Links that I find interesting
www.henrikkarlsson.xyz
I liked these thoughts by Henrik Karlsson (who I’ve quoted before). He writes about having an “anxious narrator” part of his mind, and explains how he deals with it. I won’t quote it here—it’s a handful of paragraphs long, and an excerpt won’t do the whole passage justice—but it’s worth a read.
www.scotthyoung.com
I really like this article by Scott Young about different approaches to goal-setting (minimum, average, and maximum). I think this is a useful mental model for setting effective goals in different areas. E.g. I’ve found minimum goals work really well for scripture study, where the default is zero output—scripture study is not something that just happens. Right now my scripture study goal is rendered for myself as: “each day, read something in the standard works and write about it.”
Average goals work nicely for physical activity, where the default is some output, from just living life, and goals in this area typically aim to push this output upward. Right now my physical activity goal is “use my treadmill desk and monitor my average activity levels over time using a fitness tracker app.” (The monitoring probably needs to be adjusted, though—having to keep my phone on my person during the workday has been detrimental to my work output; I want to go back to what I did before and leave it in another room.)
But in my experience there’s an interesting gotcha with this mental model, which the author doesn’t touch on: it’s substantially harder to be gracious with yourself in struggling to hit a minimum goal than in struggling to hit an average goal, and harder to be gracious regarding average goals than maximum goals. This makes sense, because maximum goals seem more ambitious, and we give ourselves more grace with that ambition. But I think overall it’s detrimental to the success of minimum or average goals.
Maybe having this mental model in mind can help with that? Maybe when we set a minimum goal, we can recognize it as being valuable because of inherent difficulty in the goal domain. For example, consistent, meaningful scripture study is hard. Reading something every day and writing something about it is hard (and I should give myself grace in it) but still worth striving for because the returns (closeness to God, spiritual perspective amid the secular day-to-day of life) make it worth it.
www.macobserver.com
I thought this was neat. Might need to get an iPhone! But maybe I’ll try this Android app providing similar functionality and see if it works for me; apparently the individual differences in the effectiveness of a visual-cues solution like this are quite large, and even a slight lag in the software could make symptoms worse.
(I didn’t get motion sickness at all until getting it quite suddenly a couple years ago. Since then I have to be very careful to avoid using my phone in the car. I’m not sure what the change was.)
www.lewissociety.org
A talk by C.S. Lewis about the dangers of seeking to be part of an exclusive group (at work, but I think it applies in other domains too). I like his antidote:
If in your working hours you make the work your end, you will presently find yourself all unawares inside the only circle in your profession that really matters. You will be one of the sound craftsmen, and other sound craftsmen will know it.
lia.mg
An interesting post arguing that uncomfortable emotions like despair can increase productivity for software engineers if they escape those emotions by getting into flow. I think that might be true, at least in some cases, but I don’t think it’s a healthy way to approach work. It reminds me of the quasi-addicted state I found myself in when building Logwise: productive, but self-diminishing. Companies don’t need more reasons to put employee productivity over employee well-being.
“Society cares for the individual only so far as he is profitable.” - Simone de Beauvoir
blog.jim-nielsen.com
A simple but clever (the good clever this time!) approach to implementing a
progressively enhanced search on a website: in the no-JS case, the search form
submits via a GET request to your search engine of choice, with the search input
mapped to the q parameter. E.g. with DuckDuckGo:
<form method="get" action="https://www.duckduckgo.com/"> <input type="text" id="search" name="q" /> <button type="submit">Search</button></form>Then when JS loads you could use something like PageFind for a more interactive on-site experience. Might have to try this on my personal site.
unplannedobsolescence.com
I really liked this post by Alexander Petros.
Here’s the problem: your team almost certainly doesn’t have what it takes to out-engineer the browser. The browser will continuously improve the experience of plain HTML, at no cost to you, using a rendering engine that is orders of magnitude more efficient than JavaScript. To beat that, you need to be continuously investing significant engineering effort into cutting-edge application work.
chromestatus.com
Whoa neat—a new moveBefore DOM manipulation method that preserves state. E.g.
iframes can be moved without reloading them, inputs can be moved without losing
focus. Could be very interesting to combine with the same-document View
Transition API.
scrtwpns.com
Whoa this is really cool—a library for color mixing that’s based on how pigments mix. Looks like you need a license for commercial use though.
web.dev
An interesting read.