WDRL — Edition 273: 5min meetings, Basic as virtue, and Well engineered text form fields.

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Hey,

Do we make our lives too complex, too busy, and too rich? More and more people working with digital technology realise over time that a simple craft and nature are very valuable. Getting more productive and the constant hunt to do more, including making wellness and sports a competition as well doesn’t seem to be a great idea, yet currently this is a trend in our modern world. After work, we need to do 2hrs of Yoga and be able to make the craziest figures, we need a hobby, binge watch series on Netflix, and more. This week I encourage you to embrace a basic lifestyle.

“To live a life in which one purely subsists on the airy cream puffs of ideas seems enviably privileged: the ability to make a living merely off of one’s thoughts, rather than manual or skilled labor.” — Nadia Eghbal in ‘Basic’.

What does basic stand for? Keep it real, don’t do crazy over hours, don’t try to pack your work day with even more tasks and find more techniques to hack it and be more effective. Don’t try to hack your productivity, your sleep, let alone your meditaion, yoga or other wellness/sport time. Do what you need to to and enjoy silence and doing nothing when you’re finished. Living a basic life is a virtue and it becomes more relevant again as we have more money to spend on unnecessary goods and more technology that intercept our human, basic thoughts around things.

News

• Firefox 69 is out and brings us JavaScript public instance fields, Resize Observers, Microtask APIs, CSS overflow-block and @supports for selectors.

Generic

• Chris Coyier asks the question whether a website should work without JavaScript in 2019? Well, it breaks down to a couple of thoughts that mainly conclude with progressive enhancement being the more important thing than making a website work for users who actively turned off JavaScript.

Privacy

• This article reveals research made by Brave about how Google works around the legal requirements of the GDPR directive on its DoubleClick service and exposes private user data without control to millions of websites.

Accessibility

• Adrian Roselli shares why we shouldn’t under engineer text form fields and why the default CSS that comes with the browser usually isn’t enough. A pretty good summary of what’s possible, what’s necessary and how to make forms better for everyone visiting our websites. It even includes high-contrast mode, dark mode, print styles, and internationalisation.

Work & Life

• Who doesn’t love to be interrupted? A great article to understand why “we developers” is the wrong point of view and when you ask yourself why people interrupt you, we can figure out what the real problem is and improve so these questions don’t come up anymore or foster a culture that works differently.
• Nadia Eghbal on externalizing all our thoughts, information, and why it’s not only a good thing. Embracing the basic in our lives is a virtue we should focus on more and this article is great food to foster thoughts (oh, the irony here) for all of us.

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—Anselm