Cool Links

Last month I shared that the State of Devs survey was going on, and now the results are out! I always love this type of surveys and the results are really interesting, even if somewhat expected. Lots of uncertainty in the industry, you might be able to guess why.

Great video! It goes into how AI as a tool affects our way of thinking, how damaging that can be for learning, and how to leverage it in a way that could be positive while still giving us ownership of what we build.

I’ve seen this video circulating before but never gave it a chance due to it coming from a brand (JetBrains), but I’m glad I decided to give it a watch now.

Fantastic talk from a UX designer about why desktop UX seems stagnated and what can be done to move it forward. The prototypes he presents around the 30-minute mark are amazing and make me really excited to try something similar in the future.

He does bring up a fair point, though: no innovation is gonna come from Windows or Mac.

With these seismic changes, I will continue to make the argument that craft defined as caring about the quality of output (independent of the tools used to generate the output) is more important than ever. Caring about what you ship will always have real-world value to visitors/consumers/users real people.

Mostly, it seems, we yell. We yell about the world, we yell about the other social sites, we yell about news stories we didn’t read, we yell about whatever sucker was unlucky enough to be that day’s main character, and we yell, mostly, at each other. We yell because we are mad at all of this. And we yell because we’re all trapped in a machine that was built, in part, to keep us yelling.

It’s rare to find someone who doesn’t feel like this. Maybe we don’t find them because they don’t frequent the same digital places we do. Maybe that’s the secret.

Neat little project that offers 10k pixels in a grid in which people can add their websites to. All of them seem to be personal, indie websites, so it’s a nice way to find something cool! Mine’s in there, somewhere ;) p

This is a nicely crafted website in which you can play a different trio of nonograms every day! I had no idea what nonograms are before, but once I took a few minutes to learn, it became very fun and one of the best parts of my morning ritual. They’re most similar to minesweeper, I guess, but with the numbers on the columns and rows instead of on the squares themselves.

This was posted during the World Cup while more people were paying attention to football and the VAR, but it’s just as valid today. Just as AI provides an obvious benefit at first glance, its deeper effects can be seen as a net negative.

The VAR hasn’t eliminated or reduced biases or corruption in football. It merely made them more hidden and institutionalized.

If you’ve ever struggled on how to organize components in your project, then this is well worth the read. This article goes into the Atomic Design principles (+ some extensions of it) and explains all the rules that will make finding your way around a codebase much easier.

It’s been 5 years since I was introduced to this way of building websites (Jeff is my coworker!) and it’s a fantastic way of doing it, especially when you hop around different projects all the time. I use it both at work and on personal projects like this website.

As a non-designer that sometimes designs stuff, this is fantastic! A compilation of easy to understand rules you can follow in web design without having to worry too much about context.

Some of them I had already learned elsewhere, but it’s nice to have them all laid out together like this.

This project aims to make it easy for CSS to have access to things only JS could have previously, all through CSS variables. This makes it way easier for CSS to still be responsible for the presentation layer, without having to add animations, transitions and status information through JS.

I gotta point out that the performance on that site specifically is pretty horrid. It’s probably better used sparingly, but I get why the demo site would use it everywhere 😅

Nice, cozy video reflecting on how we are often a distant audience of other people’s lives instead of living our own. It’s definitely that damn phone.

Pretty cool study about how our brains work in finding optimal routes and how surprisingly good we are at it, even when compared to computers. Lots of visual and interactive demos inside!

I found out about this when looking at my website’s analytics: this is cool! It’s an aggregator of cool links from the indie web, where nobody posts anything: every link comes from RSS feeds of various sites, and users upvote the best to make them bubble up to the top. It’s a great way to find new blogs and people to follow.

This is a survey for developers about everything but coding, that is accepting answers up to September 5. If you’re a developer, it’s worth participating! It doesn’t take long to fill and can help understanding the current environment of the dev industry in such chaotic times.

There’s a lot of websites that mimic retro desktops nowadays (they’re cool!), but this one feels truly special by having its own aesthetic, and it feels so fun to explore! I love ghow you can draw your own stamps and leave your own mark on it.

Play a different hole of mini-golf in your browser every day. You can see other people playing as well, and share your play with friends if you’re into that.

OverpAId is not coming for the people who do the actual work. It is coming, with extreme prejudice, for exactly one category of job: the one that spent the last forty years insisting everyone else’s job was replaceable.

This is fantastic.

There will be at many points in your creative process opportunities to bypass the struggle of working and learning, but availing yourself of those shortcuts will gradually undermine your work in subtle ways that you cannot foresee.

So sure, go ahead and use generative fill to clean up your image. No one’s watching. I won’t tell anyone and no one will ever know. But you will pay a very small price in relieving yourself from the duty of learning some new Photoshop skills. You might not need those skills in this precise moment, but as you grow into your craft, those skills might come in handy in other ways that you do not presently anticipate.

While focused on people who do creative work, this video easily applies to everyone. It’s so easy to fall into the trap of letting the sparkles do something for you, and just as easy to prevent yourself from learning and improving because of that.

Even as someone who tries to limit and police my own usage of AI tools, I could see myself in a lot of these examples. Process isn’t only important to creative work; it’s important to our own personal development. AI can produce generic output that anyone else could, but only you, with your unique combination of skills and experiences accumulated over the years, can produce something unique.

Another amazing Josh Comeau post that explains a new concept in a super easy to understand manner and makes me wanna try it out right now? Yes please.

The last time I saw the anchor positioning API, it looked kinda intimidating. Now it sounds so simple! I know there was work on the browser standards side to simplify it, so kudos to them for arriving at what seems to be a really sensible API.