Valuable thoughts

50% of computer programming is trial and error, the other 50% is copy and paste.

Don't address their brains. Address their hearts.

Everyone you will ever meet knows something you don’t.

I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will not forget how you made them feel.

Everybody is an expert in something.

Look at the people at your new work place: you'll become like them. They won't become like you.

One of the basic rules of the universe is that nothing is perfect. Perfection simply doesnt exist.

The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.

Information shouldn't be a privilege.

Programming slowly takes over your life.

Tech has to be for everyone, for everyone to be in tech.

Adopting an inclusive design approach expands a tech product's total addressable market.

By recognizing exclusion we can start to build empathy for people who interact with unwelcoming designs every day of their lives.

Inclusive design is not just for good, it's for good business!

I believe that making things accessible should be required because it is the right thing to do!

The modal is the boss battle in a11y.

I know enough JavaScript to be dangerous.

JavaScript fatigue is what happens when people use tools they don't need to solve problems they don't have.

Our brain loves to be surprised.

Programming is the closest thing to a superpower we have.

The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect.

For every complex problem, there is an aswer that is clear, simple, and wrong.

Do more things that make you forget to check your phone.

Every one and everything is interesting.

A dream you dream alone is only a dream. A dream you dream together is reality.

When you're different from the mono culture people want to focus on the differences and not the similarities.

In the future there will be no female leaders. There will be just leaders.

You're shaping tomorrow's job market based on the technology choices you make today.

The sign of an excellent speaker is someone who make the audience feel something.

A junior person’s job is to find answers to questions; a senior person’s job is to find the right questions to ask.

I could change lifes and make a bigger impact, and that's why I have never been able to turn off that switch for accessibility.

If you make people feel good about what they’re doing with your technology, they’re going to make sure that other people know about it and are doing good things with it.

Notifications are a DOS attack on your brain!

The only way to do great work is to love what you do.

For people without disabilities, technology makes things easier. For people with disabilities, technology makes things possible.

One of my biggest motivators is the fact that I am impossible to satisfy. I’ll never feel like I’ve done enough conference talks or written enough blog posts or submitted enough pull requests. Admittedly, this is a dangerous ideology and one that I would not recommend other people follow.

If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.

We're *all* edge cases.

There's actually no magic in tech. [...] It's just a skill set – one that all kinds of people can, and do, learn.

Accessibility isn’t on anyone’s radar — until it is.

“Diversity and Inclusion” is a thing — and Accessibility is a big part of it.

"Stories aren't just facts, stories are facts with souls."

A 10x engineer isn’t someone who is 10x better than those around them, but someone who makes those around them 10x better.

The best technical tutorials are written by engineers who don't know the technology before writing them.

Being human is an essential skill!

I think we all have empathy. We may not have enough courage to display it.

Configuration should not stand in the way of getting started.

Coding is not the goal. [...] The goal is creating great, usable and maintainable solutions to problems people have.

Accessibility is the goal to ensure that products support each individual user’s needs and preferences.

Better words make better products.

"We don't have any non-JavaScript users" No, all your users are non-JS while they're downloading your JS.

"When you use Serverless, your server is actually everywhere (and not nowhere as the name suggests)."

Truncation is not a content strateg...

Nobody loves what prettier does to their syntax. Everyone loves what prettier does to their coworkers' syntax.

Another flaw in human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.

I have decided to be happy because it is good for my health.

If you get tired, learn to rest, not to quit.

Diversity is being invited to the party; inclusion is being asked to dance.

Just because you are grabbing all the low-hanging fruit doesn’t mean you are making a good fruit salad.

A team of senior engineers without junior engineers is a team of engineers.

Debugging is like being the detective in a crime movie where you're also the murderer

HTML is by default accessible. And fast. Our job as developers is to not fuck that up!

How to Take Criticism? Ask yourself: Is this helpful or not helpful? Translate. Stay curious. Hang in there until you receive actionable feedback.

Code never lies. Comments sometimes do.

Every website is a web app and every web app is a website.

Don’t Compare Your Behind-The-Scenes With Everyone's Highlight Reel. Don’t Compare Your Behind-The-Scenes With Everyone's Highlight Reel. Don’t Compare Your Behind-The-Scenes With Everyone's Highlight Reel. Don’t Compare Your Behind-The-Scenes With Everyone's Highlight Reel.

Hacking your work life balance is a process.

The hardest thing in web development is communication and talking with people.

We don’t hire people to write code. We hire them to solve problems.

What one programmer can do in one month, two programmers can do in two months.

Static is just a cache.

You have to reward your users for interaction.

No matter where you are instead of looking at your phone look at all the people and find the one that you connect with and realize that they're the center of the universe – because for them they are, just like you are for yourself.

Love is a verb, not a noun.

Always know it’s okay to be broken. It’s okay to talk about it and doing something about it.

Don't make assumptions on what people may or may not know. Any assumption you make is likely wrong.

Serverless is much like wireless. Wireless doesn't mean there's no more wires involved, it's just that you don't need to worry about them most of the time.

Human beings are storytellers. We don’t see or observe things as they are but we impose a narrative line on the events in our life to add order to them.

Empathy is love's reason for being.

“Fully Accessible” doesn’t exist.

Always remember that to argue, and win, is to break down the reality of the person you are arguing against. It is painful to lose your reality, so be kind, even if you are right.

People do not decide their futures, they decide their habits and their habits decide their futures.

Accessibility is about ensuring that there are no barriers preventing someone using a product or service.

The problem is that if you can’t say no, you can’t have priorities.

Whenever you fall, pick something up.

Before you release a website, tab through it. If you cannot see where you are on the page after each tab; you're not finished yet.

Nobody has ever thanked me for using complicated words.

The reason not every fantasy should be pursued is because fantasies never have negative repercussions. Reality does.

Essentially, engineering is all about cooperation, collaboration, and empathy for both your colleagues and your customers. If someone told you that engineering was a field where you could get away with not dealing with people or feelings, then I’m very sorry to tell you that you have been lied to.

Pushing against a stereotype is emotional labor that men, white men in particular, don't have to perform. Instead, they can use that energy to focus on being a great engineer. Women and minorities, on the other hand, start and end the day at an emotional deficit.

If you don't like how @PrettierCode formats your code, it's because you care too much about code formatting.

Talking to people is never a waste of time if you know how to listen.

When we took a closer look, we found that UI developers were spending less than 1/3 of their time actually building UI. The rest of that time spent was figuring out where and how to fetch data, filtering/mapping over that data and orchestrating many API calls. Sprinkle in some build/deploy overhead. Now, building UI is a nice-to-have or an afterthought.

Make time for your team, or you won't have one.

Culture is how people make decisions when the boss isn’t in the room.

Complexity is the enemy of accessibility.

We should see front-end development as a unique skillset that is critical to the success of any project.

Bootstrap isn’t a skill though — front-end development is.

You don't have to Marc Zuckerberg to be happy.

As designers, we disable people when we don’t get it right.

It’s funny, cause no one has JavaScript disabled in 2018, except everyone has JavaScript disabled until it’s loaded and evaluated.

Serverless thinking: Use a service whenever possible because services are almost always cheaper than people.

Because you guys, it's not just about you guys.

Becoming aware of our priviliges opens us up to listening & learning.

When I think about my own Facebook use, I think often about that first website I made, and how that site served the exact same purpose then that Facebook does now.

Code is like humor. When you have to explain it, it’s bad.

No one has every complained that something was too easy to read.

If I slam a product or service I don’t like on Twitter, I’m publicly making a whole lot of engineers who put lot of work into it feel like shit.

Life is too short to let things stay the way they are.

Even your favorite developers may not know many things that you know.

Fast feedback loops lower stress, aid focus, foster creativity, and reduce risk.

Leadership is not tied to a position. Leadership is a mindset.

Developers rarely refactor code unless it is cheap and safe to do so.

Your smile is a messenger of your goodwill.

If a person’s behavior doesn’t make sense to you, it is because you are missing a part of their context. It’s that simple.

Access isn't a yes or no question, it's a conversation.

[...] the people you admire on here are just people. They're nerds who struggle with impostor syndrome and self-doubt like you, and there's nothing special about them that isn't special about you too.

Every design decision has the potential to either include or exclude people.

By designing with accessibility in mind what we're actually doing is we're designing for our friends family and our future selves.

T.H.I.N.K. before you speak. T - is it True? H - is it Helpful? I - is it Inspiring? N - is it Necessary? K - is it Kind? I feel like I need this to pop up every time I go to post online.

Privilige is bound to its context.

What I don’t understand is why it’s okay if you can “just write JS”, but somehow you’re not good enough if you “just write HTML and CSS”.

Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self esteem, first make sure you are not, in fact, just surrounded by assholes.

If Your Dreams Don't Serve You, Let Them Go

Writing is the meetup you don't have to go to.

Useless is not worthless.

We get together on the basis of our similarities; we grow on the basis of our differences.

My github account is full of empty repositories with good intentions.

You can spend a lifetime to build a good reputation and then ruin your efforts with less than 280 characters. Be mindful of what you share. Be less judgmental and mean spirited. Don’t belittle people. And if given a choice between clever or kind, always choose kind. Be kind.

No amount of indentation or sorting imports alphabetically can fix a broken design.

A full-page spinner is basically an admission of being too slow and apologising to the user.

It's a mistake to learn a framework without first learning the fundamentals. That's why, when dealing with beginners, I always start off by making them build their own CPU, programming language and operating system.

"Solving" a software problem by saying which tools or framework you'll use is like solving a math problem by saying which calculator you'll use.

The distance from zero to hero is exactly one character wide.

Treat the world like a codebase. Leave it in a better shape than how you found it.

The internet is the world’s greatest university but you have to build your own curriculum, set your own schedule and grade your own work.

Good developer experience happens when doing the right thing is natural and messing up is hard.

anxiety-driven development is me grepping and debugging by myself for hours instead of asking my teammate a simple question because i just feel like i'm "supposed to" be able to figure something out 😭

Frameworks are not tools for organising your code, they are tools for organising your mind.

If we, as leaders and managers, don’t take the time to remind our teams that we value them, we’re letting people’s imaginations fill in the gaps. That’s a recipe for stress.

If you’re used to winning, winning is habitual, losing sucks. If you’re used to losing, losing is habitual, winning is epic.

Always be honest. It sounds dumb, but often the person we’re the least honest with is our own self.

Serverless is an idea, not any single implementation of that idea.

Leadership is about making choices when the waters are murky and it’s about modeling how to make tough choices so your team has the courage to do the same.

Be careful not to say "nobody needs a CS degree" or "CS degrees are bad" when you really mean "I have not found myself at a disadvantage for the things I've wanted to accomplish in my life by not having a CS degree".

[...] the degree to which other people want to work with you is a direct indication on how successful you’ll be in your career as an engineer. Be the engineer that everyone wants to work with.

Great is just good, but repeatable.

Documentation is a love letter to your future self.

The tech industry is not a meritocracy.

If we, as leaders and managers, don’t take the time to remind our teams that we value them, we’re letting people’s imaginations fill in the gaps. That’s a recipe for stress.

If you find yourself \[as a manager\] talking for more than 50% of a one to one meeting then you’ve failed.

It takes far more courage to be uncool than it does to be cool.

Rarely is anyone thanked for the work they did to prevent the disaster that didn't happen.

To be on a cutting edge team is a privilege. It means having resources and money and a lack of accountability that most web developers simply don't have.

Being an introvert is not an excuse for making no effort to treat people like real human beings.

Two proven methods to make your site fast: 🤔 Cheap: Remove all the JavaScript. 💸 Expensive: Keep writing JavaScript til its fast.

Vulnerability is consciously choosing to NOT hide your emotions or desires from others.

Kindness is helping someone else feel less alone.

The greatest management tool in history is a focused, leisurely walk and conversation.

You can’t be a web performance expert without being an image expert.

Being a leader is about doing the right thing — not because someone might notice you, but because it’s the right thing to do.

Your product will look like the KPIs you optimise it for. Choose your KPIs wisely.

Inclusion is not about everyone feeling comfortable; it is more accurate to think of it as the redistribution of discomfort.

A good book can save you a decade of thinking.

You’re not unmotivated. You’re not lazy. You’re not bored. You are afraid.

Load is not a single moment in time — it is an experience that no one metric can fully capture.

"Productivity is always about emotional state."

When you say no, you are only saying no to one option. When you say yes, you are saying no to every other option. No is a decision. Yes is a responsibility.

It’s \[...\] hard to write a good article about something you don’t care about (that’s why writing was such a draining task in school).

Improvements are only temporary until they become part of who you are.

Asking for help is a form of vulnerability. That’s why people tend not to do it, they’re afraid of displaying a lack of strength.

The plural of regex is regrets.

Everything you learn about front-end development without using a framework is still useful while you are using a framework, or when the framework changes.

If you want to take something more seriously, do it publicly. [...] Social pressure forces you to up your game.

Writing is often the process by which you realize that you do not understand what you are talking about.

Environment is the invisible hand that shapes human behavior.

No one comes to our sites disabled. They come with impairments. We disable them.

"Treat others the way you want to be treated" \[...\] is a poor definition of empathy.

True inclusion is quiet and integrated, not some flag to wave.

Me 3 years ago: Ok first I’ll master JavaScript and Node, then I’ll learn Python, Ruby and some Java. Me today: I am still learning JavaScript.

Good documentation is like a love letter to your future self.

A large percentage of your work should be the thing you're evaluated on. If you're doing very little of your core job, you're hurting your career.

Disagreement is not disrespect.

If a linter rule annoys you and your team, delete it. It may not be worth it. Learn from your own mistakes.

Following group chat all day feels like being in an all-day meeting with random participants and no agenda.

It’s really helpful to respond to a person’s ineffective behavior with curiosity rather than judgment.

Your journal is an opportunity for truth and honesty about yourself that you don’t normally have.

Nobody learns how to write good software without writing lots lots of bad software first. Don't let fear that your code will suck paralyze you.

Your job as an developer is to decide, to decide what tools to use, to decide what frameworks to use, to decide what to prioritize, to decide what is the best way to maintain a project – a lot of questions only your team is able to answer.

The thing about position: sticky is that it only works in articles which explain how to use position: sticky.

Saying yes to everything will lead to you not being able to do your best on everything.

So much of the world’s knowledge is hidden behind hamburger menus.

The future of technology is less layers, not more.

Accessibility is a perfect indicator for the quality of a website.

There are leaders and there are those who lead. Leaders hold a position of power or authority, but those who lead inspire us.

Always remember that to argue, and win, is to break down the reality of the person you are arguing against. It is painful to lose your reality, so be kind, even if you are right.

Doing deals doesn’t yield the deep rewards that come from building up people.

Do things with an eye towards the long haul. [...] Do things that will matter years from now. If you're going to write about something, write about something that will still be a thing five, ten, twenty years down the line. Write it like your gonna own it.

As a leader, it’s your job is to make your employees feel as safe as possible to speak up.

People need to know why they are being asked to make a change, and another developer’s personal preference isn’t a good enough argument.

Settings are for successful products. For MVP, just get the defaults right.

Reading is the inhale, writing is the exhale. Breathe.

The quickest way to ruin the productivity of a small company is to have it adopt the practices of a large company.

We need more discussions where no one is demonized, shamed and both sides are open to changing their mind. Not only is it more pleasant, but that harsh stuff doesn’t actually work.

And the single most effective way to have productive arguments on Twitter or Facebook is by not having arguments on Twitter or Facebook.

You can create a lot of meaning in your own life by helping someone else do something that is meaningful to them.

If you have senior engineers but are unable to hire junior engineers because your team can't support them, you seriously need to reevaluate these so-called seniors.

Old doesn't mean obsolete.

Slack is like coffee. They both make you feel: Busy, Organised, Productive.

*Two hours later* Anxious

Emotion = E + Motion = Energy in Motion.

Being a good writer is an essential part of being a good remote worker.

We undervalue the emotional labor of being the boss. But this emotional labor is not just part of the job; it’s the key to being a good boss.

No joke, about 95% of the work in open source is around education. Docs, issues, pull request reviews, web sites, blog posts, talks, tweets, examples, etc. Writing the code is the *easy* part. Helping people use it is the vast majority of your responsibility as an OSS dev.

The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.

Companies don’t need content; they need things to happen when they publish content. Good content is just the catalyst for performance.

The problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story the only story.

[...] All of the fancy optimizations are trying to get you closer to the performance you would’ve gotten if you just hadn’t used so much technology.

The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn’t said.

If you can’t communicate an idea clearly, you haven’t written about it enough.

Good DX is just being able to do your job rather than fight with tools.

Without a routine, life just sort of happens to you.

Writing shows you how little you know about topics you thought you were an expert on.

Freedom of speech is not freedom of reach.

"I won't get fired if this blows up" is the real engineering 10x.

The best JavaScript coding style is to have no style.

The overscheduled life is not worth living.

Unhappy is who depends on success to be happy.

For the record: No one was born a developer, we all started by learning from scratch...

There are only two industries that refer to their customers as 'users': illegal drugs and software.

Leadership isn't about control and compliance, it's about creating the context for the best ideas to emerge out of your organization.

Writing about something is a cheat code to clarifying your understanding of it.

Most single page apps are just giant carousels.

If you find even the smallest way to make people smile, they’ll remember you more for that smile than for all your other fancy business-model stuff.

Site analytics only show the behaviour of those visitors who'll tolerate the experience being delivered.

Frontend devs are the most lucky of all coders, getting to create the intersection between human and machine.

In most cases, every choice to grow in one discipline is also a choice to not to grow in another.

To add value, subtract complexity.

A privilege isn’t something to be ashamed of, it’s something to be aware of.

We judge ourselves by our intentions and others by their behaviour.

Every employee relationship should be bidirectional nature; it should be clear how the emplyee benefits and how the employer benefits.

The hardest problem in computer science is not being an opinionated jerk about everything.

When you know something it is almost impossible to imagine what it is like not to know that thing

Live chat is for the things that can get lost.

I'd suggest that anyone who feels they have important things to say gets a blog, does some critical thinking on their subject, and writes about it. Rather than feeling the need to convince women on the internet one by one via DM and email.

I document purely for selfish reasons because If I'm busy, I don't want anybody to ask me questions.

Quantity leads to quality.

One accurate measurement is worth a thousand expert opinions.

Free is great, but longevity is better and always worth paying for.

The only productivity hack you need is enjoying what you do.

Even if nobody reads your content, someone still benefitted from it: you.

Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it.

Blogging is pointing at things and falling in love.

The more you complain, the less you value your time.

Blaming a tool for your productivity is like blaming a pencil for your bad writing.

Success is a matter of how much your are.

Passion about an idea is good, but anger is not.

Work will never love us back. But other people will.

A personal website ain't got no wrong words.

When someone has a strong technology preference, it's often just because it's what they learned first.

Read before sleeping, write after waking.

An Open Source project is as good as its community.

6 hours of debugging can save you 5 minutes of reading documentation.

Pair programming isn't 2 people doing the work of one. It's 2 people avoiding the rework of 7.

One of the biggest privileges is being listened to.

90% of software development is coming to an agreement on where to make the mess.

Do no forget that self-discipline is not just about hustling, it’s also knowing when to give yourself a break.

Every decision we make, big and small, short-term and long-term, is an effort to improve our mood.

Ask a better question. Get a better answer.

Everything you say “YES” to in this life means saying “NO” to something else.

You can be the most intelligent person on earth, if you don’t have the focus which will enable you to use that intelligence, then the potential is gone.

It’s easiest to convince people that you’re special if they don’t know you well enough to see all the ways you’re not.

The terminal is the most intimate conversation you're gonna have with your computer.

WCAG compliance is not the end of the journey, because accessibility is a program not a project.

Code runs on people. Please keep it simple.

If you want to be free from anxiety you must be willing to have it.

Your most important customers are not those that generate the most revenue but those that can unlock the most value in your business.

Why would you let someone, who doesn't love you, ruin your day.

"There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses."

Open calendars are toxic!

One tool should not define your career.

Do what you love, and you’ll work every day for the rest of your life.

“Clear” is more important that “interesting”. If something is not clear to your reader, it cannot be interesting for for them.

It's not about what you do, but rather what you enable others to do.

Great is just good, but repeatable.

There's only one age: alive.

If you build a product to solve your own problem, you will have at least one user – more than most startups ever get.

Short-term results come from intensity. Long-term results come from consistency.

Legacy software is written by people like me.

The *actual* company values, as opposed to the *nice-sounding* values, are shown by who gets rewarded, promoted, or let go.

Don’t just work for your Company, work for your company.

The ability to stay calm and polite, even when people upset you, is a superpower.

Do what looks like work to others but feels like play to you.

There is no competition for your personal voice.

Your desire to make something look cool is not more important than making it accessible.

Little screens make for little thoughts.

If your reaction to a successful product is “I could have built that in a weekend’, the first thing you should consider is that you didn’t.

Remember, every developer has a story to tell!

You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.

A good teacher is simply a good learner who loves to share.

Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.

We are all guilty of micromanaging the browser in some aspects, and in turn, are creating an inflexible and fragile user experience.

Your health is more important than your deadline.

Every great team is just one inevitable failed sprint away from a death cycle.

When in doubt, be kind. you never know what someone might be going through.

Code is never the challenge. Well-rested comfortable people who feel emotionally safe have solved every problem I’ve put in front of them.

What you do on your bad days matters more than what you do on your good days.