Links from 2020

When was the last time you saw a website that didn’t have a huge image fitting to the screen with some giant text overlaid on it?

From 2015!

A book - serialized free online - about the art and science of independent consulting.

Sponsor a London Homeless Person Back Into Work

The Presentation Layer, our React-based rendering layer for the new BBC website, is a monorepo that includes the design system. Only web pages created in the monorepo can use the design system. And, most importantly, any changes to components in the design system are rolled out instantly.

Role models matter. So I made a list of small companies that I admire. Neither giants nor startups - just people making a living writing software on their own terms.

In his 1959 book, “Landmarks of Tomorrow,” he coined the term “knowledge work,” and argued that autonomy would be the central feature of the new corporate world. Drucker predicted that corporate profits would depend on mental effort, and that each individual knowledge worker, possessing skills too specialized to be broken down into “repetitive, simple, mechanical motions” choreographed from above, would need to decide how to “apply his knowledge as a professional” and monitor his own productivity. “The knowledge worker cannot be supervised closely or in detail,” Drucker wrote, in “The Effective Executive,” from 1967. “He must direct himself.”

Old-ish but gold-ish.

By the end of its second episode, I knew that Netflix’s new series “Emily in Paris” was not a lighthearted romantic travelogue but an artifact of contemporary dystopia.

Product Owner is a role you play on a Scrum team. Product Manager is the job.

...but there is so much more in this article.

Your job title says "software engineer", but you seem to spend most of your time in meetings. You'd like to have time to code, but nobody else is onboarding the junior engineers, updating the roadmap, talking to the users, noticing the things that got dropped, asking questions on design documents, and making sure that everyone's going roughly in the same direction. If you stop doing those things, the team won't be as successful. But now someone's suggesting that you might be happier in a less technical role. If this describes you, congratulations: you're the glue.

You can also turn on Do Not Disturb by pressing and holding down the Option key while you click the date and time in the menu bar

Weird UI: click location is the same, but target is different.

what they are, why you want one, how to build them and some of the interesting things you can do once you’ve set one up.

Time to upgrade the scrum master.

The design architect is a champion for human-digital engagement. They have the responsibility to establish a sustainable and equitable balance between a system’s owner and its users with solid workflow and governance practices. And they must care for and find ways to measure and evaluate the health of their digital experience architectures.

U.S. companies such as DuPont and General Motors moved from a functional to a multidivisional structure in the early 20th century. By the latter half of the century the vast majority of large corporations had followed suit. Apple proves that this conventional approach is not necessary and that the functional structure may benefit companies facing tremendous technological change and industry upheaval.

Its fundamental belief is that those with the most expertise and experience in a domain should have decision rights for that domain. This is based on two views: First, Apple competes in markets where the rates of technological change and disruption are high, so it must rely on the judgment and intuition of people with deep knowledge of the technologies responsible for disruption.

Will your code work with assistive technologies?

If you've ever wondered whether a particular song qualifies as Yacht Rock, you're in the right place! Yacht or Nyacht is a collection of songs rated on the Yachtski Scale, a scientific measurement of musical yacht-ness created by the originators of the term 'Yacht Rock'.

helps you find the most durable products ever made

Competitiveness is evidently one of the many sources of his creativity, albeit competitiveness of a patient, five-day-test-match kind. He worries quite a lot about the amount of time he spends writing and revising a play. ‘If the next gap is as long as the last one,’ he said in 2017, ‘I will be 103 and no doubt ready with blue pencil and blue-black ink as usual.’ Let’s hope so.