As if working in a museum wasn't already an exciting idea, Natalie spoke about how her job as a curator is far more about collecting stories than it is about collecting objects. I found it particularly interesting how they have to have everything open to the public so, for example, they cannot have an Amazon Echo running because they don't own the software. The solution to this was to collect a gigantic map of everything involved from mining ore to training the models. This was an insightful talk, not all of us will be collecting items for the V&A but it does encourage us to look past the objects themselves and look for the story within.
The first talk of the day was so thought provoking that I was still processing it when Akil got on stage. He did something I've never seen on stage before, got the entire audience doing a breathing exercise together. That peaked my attention and the thoughts I was having went straight to the back of my head while I was again gripped, hearing how Akil had "chosen to live" and really be an active participant instead of just going with the flow. This was a brilliant talk that would be applicable to probably any person on earth, all about making radical decisions. I met Akil in the evening and it was quite a remarkable couple of minutes, but that's a whole other blog post.
What a strong start to a strong conference. In this gripping and thought provoking talk, Cennydd looked at the potential futures and how our work affects it. He argued that as good Human Centred Design is, we need to look further. How does design affect non-users (friends, family of the user maybe), how does it affect the animals or the planet as a whole. The choices we make can affect things a lot further than we currently realise. Even more importantly maybe, we can purposely decide to affect these things in a good way instead of just ignoring them.
Quite often I need a quick way to trim an SVG so it has no whitespace, I use this JS Fiddle I found as it makes it really simple to do. I'm not sure who wrote it but it basically modifies the viewbox to be the SVG's bounding box then returns the updated SVG. Nice and simple.
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.
Authory makes tools for journalists. I've been helping them with their frontend, making sure it is as easy to work with as possible.
For better or for worse, the web is now full of modal screens that block progress until you accept or reject cookies.
This is a colour contrast checker with so much more information than the others, brilliant!