Links from 2024

UX methods are cheaper, faster, and better at gathering data than “build, measure, learn” — but they don’t work inside agile development.

Most agile is incremental delivery of a pre-selected way.

Ship it.

HONC is an modular collection of choice technologies for building lightweight, type-safe, edge-enabled data apis that scale seamlessly to their demand.

Create radial interfaces using only CSS.

For most design systems, solving for every feature to support every case is a fool’s errand. Yet, design system practitioners cringe when a designer detaches a Figma component or developer codes a component from scratch.

Another classic from Nathan

Weirdly practical guide.

AI tools can analyze large volumes of content to provide metrics like readability, style, and sentiment. This allows companies to easily track content quality at scale and steer their content strategy using objective metrics.

My suggestion for separating the wheat from the chaff is to look at what works for customers in user testing. Does the hyped idea help real users perform useful tasks more efficiently or pleasantly? If so, real-world uptake is likely. Does it look fabulous in demos but fail to help people perform tasks? If so, it’s probably hype that will suffer a well-deserved death within the year.

Hint: it’s not metaverse

When done right, sound unlocks a path to much richer software experiences

Great list.

Useful to define a term. More edge-finding required.

Hilton, a global leader in hospitality, announced today an industry-first, exclusive partnership with Be My Eyes to ensure guests who are blind or have low vision can experience a more accessible, seamless and welcoming stay. Together with Be My Eyes, Hilton is making available AI-powered assistance and dedicated Hilton Reservations and Customer Care support to guests who are blind or have low vision across the U.S. and Canada.

Good Grauniad summary.

There is now an update to RDP version 11 in the App Store. For whatever reason it did not show up under "updates." I had to select the RDP app in my account in the app store and then it gave me the option to update. It's now called Windows app, quite different.

Like me, most ND people want to go to school, want to learn. And I think it is incredibly sad and damaging that so many so many children and young people are being let down so much by the education system. We need to do better. We need to sort out our education system. It is already too late for many children but it is not too late for the ones who are still at school or future generations.

Kind of mindblowing contextual, generative UI.

Class names are an archaic system that serves as a poor proxy for your UI primitives, and worse they're co-opted in awkward ways which results in combinatorial explosion of weird edge cases.

An interesting take, with a proposal attached.

The Shadow DOM behaves like an <iframe> in its encapsulation. The Shadow DOM inherits some of the same quirks in the form of inheritable styles. Inheritable styles are styles that inherit the styles from their parent. Here's a list.

Great list. Also where they don’t.

How to manage bugs, missing features, intentional design deviations, new patterns, and more.

the modern and intuitive way to model, plan, and align your business for everyone on your team.

The punchline: We frequently get pulled into Catch-22 arguments and discussions. No matter what we do—at least the normal gut options—we lose. But awareness is a gift.

Lume advances the capabilities of HTML rendering in the web, gifting you new HTML elements for crafting graphically-rich hardware-accelerated visual experiences that include 3D models, lighting, shadow, reflection, and more.

A great hub post for recent thinking about web components.

This is the way to do it. It's also what tends to get cut in most ticket-focussed orgs.

Society should withhold all esteem and attention to a nonfiction author whose entire oeuvre spitballs explanatory social theory under the bad faith idea that he holds his ideas “loosely” and readers should too

Great takedown.

Avoid the damage and distress of glorifying the wrong model

YC is no longer an exclusive club where membership signals legitimacy—it’s becoming a broad index of tech startups. This decline will continue until cool, innovative companies no longer see any reason to apply.

In the gif below we start with a table formatted similar to one of Excel's many styling options which, much like the chart styles, do nothing to improve the table. Progressive deletions and some reorganization deliver a clearer and more compelling picture.

The 2 most common organization architectures, their key characteristics, pros, and cons with an example