WDRL — Edition 236: Dream Big But Stay Small; Simple, Correct, Fast; And 4 Days Per Week Work.

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Hey,

Building technology and software has become a very responsible job. We not only need to think about building an inclusive solution but also need to incorporate ethics, reliability and security. As developers we need to stand up for these factors and sometimes even need to stop other from not following these rules. But in times where software and websites control a lot in our lives, we suddenly are in positions that we might not ever have imagined — a position where we are reponsible for how other people are able to live. A position where an error made by us can be fatal, a position that gives us power. We don’t need to be over-pressured by this but we should realize that a lot of other people trust our technology, depend their lives on us.

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• Drew DeVault’s “Simple, correct, fast: in that order” is a great reminder to set priorities straight in web and software development.
• Jonathan Fulton wrote a very useful resource called “The basic architecture concepts I wish I knew when I was getting started as a web developer,” which is a great web architecture 101 and foundation for newcomers in our industry.

UI/UX

• Ethics for Design is a project where 12 designers and researchers from 8 European cities discuss the impact, sometimes harmful, of design on our societies and the paths to follow for designers to work for the good of all and not just a few.

Tooling

• Dennis Reimann published the first stable version of UIEngine, a workbench for user interface-driven development.

JavaScript

• Hidde de Vries explains how we can make page titles accessible to users when building a JavaScript Single Page Application.

CSS

• Jen Simmons shares common mistakes with CSS Grid and solutions for them.
• Ethan Marcotte explains the still relatively new fr-unit that we mostly use for CSS Grids.

Work & Life

• This week I learned how useful it can be to think outside the box and how remote work and pursuing your hobby can help solving technical challenges.
• It’s definitely not the first time a company or someone tests a 4-day workweek. However, it’s great to see another company establishing this successfully and with benefits for both, the employees as well as the work done.
• Several occasions show that technology will not save lives all alone. And while technology can help, it’s definitely wrong if company founders and technologists see themselves as saviour, as Elon Musk did when he showed up at the Thailand Cave and neglected the capability and the knowledge of very experienced divers. It’s always good to know your own limits and to acknowledge the experience of other people in the world. Be it a diver, a doctor or any other professional worker — each one has their expertise and that’s great.

Go beyond…

• Tobias van Schneider on why the Sagmeister-Walsh studio is so successful by staying small and why dreaming big but staying small is so important for creative thinking.
• Ben Werdmüller shares his thoughts on how different it has become to start a business when you’re, for example, in San Francisco. This is a story where $117000USD are considered as “low income” in San Francisco and how this limits ideas to be built.

—Anselm