WDRL — Edition 269: Shaping up, Doing well while doing good, Single toggle buttons and the Illusion of control

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Hey,

it’s been already four weeks since the last edition. I’ve been on vacation for two weeks and around that, as many of you probably can relate, work is crazy. Before going off you have to finish things and when you come back, you’re overwhelmed by what happend during your absence. And in parallel, my garden is in Summer mode now so it needs a little extra care every single day — watering, sowing, cropping, caring about bugs and flies that like our foods and plants as well. But now I’m back with another edition full of articles to help you stay sane, be more effective and produce better quality work or just improve your life or expand your knowledge about how the world works.

What can we do to cause “good trouble”? First of all, I think it needs to be friendly, helpful and meaningful actions that don’t impact other peoples’ lives. Secondly, it’s something we strongly believe in — it might be using simpler JavaScript methods, reducing the application size, a better toggle UI, publishing a book or building a business without selling user data to others. Whatever it is, it’s good to have a standpoint of view and talk about it. It’s good to advocate others about accessibility problems, about how to listen better to others in a conversation, how to manage projects, products or even a company better. The most important things on all these actions is to remember that they are helping other people and not impact people, animals or our environment in general.
Doing something useful, as small as it might seem, is always good. And don’t forget to honor your action — by smiling and being thankful for what you did.

News

• Chrome 76 removes a couple of things like feature policy: lazyload, insecure usage of DeviceMotionEvent and the DeviceOrientationEvent. If you use them, please ensure you use a secure context by now or replace them by their successors.
• Firefox 68 is out and this is new: BigInts for JavaScript, Accessibility Checks in DevTools, CSS Scroll Snapping and Marker Styling, access to cameras, microphones, and other media devices is no longer allowed in insecure contexts like plain HTTP. It’s now possible to resend a network request without editing the method, URL, parameters, and headers via DevTools, and a lot of (compatibility) fixes are included for CSS features as well.
• Chrome 76 brings image support for the async clipboard API, making it easy to programmatically copy and paste image/png (currently, this is the only supported format though, unfortunately) images.
• Tracking prevention is now available in Microsoft Edge preview, following other browsers like Safari and Firefox.

Generic

• Have you heard of the concept of “good trouble”? Frank Chimero defines it as questioning and re-imagining the status quo, and having your actions stand in contrast to the norm. But the interview with the designer shows much more than a new concept, it’s challenging how we work today and how to do your own thing that doesn’t match the norm of the society. Particularly, I like this quote here:

  “Slow down, find a quiet place and create time for solitude so you can hear yourself. It’s so noisy out there.”

• What if control is only an illusion? We would realize that the true nature of an experience is revealed only in the interplay with the people who use it and that an invalidated design is nothing but an opinion. Quite a thought that puts our assumptions and approach on projects into a different light.

UI/UX

• Many single toggle buttons fail at either showing the current state or making the unselected option visible — here’s how to do toggle buttons and indicators the right way.

Accessibility

• Lindsey Kopacz shares how we can create custom, yet keyboard accessible checkboxes with modern CSS techniques.

JavaScript

• Marta Wiśniewska shares how flat(), flatMap(), and fromEntries() and other ES2019 features work and when to use them.
• Addy Osmani on the cost of JavaScript in 2019. An article (or video, if you prefer) for everyone who builds JavaScript applications.

CSS

• Miriam Suzanne explains CSS Custom Properties and their role in the cascade in a deep dive article.

Work & Life

• Active Listening is a skill that helps us listening for meaning, and how the other person is feeling instead of that usual listening that focuses on ‘how can I reply or comment on this or how will we solve this?’. Buffer’s guide written by Marcus Wermuth is a great resource to learn and practice Active Listening.
• Christoph Rumpel shares what he learned from self-publishing a book and shows interesting insights into finances of it and what to avoid or do better.
• Ben Werdmüller on doing well while doing good: This is a personal story about struggling with revenue, investments, third party capital, trying to earn money on your own by selling your product while having free competitors and how to still produce good things while doing financially well.
• Shape Up — Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work that Matters is a new, free online book by Ryan Singer about project management, leading a company and product. It’s amazing and while I only had time to flick through it quickly and read some individual chapters and sections, this will definitely become a resource to save and refer to regularly.

Go beyond…

• I was in the cinema last week to watch a movie about some people who created a farm. The trailer was nice and while I wasn’t 100% convinced of it, it was an evening where I was up to go out to watch a movie. So we did and it was good that we went to see The biggest little farm. The farmer made the film himself as he was/is a wildlife filmmaker so expect stunning pictures and sequences of wildlife animals in there. But what even to me was revealing is how much a handful of people can make out of desert land in a few years of time, how much we as humans can influence wildlife, give a habitat to insects and produce quality food while including CO2 from the air into our soil to make plants grow better, to restore nature and make an impact in the effort to fight climate change. At several points during the movie I was near tears and I was extremely thankful that I’m able to have my little garden space as well where I can do similar things (though way smaller than their farm). If you’re up for something new, to learn something about food, meat, economy and how it all connects or how to create a beatiful green space out of desert, this is for you.
• Solar panels are a good way to produce renewable energy and it’s good usage of roofs. But in China, air pollution now is so bad sometimes that solar panels stop working. Another reason to act quickly because if solar panels don’t work due to missing sun, our bodies are suffering the same lack of sunlight and we need it for our health.
• Hubert Horan about Uber’s path of destruction. It includes people, clients, our environment, stock markets, engineers, basically everyone.
• It’s difficult and challenging to do something against climate change. Now there’s Wren, a service that claims to offset your personal carbon footprint in a observable, trackable way. It even claims that for the average U.S. person that would be coverable with $15 per month. So under that impression it would work that we do nothing, pay an additional fifteen bucks a month and nothing happens to our climate. I’m sure that’s not gonna work. First of all, the amount doesn’t seem reasonable to me, especially when we look how far people fly each year, how much they drive in cars, how many things (esp. electronic stuff) they buy and how much wood and energy is needed to power all that. If we still consume so much plastic, the wildlife ecosystem will still collapse, if we fly and drive as much as today, the air will still suffer and we will still need more resources that we can regenerate with social or environmental projects. Reforestation takes decades to show effects, deforestation takes a couple of months for dozens of hektars. We need to consume less, fly less and that is probably way more action and has a bigger effect than paying another 15 Dollars to a company. Nevertheless, this should not diminish the company’s effort of trying to act on climate change and if most people subscribe to the service, that will definitely make a big impact — just keep in mind it’s not justifying and compensating everything you do.

If you like what I write, please contribute with your money.

—Anselm