Words that would otherwise be coming out of my mouth
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03 Jan, 2019
Design Systems Workshop
I’m super excited to head to Austin, Texas to give a workshop all about creating and maintaining design systems. I’m likely not doing a lot of design systems workshops this year, so don’t miss your chance! You can get tickets […]
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01 Jan, 2019
The ‘Future Book’ Is Here, but It’s Not What We Expected
I’ve long been interested in how technology democratizes creation, and I’ve had success creating and self-publishing a book. So this article by Craig Mod rang a lot of bells for me. We were looking for the Future Book in the […]
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01 Jan, 2019
Building Night Mode for Hulu.com
I think this is a great read that underscores how CSS can be quite powerful. In order to build out a night mode version of Hulu, the team got frustrated trying to sort out how to manage the relevant properties […]
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31 Dec, 2018
2018
2018 has been a hell of a year. Usually when I do a year in review, I jump right into fond memories and work accomplishments. But this hasn’t been a normal year. Gramps‘s funeral was on my wife’s due date. […]
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06 Dec, 2018
The State of Web Browsers – Late 2018 edition
This is a brutally honest, true article about the state of web browsers. It’s unfortunate the author unnecessarily said “went full retard” (a movie reference) because the rest of the post is dead on. The stuff about Firefox rang especially […]
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06 Dec, 2018
Big ol’ Ball o’ JavaScript
Heydon Pickering published a fantastic post called Reluctant Gatekeeping: The Problem With Full Stack. I have about 3 blog post drafts covering similar ground and apparently we see very much eye-to-eye on this, so I thought it might be worthwhile […]
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04 Dec, 2018
Future Ethics
I can’t recommend Future Ethics by Cennydd Bowels highly enough. I strongly encourage any person working on digital things to read this book. But I especially want a few million copies of this book to be crop-dusted over Silicon Valley. […]
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03 Dec, 2018
A Tribute to My Family’s Penis Faucet
The house I was born and raised in has a single bathroom with no lock on the door. It also contains a faucet that looks like a penis. I’ve been fortunate to travel the world, stay in all manner of hotels, […]
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02 Dec, 2018
DevTools for Designers
You know what makes me really freaking excited? All of this stuff. Get designers playing with the real thing. Take the mystery away. Get people updating and nudging in the browser. Screenshot changes, and have the “real” devs implement it. […]
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02 Dec, 2018
Who Do Designers Really Work For
we came up with a little thing we tell all our clients before they agree to work with us: “You may be hiring us, and that may be your name on the check, but we do not work for you. […]
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19 Nov, 2018
Deep Work Update #2
A few weeks ago I made the decision to schedule every minute of my day, and so far so good. A few people have asked me for an update so I figured I’d share one. While my productivity score was […]
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18 Nov, 2018
bRuCk
Bruck is a lo-fi prototyping system made with web components. Quickly create and comment on interface layouts. The output is screen reader accessible, and responsive without you having to author breakpoints. Interesting. I haven’t played around with web components enough, so […]
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18 Nov, 2018
CSS and Network Performance
This post by Harry does a great job of talking about the performance implications of CSS, and he shares a load of tips for avoiding big performance hits due to CSS. CSS is critical to rendering a page—a browser will […]
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15 Nov, 2018
Ditching the MacBook Pro for a MacBook Air
A while back I upgraded my computer to a new MacBook Pro, and ran into a ton of issues with it. My post on the topic apparently found its way to Apple’s engineering team, and I ended up working with […]
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11 Nov, 2018
Creating atomic components in Figma
It’s great to see that design tools like Figma and Sketch have improved so designers can practice atomic design within them.
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08 Nov, 2018
Designer+developer workflow: more head-down work
As part of Dan and my designer+developer collaboration series, I recorded another video building upon the work we’ve done so far. If you’re not caught up, feel free to watch the other videos: Video 1: Designer+Developer pair session Video 2: […]
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06 Nov, 2018
Design Systems: Mastering Design at Scale
Dan Mall, Josh Clark, and myself partnered with the fine folks at InVision to create a video series called Design Systems: Mastering Design at Scale. In the series, we share lessons learned from our experience helping organizations create and maintain […]
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05 Nov, 2018
Deep Work Update
Last week I made the decision to schedule every minute of my day, and wanted to share a quick update. In short, this is working out very well for me so far. A few accomplishments: I coded every day – […]
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02 Nov, 2018
Enforcing Accessibility Best Practices with Component PropTypes
I’m diving into React a lot more, and I’m specifically focused on making rock-solid, dumb presentational components that can be ingested by other applications. Part of making these components rock-solid is providing some definition and guardrails for the props […]
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01 Nov, 2018
Yes, your startup is ready for a design system
Rather than starting out by building out buttons and components (a mistake we made early on), focus instead on building flows and working backward from there. It took hundreds of sketches, brainstorming sessions across teams, wireframes, and mockups to arrive at […]