Weekly Shaarli
Tips for publishing something new every day, and approaching your progression as a writer with kindness rather than judgement.
If you find yourself wrestling with CSS layout, it’s likely you’re making decisions for browsers they should be making themselves. Through a series of simple, composable layouts, Every Layout will teach you how to better harness the built-in algorithms that power browsers and CSS.
Becoming the person we want to be is typically a case of taking action—not once, but over and over again. This is hard to do, particularly within a world that ingeniously inserts technology meant to pull us from those actions that we decided we wanted to adopt. Logically, it makes perfect sense to add a workout five days per week, but life is busy and our emotions will often disagree with these plans.
Do you ever feel misunderstood by others? Maybe you feel that people at work don’t get you. Or that your friends are not on the same page.
Maybe others truly don’t get you. But that’s not because of them, it’s most likely because of your own behavior. I’ll tell you why.
People can only judge their perception of you. And often, there’s a difference between perception and reality, right?
Persuasion and influence revolve around two related questions:
- How does our behavior influence the behavior of others?
- How does other people’s behavior influence our behavior?
Look inwardly. Change your behavior for the better. And always be mindful of how others perceive you. Especially, if you want something from them.
Misunderstandings and conflict are the results of the gap between your perception and how others perceive you. To resolve this, you have to understand why the gap is there in the first place, and then work on closing it.
To a company, a senior developer is a box that keeps its marbles together.
In programming world, too, craft is being lost gradually.
The ultimate questions you need to answer is:
- Will they want it
- Can I build it
What is TDD?
TDD stands for Test Driven Development. The process is simple:
- Before you write implementation code, write some code that proves that the implementation works or fails. Watch the test fail before moving to the next step (this is how we know that a passing test is not a false positive — how we test our tests).
- Write the implementation code and watch the test pass.
- Refactor if needed. You should feel confident refactoring your code now that you have a test to tell you if you’ve broken something.
Google Fonts are easy to implement, but they can have a big impact on your page load times. Let’s explore how we can load them in the most optimal way.
“[…] never solve the problem I am asked to solve. […] Because, invariably, the problem I am asked to solve is not the real, fundamental, root problem.” — Don Norman in The Design of Everyday Things
When we finally shipped the feature, however, we realized that filters weren’t what users wanted at all. They wanted something much more basic: content that was relevant to their unique situation, with the minimal number of steps required to get it. Giving our users what they wanted taught us this lesson the hard way.
You’re asking the wrong question.
“What process can we come up with so that we are creating something new, every single day?”
Content creation is about Volume. Plain and simple.
As a designer, I love coming across fun animations when visiting a site, and I have definitely been seeing more and more of them lately. Animations take illustrations and icons to the next level, making a site that much more engaging. While they are obviously attractive to look at, they also serve a functional purpose, captivating visitors and encouraging them to interact with the content.
Not everyone is aware that make can easily be used to manage tasks in your projects. In this article, I’d like to share a brief introduction to how Makefiles help me automate some tasks in my day to day activities. This brief guide will focus on using make as an automation tool for tasks rather than a tool for compiling code.
- Write three opening lines to three separate stories.
- Pick one event that occurred during the day and describe it in any style you like within ten minutes.
- What is your favorite TV or film character doing today?
- Describe or imagine the history of an object around your house.
- Write the events of your day as newspaper headlines
Here are some approaches that we think will work well in almost any project:
- Alternating Straight Leg Toe Touches
- Flutter Kicks With Knee Tucks
- Plank With Leg Lifts
- Side Plank Hip Dip With Leg Lift
- Leg Lifts With Pulses
- Straight Leg Sit-Ups
- Half Kneeling Lat Stretch
- Bottom of the Feet Massage
- Simple Wrist Stretches
- Frog Stretch
- Shoulder Extension Stretch
- Dowel Sit
- Low Back
Defining your personal KPIs
Design is all about making decisions that prioritize one metric over another.
What metrics are important to you?
- Less time spent
- Less forgetting:
- Less decision-making
- Less cognitive load
You can be authentic, unique, and sincere, but your writing has to do one of these three things to succeed.
Entertain
Educate
Inspire
Great writing is alchemy — you take bits of entertainment, mix in some education, and add a dash of inspiration, in order to create remarkable work.
The Definition of a Mensch:
A person having admirable, noble, or dignified characteristics, such as fortitude, responsibility, and firmness of purpose: "He radiates the kind of fundamental decency that has a name in Yiddish; he's a Mensch." (James Atlas).
A person who is admired, respected, and trusted because of a sense of ethics, fairness, and nobility.
On the surface it seems fairly easy to create a masonry layout with flexbox; all you need to do is set flex-flow to column wrap and voilà, you have a masonry layout. Sort of. The problem with this approach is that it produces a grid with a seemingly shuffled and obscure order. Items will be (unbeknownst to the user) rendered from top to bottom and someone parsing the grid from left to right will read the boxes in a somewhat arbitrary order, for example 1, 3, 6, 2, 4, 7, 8, 5, and so on so forth.
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Say it three times
Rather, the first time serves as a primer, the second as confirmation, and the third as a reminder. -
Mean (and do) what you say
If you can’t stand behind your statements or answers at work, repeating them will be both hard to do and misleading for the listener. -
Remember that real love has real boundaries
So often frustrations arise when a decision seems arbitrary or contradictory. -
Expect change regularly
But if we can accept that most things at work will change at some point, and account for that in our plans, we’ll be able to better recover and face new realities with perspective. -
Provide a soft landing for transitions
No amount of self-awareness can stop the emotions my daughter — and all of us — feel around transitions.
We should be gentle with ourselves during these moments, recognizing that our emotions are legitimate and normal.
We should extend the same generosity to our colleagues, whether or not they acknowledge they’re having a difficult time.
Let’s take a deep breath together
Injuries to the musculoskeletal system come in two basic types: acute traumatic and chronic overuse.
In chronic overuse injuries, however, inflammation may not actually play a significant role, which may explain why NSAIDs in that setting, while often useful for reducing pain, are often unhelpful in actually healing the injury itself.
The main therapeutic treatment I apply to most musculoskeletal injuries, whether acute or chronic, is the simplest: rest.
NSAIDs provide two independent effects: pain relief and reduction in inflammation. However, these two benefits occur at different dosages. For example, ibuprofen can provide pain relief at just 400 mg/day but only at 1800 mg/day does it provide an anti-inflammatory effect.
Create animation magic using keyframes, animation properties like timing, delay, play state, animation-count, iteration count, direction, fill mode and will-change.
“Almost everybody I know who does interesting, creative work went through a phase of years of where they could tell that what they were making wasn’t good as they wanted it to be… It is only by going through a volume of work will you close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions” — Ira Glass
Every month I reflect on ‘How I can be a better Designer’. I learned through my background in visual arts that you can train yourself to draw better in a shorter period of time (literally).
I experimented with this in the Summer of 2013. My goal then was to achieve realistic sketches of eyes that captured human emotion. To do this I gave myself a 30-minute time limit and these were the results…
1) 8–6–4–2 Rapid Prototype Method
The premise of this method is to sketch for 8 minutes, 6 minutes, 4 minutes and 2 minutes with quick 2 minute feedback sessions in between.
2) A Twist on the #DailyUI Challenge
Maybe you’re like me and you’ve received the congratulatory email on Day 100 🎉 with nothing to show for it. This was the simple twist I added to get myself started.
3) Solve a Problem you’ve encountered
Take a moment in your day-to-day to note down real world problems that you wish there were better solutions for. You might already a list or two or five. It’s time to solve that problem.
A curated collection of dark UI to inspire you in your product design process.
Even more examples of dark UI could be found on our amazing visual search.
Incorporating three sets of six to eight reps once a week can help keep your hamstrings strong.
Begin in a kneeling position with both ankles secured—tucking your feet under a bar, for example, or having a running buddy hold them down—and then progressively lean forward as slowly as possible while keeping your back straight. When you can’t resist anymore, just fall forward, catching yourself with your hands against the floor. Check out the video below for how to do it properly.
If you want to quickly improve your strength and coordination, almost nothing beats parallettes training. But not many people have a set of p-bars hanging around. In fact most people have never heard of them.
Implied lines are more closely related to the way our minds “see” objects. By understanding implied line and recognizing the approach that should be taken to create them, we can bypass our analytical left brain and create a drawing that is more accurate to what is observed.
Draw the entire scene within a defined picture plane on drawing paper or in your sketchbook, but do not use line. Instead, draw using only value. Allow the contrast that happens between the value, color, or texture create the “lines” in the drawing.
An Exhaustive List of all the Elements you need to have/test Before Launching your Website To Production.
Do you know how you make people feel?
Human beings are silly. We try to act like we’re these super rational people who make decisions based on logic alone, but we couldn’t be further from that. We make many decisions based on how we feel and how other people make us feel.
IF YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND HOW YOU MAKE PEOPLE FEEL, IT’S LIKE YOU'RE WALKING AROUND WITH YOUR EYES CLOSED AND YOUR FINGERS IN YOUR EARS, STOMPING AROUND, GIVING NO FUCKS ABOUT OTHER PEOPLE. NOBODY LIKES THAT GUY. THAT GUY DOESN’T REALIZE WHEN HE’S STOMPING ON A KID’S SANDCASTLE.
You Have to Care About the People You’re Serving
Care -> Learn more about their needs -> Make better solutions to help them
The 10:1 rule of writing and programming
Good software and good writing requires that every line has been rewritten, on average, at least 10 times.
First, it looks like similar 10:1 rules show up in film, journalism, music, and photography! How cool is that?
You should draw.
Sometimes a problem seems too big or too abstract to fit into a neatly formatted list of requirements. It’s difficult to hold and pick apart a series of steps in your head. You want to connect ideas, follow many series of steps in different directions, while also considering constraints and stress cases. But your brain wants to follow one train of thought from beginning to end. Anything that looks like it’ll take you off track gets brushed aside, “We’ll come back to it.” You end up in a battle with your own mental capacity. You need to explore all sides of a problem while simultaneously looking for weak points. There comes a real concern of things slipping through the cracks because your brain can’t hold them all or remember them for long.
Visualizing problems on a canvas gets them out of your head and into the real world. You can put all the pieces in front of you so you — and everyone else — knows what you’re working with. Every time a new idea, challenge, or path comes up, make a note. You may not solve it at the same time, but it’s there, waiting until you’re ready. This frees up mental space to start challenging your ideas and working towards solutions that include everyone — instead of barrelling down one track to the obvious, happy-path conclusion.
Your team should draw.
Because whiteboards are part of our physical space, they can be gathering places. We sit together with our teams, but each facing our own personal, digital canvases: our monitors. Work is only shared when you as an individual feel it’s ready, or a colleague has asked you to share. When we work at the whiteboard, we share our work while we work .
Everyone should draw.
The whiteboard is not a canvas for designers, it’s a canvas for discussion.
We build a simple, but powerful and intuitive, model for when a hockey coach should pull the goalie when trailing. When the model reports that the coaches aren’t doing it nearly early enough, we then ask why, and take away some key lessons for portfolio and risk management, and business in general.
Our brains are designed to worry, and they’re good at it.
They’re built to determine the next big thing to “fix.”
We were born to survive, which is to create.
Suffering dissolves when we focus on creating rather than feeling. Instead of being at the whim of how the world makes us feel, we focus on how we can create what we want from what exists.
Good and bad become irrelevant when the focus isn’t “What can I enjoy?” But, rather, “What can I create?”
To do something well you have to like it. That idea is not exactly novel. We've got it down to four words: "Do what you love." But it's not enough just to tell people that. Doing what you love is complicated.
After one week of pen-tooling mazes, I never had any difficulties with the instrument again. If I could shout one thing from the rooftops to beginning illustrators, it would be to conquer mazes.
I started looking at the components it would take to rebuild—a circle for this, a modified rectangle for that. With the exception of some unique paths here or there, almost every part stemmed from the simple shapes we learn in kindergarten.
In fact, it actually turns out that most flat illustrations are either based upon these basic shapes (which Illustrator perfectly pre-sets), or an organic shape (for which the mazes serve as preparation).