Valuable thoughts

Jamstack has become more of a "community" than a set of architectural rules.

You can't solve culture with technology.

Relentlessly prune bullshit, don't wait to do things that matter, and savor the time you have. That's what you do when life is short.

In twenty years, attendance at Thanksgiving will be voluntary. Attendance will be a lagging indicator of who I was as a parent today.

A privately owned space can never be a public town hall.

The right book for the right person is not enough. It needs to be the right book, for the right person at the right time.

Helpful criticism is about making the world a better place. Unhelpful criticism is about making yourself feel better.

On day 1 of creating content, people make fun of you. On day 1,000 of creating content, people get jealous of you. Keep going.

Boring gifts are good gifts. Don’t optimize for the moment of opening. Optimize for the weeks after.

Hard choices, easy life. Easy choices, hard life.

Owning your content on the web should not require extensive technical knowledge or special skills.

Memory is a lossy format.

Everything an AI burps out will always be “produced”. It will never be “written”.

You don't need complex sentences to express complex ideas.

Code is data in motion, Data is code at rest.

There are two JavaScripts. One for the server - where you can go wild. One for the client - that should be thoughtful and careful.

Work hard. Don't be an asshole. Share what you know.

Plans are worthless, planning is priceless.

If you're on the bleeding edge, you are usually the one bleeding.

We're wrongfully downplaying the complexity of HTML due to the simplicity of its syntax.

If you want to change your culture, change your reviews. Change the systems that reward and recognize people. The culture will follow.

Buying Used Toilets. You wouldn’t buy one off Craigslist, would you? But you’re essentially doing it when you buy an existing home, right? Context is king.

Group wisdom begins with individual creativity.

The most beautiful piece of art is not gonna do you any favors if it blocks the entrance to your house.

Talking to another person is like rock climbing, except you are my rock wall and I am yours.

All the problems we have with websites are ones we create ourselves.

If you don’t know HTML, you shouldn't use ARIA.

Being swamped isn't a badge of honor, it's something to work on.

If you want your reader to draw a conclusion, just tell them the conclusion!

A week is 2% of the year.

The best SPA is better than the best MPA. The average SPA is worse than the average MPA.

Saying no is better than overcommitting.

If you worry people think X about you, then you probably think X about yourself.

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

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

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

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

Your health is more important than your deadline.

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

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.

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

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

Remember, every developer has a story to tell!

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.

Little screens make for little thoughts.

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

There is no competition for your personal voice.

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

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

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

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

Legacy software is written by people like me.

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

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

There's only one age: alive.

Great is just good, but repeatable.

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

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

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

One tool should not define your career.

Open calendars are toxic!

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

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

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

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

Code runs on people. Please keep it simple.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Ask a better question. Get a better answer.

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

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

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

One of the biggest privileges is being listened to.

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

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

An Open Source project is as good as its community.

Read before sleeping, write after waking.

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

A personal website ain't got no wrong words.

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

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

Success is a matter of how much your are.

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

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

Blogging is pointing at things and falling in love.

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

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

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

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

One accurate measurement is worth a thousand expert opinions.

Quantity leads to quality.

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

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.

Live chat is for the things that can get lost.

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

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

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

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

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

To add value, subtract complexity.

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

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

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

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.

Most single page apps are just giant carousels.

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

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

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

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

Unhappy is who depends on success to be happy.

The overscheduled life is not worth living.

The best JavaScript coding style is to have no style.

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

Freedom of speech is not freedom of reach.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

Emotion = E + Motion = Energy in Motion.

Slack is like coffee. They both make you feel: Busy, Organised, Productive. *Two hours later* Anxious

Old doesn't mean obsolete.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

The future of technology is less layers, not more.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Disagreement is not disrespect.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

Environment is the invisible hand that shapes human behavior.

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

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

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.

The plural of regex is regrets.

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.

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

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).

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.

"Productivity is always about emotional state."

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

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

A good book can save you a decade of thinking.

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

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

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

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

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

Kindness is helping someone else feel less alone.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

The tech industry is not a meritocracy.

Documentation is a love letter to your future self.

Great is just good, but repeatable.

[...] 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.

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".

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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 😭

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

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.

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

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

"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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

Useless is not worthless.

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

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

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

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”.

Privilige is bound to its context.

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.

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

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

[...] 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.

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

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.

Your smile is a messenger of your goodwill.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Complexity is the enemy of accessibility.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Nobody has ever thanked me for using complicated words.

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.

Whenever you fall, pick something up.

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

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

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

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.

“Fully Accessible” doesn’t exist.

Empathy is love's reason for being.

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.

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.

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

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

Love is a verb, not a noun.

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.

You have to reward your users for interaction.

Static is just a cache.

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

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

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

Hacking your work life balance is a process.

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.

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

Code never lies. Comments sometimes do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Truncation is not a content strateg...

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

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

Better words make better products.

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

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

Configuration should not stand in the way of getting started.

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

Being human is an essential skill!

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

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

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

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

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

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

We're *all* edge cases.

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

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.

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

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

Notifications are a DOS attack on your brain!

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Every one and everything is interesting.

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

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

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

Programming is the closest thing to a superpower we have.

Our brain loves to be surprised.

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

I know enough JavaScript to be dangerous.

The modal is the boss battle in a11y.

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

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

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

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

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

Programming slowly takes over your life.

Information shouldn't be a privilege.

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

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

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

Everybody is an expert in something.

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.

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

Don't address their brains. Address their hearts.

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