WDRL — Edition 252: End of the year WDRL, have a great end and see you next year

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Hey,

it’s the last edition of this year and I’m pretty stoked what this year brought for us, what happened and how the web evolved. Let’s recap that and think what each of us learned this year, what was the most useful feature, API, library we used this year and how we personally changed. I’ve collected yet another bunch of articles for this week and want to leave you with it. If that’s not enough, you can always read through the entire archive or the Evergreen list which contains the most important articles since the beginning. I hope you don’t have a too stressful time until the end of the year and wish you all the best — see you next year.

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• We’ve built ways to access and use websites offline now with amazing technology. But one thing we totally forgot about is that for the past thirty years we taught people that the web is online, now we don’t need to wonder why offline usage is not known to exist for most people around the world. A lesson in user experience design and the importance of thinking about the history of the medium we build a product for, shared by Paul Bakaus.

UI/UX

• A rather satiric resource about the state of UX in 2019.

Tooling

• Sandip Devarkonda explains us how we can build a real time app with GraphQL subscriptions on Postgres.

Accessibility

• Scott O'Hara on the importance of not forgeting about the inherent functionality and accessibility that many provide when we strive for custom styled controls.

JavaScript

• Google brings us yet another API to the web, this time it’s the Badging API which allows Web Desktop Apps to indicate new notifications or similar. It’s not in any browser yet and the spec is still in discussion but great to know and if you plan to implement, they’d be happy to hear your thoughts about it.
• Hidde de Vries explains how we can scroll an element into the center of the viewport with modern JavaScript APIs.

Work & Life

• Shana Lynch tells us what makes someone an ethical business leader, which values are important, how to stand upright when things get tough and how to prepare for uncomfortable situations upfront.
• Ozoemena Nonso tries to explain why we often are not happy. But the biggest thief of our happiness is not comparison by itself, it is that we never always get the model of comparison right. It’s an incredibly good piece of life advice if you compare yourself with others often and your happinness suffers from it.
• A rather uncommon advice that after reading I find pretty important. Why forcing others to leave the comfort zone might be a bad idea.

Go beyond…

• Design Ethics & the Truth About Who Designers Really Work For is a masterpiece on responsibility as human being.
• Maryanne Wolf shares research that when our reading brain skims texts, we don’t have time to grasp complexity, to understand another’s feelings or to perceive beauty and how this got worse over the last decades.
• Global investors managing $32tn issued a stark warning to governments at the UN climate summit on Monday, demanding urgent cuts in carbon emissions and the phasing out of all coal burning. Without these, the world faces a financial crash several times worse than the 2008 crisis, they said.
• In some ways, the planet's worst mass extinction — 250 million years ago, at the end of the Permian Period — may parallel climate change today.

—Anselm