Links, July 19, 2024 • lyonheart

The deskilling of web dev is harming the product but, more importantly, it’s damaging our health – this is why burnout happens

This touches upon many of the reasons I’m skeptical of the current web development industry.

Of course developers love this. Why wouldn’t they? I’m sure they’d love having a friendly real-life specialist that takes care of all things CSS even more, but we all know that’s not going to happen in our current deskilled industry.

Against Innovation Tokens

This makes a lot of good points and touches on some thoughts I’ve had specifically around boundaries and why those are the points of friction, not just operationally but semantically as well.

First, you will have to find a team that likes both Ruby and Haskell and sees no problem using both. If you are not familiar with the cultural proclivities of these languages, suffice it to say that this is unlikely.

I’ve been getting back into CSS lately, it’s gotten good. There’s a lot of great new stuff, it’s been hard to keep up with it all, but this really brings it home. I’m particularly happy to see support for oklch colorspaces.

Stop Giving af and Start Writing More

This mirrors a lot of my own thoughts about Gardening, Digitally

Seriously. The idea of a “blog” needs to get over itself. Everybody is treating writing as a “content marketing strategy” and using it to “build a personal brand” which leads to the fundamental flawed idea that everything you post has to be polished to perfection and ready to be consumed.

The Linear Oppression of Note-taking Apps

As someone who is primarily a spatial and visual thinker, so much THIS. While I’m getting a lot of great mileage with Obsidian for my personal note-taking environment, I find it very constraining in the way Maggie so wonderfully articulates. I love using GoodNotes on my iPad, but they’ve moved to a subscription model, and the desktop app isn’t as great of an experience on a desktop computer that doesn’t have a pen input.

You cannot freely drag things around and place them wherever you like. That would make it too much like the real world, where we can place one sticky note to the left of another, place both above a small notecard, arrange these next to a book with sticky notes inside it, and pile it all on top a ripped out page from a notebook covered in haphazard scribbles and doodles, half of them upside-down.

The Interfaces With Which We Think: Part 1, Noticing the Problem

I am eagerly looking forward to the rest of this series. It touches on a lot of things I’ve been thining about lately, and in some ways why I still rue the death of OpenDoc and why we need a new HyperCard.

On the flip side, apps and windows have these artificial boundaries: they are each a data silo keeping their things in and other things out. Although an email, a calendar event, and a note might all be inextricably related, you have no way to reflect that in today’s operating systems.

Anti-Gatekeeping Sound Design

I would normally loathe to link to a Google Doc, but this is a gold mine of unconventional ideas for making sounds. Some of these techniques are very mathy and some are very crude, but they’re all out of the ordinary.

placing two frequency shifters at the start and end of your processing chain, and having them shift the signal in opposite directions from each other can have drastic results on the final sound, shoutout false noise.

This is a favorite of mine, though I tend to put other processing that affects pitch in between the shifters.