Open as RSS feed, View full archive
Every year I see all the incredible Halloween projects that people make. I've never had much opportunity to play around with hardware so it always feels like too big of a task to try. This year however I had a Raspberry Pi Zero W on the side and a small bit of time to make something. As with all my side projects I wanted to use the time to learn something new.
The task was simple: get an app into the iOS App Store. I failed that task. When my apple developer account was up for annual renewal, I decided not to renew it. I considered focussing on it and achieving my task but after a year I figured it was pointless. The app is quite cool and has some use-cases but it's not something that would ever take off so it would just be a waste of my time.
For better or for worse, the web is now full of modal screens that block progress until you accept or reject cookies.
A tiny little letter I wrote to myself so I remember how to find my lost work in git.
One Sunday I was having breakfast with a friend and got talking about team structures and how projects vary. It was a really useful discussion and I felt that other people might find conversations like that useful too, this idea very quickly became Interviews by Shane Hudson. I began building it that day and within just over a week I published the website with five interviews.
This was a dConstruct-worthy talk. It didn’t necessarily give any answers or solutions but it gave plenty of questions and showed his journey of learning and exploring ideas related to design systems at an almost philosophical level.
How do you design a design system that can be used by any site on the web? That’s a big challenge and one that Una did a brilliant job explaining.
Varya gave a React talk that seemed to be useful for everyone, she explained how you can take tools originally made for React (such as Storybook) and pass through vanilla HTML/JS/CSS without any need to know React at all.
This one was hard to write notes for, partly because it was code-heavy and partly because I had just been to MEATliquor for lunch. There is one note however that somehow didn’t make it to this list: Heydon wore lobster hands through his entire talk.
Topology. The talk I didn't realise I needed to see. Starting off with inter-tidal zones, a picture of a Klein bottle, into how we should be caring about the gaps and the overlaps in our projects instead of just the things (say, components?), and back around to inter-tidal zones. Danielle gave a brilliant talk that critiqued the work we do from a perspective I hadn't ever thought of but I think it may help me to structure how I think about some of the work we do in the future.