best bud. Thankfully, I’ve had a year to work through my grief, so I can arrive at this difficult task with a better perspective. Th … | Continue reading
I pay attention to anything Zach has to say about web components (and, well, pretty much all web stuff), so I really liked 3 Methods for Scoped Styles in Web Components That Work Everywhere. WebC is something I want to play around with, and I’m hoping I have a good excuse to soon … | Continue reading
In what I hope becomes a series, I’ve been recording myself as I drive home from dropping my daughter off at school. Shifting away from more heady topics like AI’s impact on design and development, I felt like talking about the importance of choosing a name for your design system … | Continue reading
This is fantastic. | Continue reading
I had the great opportunity to chat with Behrad Mirafshar on the Lean Cast podcast. We covered a lot of ground about design systems and AI’s impact on the field of digital design. I really welcomed the opportunity to dig into these things that feel really relevant and important. … | Continue reading
Here’s my brother sharing how he’s seen the design system landscape since he’s started working on them. There’s a lot of good stuff here, but I especially like this part: The success of a system depends more on the people and process within the system more than the framework or t … | Continue reading
I had a great time talking with Brian and Eric about web components, design systems, and trends in web development. | Continue reading
I wish I was better at journaling. I love it and love having documentation of the things I’ve done, feelings I’ve felt, experiences I’ve had, etc. I just haven’t built the habit yet. I’d like to change that. While I want to document my life moving forward, I also want to start p … | Continue reading
Some really great things in here. I found myself nodding right along. | Continue reading
I had an unique opportunity to be interviewed about my interest in both music and web design. I covered a lot of ground! The interview is pretty raw (meaning not super edited), but it’s interesting (to me anyways). Check it out: Brad Frost – Music, Web Development, & Artificial I … | Continue reading
Despite its hyperbolic title, The End of Front-End Development is a well-considered piece by Josh Comeau. I share many of the sentiments expressed here, though how things will actually shake out is anyone’s guess. In my view, this is one of those areas like climate change where i … | Continue reading
I’ve spent the last two years thinking about doing these two projects, and the actual effort to bring them into existence only took two weekends. I arrived at an important insight: if you find yourself frequently revisiting an idea you have kicking around in your head, do yo … | Continue reading
I drive my kiddo to school in the morning, and my 12-minute return trip home is a fruitful time to think and prepare for my day. I had the realization that my little drive home is a nice window of time to share my thoughts, so I’m exploring what that might look like! This feels l … | Continue reading
Once upon a time, I had the word “artist” in my bio. Somewhere along the line, I removed it. Maybe it was because I was preoccupied with what I do for money. Maybe it was because I’m not a professional artist. Maybe it was because my art isn’t particularly great from a technica … | Continue reading
developer experience needs to pivot from a concept centered on feeling fast and living on the bleeding edge to one based on the enabling of developers to deliver reliable and first rate end user experiences — for as many users as possible, and for as long as possible. This doesn’ … | Continue reading
While there’s nothing particularly revolutionary here, Why You Should Stop Reading News shares an important message that needs to be repeated often. | Continue reading
Neurodiversity Design System articulates some good design best practices to make information accessible to more people. Like most things accessibility related, these are design considerations that make an experience better for everybody, not just those with disabilities. | Continue reading
Mitigating climate change is often framed as requiring money, effort, and sacrifice to keep something bad from happening, usually to other people. But we finally have the tools we need to create something new and better—to transform our technological and infrastructural systems i … | Continue reading
I’m terrible at focusing. I flit around from task to task like a goddamn hummingbird, never stopping too long on one thing to make too much progress. Flow state? More like “no state”, amirite? I’ve got many legitimate things contributing to my lack of focus, and I know not to b … | Continue reading
Clever Code Considered Harmful is a great read. When it comes to day-to-day production code, here’s the barometer I like to use: will a junior developer, someone at the very start of their career, struggle to understand this code? In the context of a shared codebase, good code is … | Continue reading
There’s so much truth to this tweet by Masato: To me, design systems hiring is fundamentally broken.Companies do not have a vital way of searching for candidates specializing in design systems.And candidates cannot find DS job opportunities efficiently because of full of non-spe … | Continue reading
The mental health and vision analogy The analogy of mental health and vision is a great one. We generally don’t ostracize people for wearing glasses or contacts, and we generally don’t beat ourselves up for not having perfect vision. When our imperfect vision becomes disrup … | Continue reading
Scribble Diffusion is wild. Out of curiosity, I asked it to design a webpage: Wild. | Continue reading
For whatever reason, this video just crashed into my memory like a meteorite. I remember likely landing on this video via Stumble Upon (!!!), and I remember showing it to everyone. It was incredibly influential for me as it combined so many of my interests (music, humor, storytel … | Continue reading
It’s been absolutely wild to witness the rise of the new crop of AI tools. This moment feels equally exciting and terrifying, but given humans’ track record of driving promising technologies off the rails, I’m erring on the side of terrified until (hopefully) proven wrong. Sett … | Continue reading
Late last year, our friends at An Event Apart brought down the curtain of running conferences after an impressive 17-year run. It’s difficult to articulate exactly how An Event Apart changed the trajectory of my life, but it did in big and meaningful ways. I wouldn’t be where I … | Continue reading
This is fantastic. Great work, Dave. Source: The case for Flex applications – daverupert.com | Continue reading
Testing design system component libraries is critically important, but has historically been a pain in the butt to implement. That’s why I’m thrilled my brilliant colleague wrote Testing Components in Storybook in 2023, which details how to lean into Storybook’s testing features … | Continue reading
Here’s Andy Bell with a post called the (extremely) loud minority. Always remember that although a subset of the JavaScript community can be very loud, they represent a paltry portion of the web as a whole. This means that when they say something like “Best practices don’t actua … | Continue reading
If you want a colored, shaped favicon, you need a color that works on dark and light equally well. Like orange! You kinda want an orange favicon. – Chris Coyier Can’t say I disagree with this one! | Continue reading
This is a great read from Eric Bailey, reminding us that the technology decisions we make truly can make the difference between people getting the healthcare they need or not. In some cases, it can even be a matter of life or death. A person seeking help in a time of crisis does … | Continue reading
You can’t learn the whole stack. Nobody can. Maybe it was possible in 1990, the day after the web was invented, but I’m not even sure about that. The stack grows and shifts and evolves every day. Very much agree with everything here: You Will Never Be A Full Stack Developer and … | Continue reading
A pattern is emerging: even years are nightmare years. 2018 was a nightmare year. 2020 was a real fucking nightmare year. And now 2022 was a nightmare year. 2022 was a year of death, organizing chaos, once again putting our lives on hold to deal with family medical emergencies, … | Continue reading
Here’s a fantastic article that digs into whether or not digital products need dark mode or not. In my design system consulting work, it’s a topic that comes up a lot, and I always find myself asking follow-up questions to client teams and workshop attendees that ask about it. Ha … | Continue reading
Great, succinct article about making button labels accessible. | Continue reading
I had a great time on the Skip To Content podcast chatting about how design systems are great vehicles for delivering more accessible experiences to users. Check it out: | Continue reading
A year of new avenues is a great, inspiring read. I want to insist on an amateur internet; a garage internet; a public library internet; a kitchen table internet. At last, in 2023, I want to tell the tech CEOs and venture capitalists: pipe down. Buzz off. Go fave each other’ … | Continue reading
Building conscious design systems by Amy Hupe is a very, very good read. You should read it all. | Continue reading
“Writing your component UI tests in Jest can feel a little like stabbing at your components with a blindfold on.”- Michael Chan This nails it. I used to think my stumbling over testing design system component libraries was a personal deficiency, but I’ve come to realize it was la … | Continue reading