Andrea Buran’s Site ^5.0

I can’t recall an example of groundbreaking work coming from an environment of stress, anxiety, and fear of failure.

If you’re here to help others, be patient and welcoming.

[…] Nintendo said, “pay us a royalty not on sales, but on manufacturing.” Nintendo said, “we will decide what games we’ll allow you to publish,” ostensibly to prevent another crash like that of 1983, but in reality to quash any innovation but their own. Iwata-san said he has the heart of the gamer, and my question is what poor bastard’s chest did he carve it from?

The main thing I want to know is, Larry: you do realize […] that when you keep our husbands and wives and children in the office for ninety hours a week, sending them home exhausted and numb and frustrated with their lives, it’s not just them you’re hurting, but everyone around them, everyone who loves them?

[…] The designers are the pegboard though. They set up where everything has a space and how it is going to work together.

There is this huge library, this huge vocabulary of actions built up over the years that people you know don’t really do, but which happened so often in TV and movies that they’re familiar enough to an audience that they become, well, passable for human motivations.

Not making it clear from the start that I have a process, and clients taking control of the design process […].

As the landslide of bullshit surges down the mountain, people will increasingly gravitate toward genuinely useful, well-crafted products, services, and experiences that respect them and their time. So we as creators have a decision to make: do we want to be part of the 90% of noise out there, or do we want to be part of the 10% of signal?

[…] Conversely, don’t link to outside sites that are not credible. Your site becomes less credible by association.

With all that at play, how can any tool give us a truly accurate picture of unused CSS, to the point that actually removing that CSS isn’t just as dangerous as leaving it alone?

[…] Then management decided that it would “look better” if we went to circular desks where several of us would be sitting with our backs to the hallway, so everyone walking past would be looking at our screen as they passed. It took a minor rebellion that lasted several weeks before management backed down from that horrendous idea.

[…] if you’re investing time and budget to make a prototype and put it in front of people, you’ll want to do some preliminary research first. Only then will you have an informed hypothesis worth testing.

Above all, when designing a web page we should design the body text first, usually before anything else in the layout. It’s the most common element and its appearance will have an evident effect on the rest of the composition.

We initially tried to create these components as symbols in Sketch, which resulted in a mess. Even now, our Sketch files are sometimes challenging to maintain.

The more context we have for the situation, the better I can design a solution.

If someone wanted to segment them by market or customer, these segments couldn’t be more separate. Yet, if you thought of them in situational segments, you’d find these segments to be tangent—maybe even the same.

Disagree and commit is a management technique for handling conflict. There are two parts to it. First, expecting and demanding teammates to voice their disgreement. Second, no matter their point of view, once a decision has been made, everyone commits to its success.

Artifacts can force clarity of the complexities of the wicked problem space.

Continually look for opportunities to test the direction you are going in. If people disagree, test. If you aren’t sure about your approach, check it.

Always having at least two people look over the code also curtails ideas of “my” code and “your” code. It’s our code.

Remember that there is an appropriate time for different types of feedback. Cheerlead early, and critique more thoroughly later.

Be comfortable letting things go, and remember that your teammates are smart people with expertise.

Underlying these concerns is the predominant business model for platforms on the Web—user-targeted advertising. Advertising based business models encourage the consolidation and the hoarding of user views and data, driving platforms to become ever larger.

“One of the things we’ve realized is that it’s hard to separate motivation from sustained attention,” he says. “If we’re not looking at motivation, then we’re really missing the boat in terms of attention.”

“There are no right or wrong answers. Since I didn’t design this, you won’t hurt my feelings or flatter me. In fact, frank, candid feedback is the most helpful.”

In the React era, we have embraced the extremely useful approach of modular, component-based development […]. But I think it’s equally important to acknowledge that CSS is not 100% modular, nor should it be.