WDRL — Edition 277: Request with Intent, Small Differences, Self Organisation and Accessible Cards

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Hey,

what makes a good product? Well, it’s more than a great idea. It’s all the little details, from how you do product management, who much you care about accessibility, usability, good performance, caching to typographic details. It all makes the difference. We can choose where to put our focus.
Let’s start caring about small details, not just the big picture. And we can apply it to our entire life — whether it’s perfecting the tea brewing, yoga pose or avoiding waste, driving less with a car or growing some plants at home. If we care about something or someone, we’ll be rewarded.

News

• The 2019 Web Almanac is out. It’s a state of the art report by the HTTP Archive about used technology (choices) and reveals quite some interesting data.

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• Jiaona Zhang on why we shouldn’t serve burnt pizza. Seriously, she shares why MVPs are not the best way to build a product but building a Minimum Lovable Product is. A solid article on how to build better products and evolve them.

UI/UX

• This is an open source illustrations kit that we are allowed to use on our websites. It features really nice graphical art and it includes already quite some symbols.
• Nana Jeon on how to create a card component that’s accessible and works with all the different action states.

Tooling

• Google now offers us a way to run the Lighthouse tool as Continuous Improvement (CI) service, and there’s even a Github Action for it.

Web Performance

• Aaron Gustafson shares various caching strategies in the age of Progressive Web Applications, which is a good idea to follow because things are differently if you use Service Worker.

Accessibility

• Hampus Sethfors on why there’s likely a better way than showing disabled buttons on webpages.

JavaScript

• Rik Schennink how we can crop images to a specific aspect ratio with JavaScript with the HTML Canvas API.

CSS

• Robin Rendle on how we can improve showing numbers in a table or list and align them better with CSS typography options. This technique is especially useful for currency based calculations.

Work & Life

• Deadlines can be really useful but they can also have a super negative impact. When people say “deadline” we often mean many different things. Adam Blanchard says, the first step to better using deadlines is to understand exactly what expectations you are trying to set.
• Adam Blanchard shares a method to find ways how to lead self organising teams, avoid micro management but also avoid macromanaging and keeping it in balance.

Go beyond…

• Crypto currencies sound exciting to us but the mining is bad for our energy households, for the climate and electric power consumption. In Georgia, 10% of the nation’s power consumption is crypto mining. Still want to have crypto currency in your wallets?
• Arvind Narayanan shares how we can recognize AI snake oil, what’s false promises and what’s worth the term “intelligence”. He for example shows why AI doesn’t really work for hiring and why it’s so easy to trick such mechanisms as candidate.

If you want to support produce WDRL, contribute via PayPal or Stripe. Every small amount you pledge will help pay my costs. Thanks a lot!

—Anselm