Syndicating to Mastodon
I’ve been contemplating a checkbox. The label for this checkbox reads: This is a bot account Let me back up… In what seems like decades ago, but was in fact just a few weeks, Elon Musk bought Twitter and began burning it to the ground. His admirers insist he’s playing some form of four-dimensional chess, but to the rest of us, his actions are indistinguishable from a spoilt rich kid not understanding what a social network...
Artemis rising
Two weeks ago I was on stage for two days hosting Leading Design in London. Last week I was on stage for two days hosting Clarity in New Orleans. It was an honour and a pleasure to MC at both events. Hard work, but very, very rewarding. And people seemed to like the cut of my jib, so that’s good. With my obligations fulfilled, I’m now taking some time off before diving back into some exciting events-related work (he said,...
Overloading buttons
It’s been almost two years since I added audio playback on The Session. The interface is quite straightforward. For any tune setting, there’s a button that says “play audio”. When you press that button, audio plays and the button’s text changes to “pause audio.” By updating the button’s text like this, I’m updating the button’s accessible name. In other situations, where the button text doesn’t change, you can...
In person
I’ve had the opportunity to gather with my peers a few times over the past couple of months. There was dConstruct, which I hosted. That was just lovely. Then a few weeks ago, in spite of train strikes and travel snags, I went to Bristol to give a talk at Web Dev Conf, a really nice gathering. This past weekend I was in London for State Of The Browser, this time as neither host nor speak, but as an attendee. It was really good! I...
Knowing
There’s a repeated catchphrase used throughout Christopher Nolan’s film Tenet: ignorance is our ammunition. There are certainly situations where knowledge is regrettable. The somewhat-silly thought experiment of Roko’s basilisk is one example. Once you have knowledge of it, you can’t un-know it, and so you become complicit. Or, to use another example, I think it was Jason who told me that if you want to make someone’s life...
The audio from dConstruct 2022
dConstruct 2022 was great fun. It was also the last ever dConstruct. If you were there, and you’d like to re-live the magic, the audio from the talks is now available on the dConstruct Archive. Here they are: George Oates Lauren Beukes Daniel Burka Sarah Angliss Matt Webb Seb Lee-Delisle Anil Seth Thanks to some service worker magic, you can select any of those talks for offline listening later. The audio is also available on...
Design systems thinking
As you can probably tell from the stuff I’ve been linking to today and today’s Clearleft newsletter, I’ve got design systems on my mind. What I like about design systems is they encourage systems thinking …in theory. I mean, it’s right there in the name, right? But in practice I see design sytems focusing on the opposite of systems thinking: analytical thinking. Okay, I realise that’s a gross oversimplification of both...
That was dConstruct 2022
dConstruct 2022 happened last Friday, September 9th. And what an event it was! All eight talks were superb. To have eight speakers and not a single dud is pretty great. To have eight speakers and each one be absolutely brilliant is more than I could’ve hoped for. Hidde has written a summary of the talks. I loved each and every one. I got to sit there in the front row of the beautiful Duke of York’s cinema and watch these supersmart...
