Journal

In this talk at State of the Browser, Amy offers some suggestions for making work feel more meaningful.

I found this postcard from Lockdown. (Actually it’s a post-it note however that doesn’t sound as good). It provides a record of a difficult moment. I was suffering from isolation during lockdown and the only times I was getting out was to walk a reactive dog who lost his shit in a fairly upsetting way on a regular basis. Anyway I must have felt moved to empty my thoughts on paper (not someting I do too often) either for my own sanity or to help gather my thoughts to be able to confide in someone, likely Clair.

Minimal time out of the house. Most of that’s with him. My nerves are shattered. My concentration’s broken all the time. I can feel my mental health dipping.

Of course I’m aware that this pales in comparison to challenges people on the front-line of Covid/lockdown were dealing with. And in fact, I don’t think feeling a degree of shame at expressing mental health issues will ever leave me – I know it’s not just whining, but it can feel that way. Nonetheless, it wasn’t a fun time. Just noting it before I bin the post-it.

This recipe from Gousto, with a few tweaks from Clair, is a straight winner. Although I’m sure it’s delicious as they list it, Clair substituted linguine for rigatoni and as a treat added some artichoke hearts which took it to the next level.

Here are some recurring development decisions I make when maintaining my personal website/blog, with some accompanying rationale.

The naturalist, TV campaigner and activist on growing up, autism and asking himself “what is the best use of me?”.

He’s such a brilliant, sensitive soul, but it must be hard work being Chris Packham.

Adam offers tips for how to proceed when we are presented with a request for a shiny new pattern which is not grounded in research but rather follows a fad.

The purpose of design is to solve actual problems. Not made up “I’m bored so I’ll come up with something new” problems.

So how can we evaluate these patterns, avoid unnecessary work and ultimately avoid patterns that degrade UX?

Heather suggests that in developers’ excitement to do cool new stuff and use cool new tools and techniques “we stopped letting people do very normal web things”. Things like:

• the ability to copy text so you can then paste it
• ensuring elements which navigate also behave like normal links by offering standard right-click and keyboard shortcut options etc. Which is to say – please use the anchor element and leave it alone to do its thing
• letting people go back using the back button
• letting people scroll with native scrollbars. Relatedly, letting people get to the links at the bottom of the page rather than having infinite scrolling results which mean that the footer is always just beyond reach!
• letting the user’s browser autocomplete form fields rather than making them type it

An interesting article which helps the author – and his readers – understand some of the lesser-used and more obscure HTML elements.

I’m interested by Shoelace’s MO as a collection of pre-rolled, customisable web components. The idea is that it lets individuals and teams start building with web components – components that are web-native, framework-agnostic and portable – way more quickly.

I guess it’s a kind of Bootstrap for web components? I’m interested to see how well it’s done, how customisable the components are, and how useful it is in real life. Or if nothing else, I’m interested to see how they built their components!

It’s definitely an interesting idea.

This post from earlier this year offers a similar encouraging message to Henny Swan’s recent The only accessibility specialist in the room. It contains advice that’s worth remembering when we have one of those ”what’s the point?’ moments!