Five Neat Things: Starting Small
I have been putting this off for a while now. For months I have been telling myself I need to update my website, start sharing the interesting things I read, and generally put all the thoughts bouncing around my head into super smart and introspective words. But the bigness of it all has held me back. I want it to be perfect! And put together! And please everyone!
I have drafts of posts scattered about on multiple note-taking apps, incomplete fragments of thoughts jotted down within physical notebooks, and dozens of uncommited files. I've spent many hours attempting to find the perfect solution to organizing everything that I have read and everything I plan to read. It started to become too overwhelming, and while I was spending entire weekends reading, I wasn't giving myself enough time to process what I had read.
While searching around trying to solve a problem at work (fallbacks for css variables), I stumbled across this article that really pushed me to finally hit publish. Maybe these thoughts are incomplete, and hell, the code isn't even perfect. But I expect this to grow and evolve.
In the meantime, here are five neat things I found this week:
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I was introduced to Edward Tufte's work in college and I was thrilled to find out he offers one day workshops. How cool would it be to go to one of these?
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Jocelyn Glei's Hurry Slowly has undoubtedly become my favorite podcast. This week's episode on maintenance sparked so many ideas that can be applied to any discipline.
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On the design process. I recently left the agency world, where I was starting to feel like the web design process was becoming very rigid and controlled. Maybe building a website can be exciting again.
I know how to make a website; that’s not the concern. But if we want something truly unique, we need to first discover what that is and not assume that the same-old web design process is going to yield a different result.
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Did you do anything essential today?
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And my favorite read of the week, Slack is the opposite of organizational memory. I have since turned off my “is typing” feature.
Slack is inherently rushed: I feel like I’m in a hurry to whisper before someone shouts. [...] Paradoxically, speed is just as toxic to group thought, as people will race to get out ideas and leave them half-formed or contradictory.
Why are people blind to this? I think because most people never understood how work gets done or don’t think about it. Now slack comes in and makes ‘work’ visible in the form of instant replies to quick questions, dancing emoji stickers, and nonstop chatter, and some people are like, ‘yes! look at all that my team has accomplished’.
Down with interruptions.