Letra Studio

Dave Rupert is, like me, a longtime Jekyll user.

Zeynep Tufekci on the miracle of open source software: As a social scientist myself, I can say that convincing a colleague from the past that Wikipedia and Linux actually work the way they do would be a pretty huge lift.

Max Böck: Posting a new short “note” on my site currently requires me to commit a new markdown file to the repository on Github.

Ben Thompson on internet content moderation: The top of the stack is about broadcasting — reaching as many people as possible — and while you may have the right to say anything you want, there is no right to be heard.

Test packages directly in the browser, without installing anything locally.

Laura González: In elevating frontend to the land of Serious Code we have not just made things incredibly over-engineered but we have also set fire to all the ladders that we used to get up here in the first place.

Karen Olsson thinks about the importance of the many books she owns but will never read: Perhaps in some cases it has actually meant more to me to possess a book than to read it, because as long as its contents remain unknown to me, it retains its mystery.

Eric Bailey posted a terrific list of principles that should be kept in mind when working on web accessibility.

Craig Mod: Software that’s speedy usually means it’s focused.

Rewatched 2 August 2019, rated 5 out of 5 stars Our world doesn’t deserve the unbridled vibrancy and earnestness of Speed Racer.

Chris Coyier’s latest talk puts all the complexity of modern front-end development in perspective: All the very huge responsibilities front-end developers already have: Pulling of the design Making the design part of a system Making sure it is accessible…

Charlie Owen: The vast majority of respondents are still using Sass and vanilla CSS?

Megan Amram: Men and women have completely different needs in the skin department.

Watched 28 July 2019, rated 4 out of 5 stars Best car chase of all time?

Henry Sung: What’s remarkable about vertical drama is that it’s not just any scripted content cropped for a vertical aspect ratio.

Quinn Keast: The Possibility Gap is a dark pattern that arises when a product takes advantage of unknown unknowns on the part of their users, as it relates to their understanding of what is possible in digital products today.

I’m linking to this just so I can go on the record on this here blog and say: motion smoothing is an abomination.

Watched 24 July 2019, rated 4 out of 5 stars There are many cool robots and body parts flying around.

Evan Minto: min() accepts one or more values and returns the smallest value.

Dave Rupert: Upgrading legacy applications was one of the usecases Vue was designed around.

Download video.

Mike Sherov: In order to understand how best to kill IE11, we need to look back to how 2 previous versions of IE met their fate: IE6 and IE8.

Played 15 July 2019 on Mac, rated 4 out of 5 stars A charming little game that got me to smile a lot for the duration of a well-spent hour.

A repository of styled and “styled” form control elements and markup patterns, and how they are announced by screen readers.

Kyle Wiens makes a great point: [Dieter] Rams loves durable products that are environmentally friendly.

Adrian Roselli: What we know is that native and custom calendar controls are often a problem for users and applied where they are not needed.

Thanks Todd Vaziri for tweeting about this great Roger Ebert quote that I had forgotten about: Movies are the most powerful empathy machine in all the arts.

An open-source community effort to map support for web accessibility features across different Assistive Technologies.

Zeynep Tufekci is worried about what ownership means for always-connected products: Today, we may think we own things because we paid for them and brought them home, but as long as they run software or have digital connectivity, the sellers continue to ha…

Played 21 June – 1 July 2019 on Nintendo Switch, rated 5 out of 5 stars I just knew that as soon as I booted this game for the first time, I would fall down the rabbit hole and be completely transfixed.

Watched 29 June 2019, rated 4 out of 5 stars I started off a bit disappointed, because this seemed like little more than a duller version of Patriot; the writing felt meandering, the humor more surface-level, never as witty or pithy.

Great interview.

Heydon Pickering and Andy Bell have created a terrific resource for CSS layout patterns following algorithmic design principles.

Ethan Marcotte: When I’m asked to describe design systems work, I say the word that springs immediately to mind is mapmaking.

Sarah Jampel: Every additional ingredient should bring a contrast in flavor or texture: If the salad is primarily crunchy, add something soft.

Maciej Ceglowski writes about privacy and I want to quote the whole thing: Ambient privacy is not a property of people, or of their data, but of the world around us.

Andy Bell: One thing that is often forgotten about accessibility is that keeping things simple and utilising semantic HTML gets you most of the way towards providing a fully accessible experience for everyone.

Ben Thompson: Suggesting that users changing ecosystems is a sufficient antidote to Apple’s behavior is like suggesting that users subject to a hospital monopoly in their city should simply move elsewhere; asking a third party to remedy anticompetitive be…

Brent Simmons on SwiftUI: The future of app-making looks more and more like web development.

Brad Frost: I was just talking with Dave about the accessibility of moving images on the web, and he said: hm… I wonder if you could use picture + prefers-reduced-motion?

Watched 21 May 2019, rated 2 out of 5 stars It is still mindblowing that this show could get made, but it’s a shame that it couldn’t quite fill its own shoes towards the end.

Lindsay Ellis: So here’s a question: when did animated movies start selling themselves on their bankable celebrity talent?

Emily S.

Watched 11 May 2019, rated 2 out of 5 stars This movie doesn’t know when to calm down.

Nick Heer: When you think about it, it’s pretty nuts that we allow the automatic execution of whatever code a web developer wrote.

Esther Rosenfield: It’s no coincidence that you never see the comic posted in response to criticism of some understated indie drama or underground Bandcamp musician.

Adrian Roselli: Underlines, the standard, built-in signifier of hyperlinks, the core feature of the web, are beautiful.

Adrian Roselli: Once major browsers started supporting <details> & <summary> developers immediately started to play with them to see what sorts of patterns they could enhance or replace.

In this 2019 GDC session, Subset Games co-foudner Matthew Davis details the Into the Breach design process from early drafts to the final balancing decisions.

John Gruber: These companies are trying to usurp the word podcast for one simple reason: people love podcasts.