Journal

Something we often talk about in our Design System team is that components should not be like Swiss Army Knives. It’s better for them to be laser-focused because by limiting their scope to a single task they are more reusable and support a more extensible system through composition.

Getting to profitability is no longer a distant, post-IPO nice-to-have, but a short-term necessity for survival. But how to do that without cutting off the legs of the product team? By using better tools and techniques, that's how.

DHH of 37 Signals and Basecamp offers three pieces of advice for productivity and profitability.

1: Unless market conditions demand otherwise, delay native app development for as long as possible.

2: Hire full-stack developers, and don't let them split the frontend and backend into separate jurisdictions.

3: Hire designers who work natively with the web.

Clair and I loved this story of Viggo Mortensen’s Ben Cash and family temporarily leaving their off-grid existence in the Pacific Northwest to enter civilisation. It poses some interesting questions about parenting, lifestyle and morality but mainly, it’s just a lot of fun.

Judging by his movie review for The Guardian, Mark Kermode seemed to like Captain Fantastic too.

Having pre-recorded previous shows, I recently made a first visit to Clyde Built Radio’s station at the Barras market for a live show and really enjoyed it. It’s such a great location and it was a nice change to spin records on a Sunday morning.

Responsive design for tables is tricky. Sure, you can just make the table’s container horizontally scrollable but that’s more a developer convenience than a great user experience. And if you instead try to do something more clever, you can run into challenges as I did in the past. Still, we should strive to design good narrow screen user experiences for tables, alongside feasible technical solutions to achieve them.

I’ve started reading some entries from Manuel Matuzovic’s 100 days of (more or less) modern CSS series, and began with the excellent Day 99: Native Nesting. It clearly explains how to use the now-agreed syntax for various common scenarios.

Adam Silver’s collection of accessible form-related components – a companion to his book Form Design Patterns – is a brilliant reference.

The component gallery is an up-to-date list of interface component examples. It’s really helpful for looking up existing naming conventions. It also contains a list of Design Systems.

Here’s an important update on native modal dialogues. TL;DR – it’s now OK to use dialog.

This new resource on Web Components from Keith Cirkel and Kristján Oddsson of GitHub (and friends) is looking great so far.