Journal

I like the metaphor for personal websites of tending to a digital garden.

Like all gardens, they can become a bit unruly and need some weeding. Right now, as I consider updating some software and freshening things up, I realise that I’ve let it overgrow a tad.

So, here’s a post in which I’ll log my website’s current features. This should be useful in and of itself as a stepping stone to writing a proper readme. However it’ll also help me reflect on my website’s health and maintainability so I can decide which features to nourish and which to prune.

Note: this post will take a bit of time and a few sessions, so please regard it as a work in progress.

This was a great watch. Big Zuu (Zubair Hassan) approached his pilgrimage with good humour, curiosity and genenrosity. And I learned lots from it about Islam in general and muslim men and their friendships in particular.

Chef and rapper Big Zuu makes a pilgrimage to Mecca on a personal spiritual journey to try and understand more about his faith and what it means to be 'a good Muslim'.

I really liked some of the contradictory things Big Zuu tried to reconcile. For example could he be a good mulsim but also enjoy some western ways such as alcohol? How would he feel being in Saudi Arabia (Jeddah and Mecca) in light of negative way the region is stereotyped? And is the fee of nearly £8000 paid to the Saudi government the best place to use his money?

In the end there’s a nice theme where Zuu say he’s not perfect nor will he become so… but that understanding his faith is part of striving to become the best version of himself.

David’s template provides not just the starter component code but also a nice readme, issue template, and publish-to-NPM flow.

Martin introduces the “Now” page concept and how he adapted it for showing on his homepage.

Hard to argue with Brad’s logic.

Right now, vast numbers of human beings are devoting their time and energy to designing, building, documenting, and maintaining the exact same set of common components.

Our efforts to reduce duplicative work at the individual level are resulting in duplicative work at the inter-organization level.

A Global Design System would improve the quality and accessibility of the world’s web experiences, save the world’s web designers and developers millions of hours, and make better use of our collective human potential.

Nice to see and chat with Liam, there.

Things continue to go pretty smoothly for both of us since we sought new adventures back in 2019 after running a business together.

We talked a bit of work stuff, a bit of family and a bit of music.

We had dinner at Sugo which was tasty if a tad hurried, then a beer at The Horseshoe Bar. Liam tells me he’s holding out for an invite to listen to some records at mine, so we’ll need to make that happen sometime!

Adrian recommends that we underline links in body copy and provides a host of evidence and rationale to back that up.

Here’s Eric Bailey with some very relatable thoughts on the need to tell design system stories even though it’s difficult.

The component works. And because it works, nobody pays attention to it.

This is the promise of a design system made manifest: Consistent, quality experiences for complicated interactions, distributed at scale with minimal fuss.

This is objectively great. The problem, however, is how we talk, or fail to talk about this type of success.

The FT’s design system Origami not only has a cool name but also some interesting metrics.

This is a wonderful guide that’s choc-full of practical examples.

CSS container queries help us to write a truly fluid components that change based on their container size. In the next few years, we’ll see less media queries and more container queries.