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Where do individual contributors go once they peak?
On why senior individual-contributor designers shouldn't have to move into management to grow—and how the industry can build a real IC leadership track.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 77 posts.
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This Page is Designed to Last
The end of the year is an opportunity to clean up and reset for the upcoming new semester. I found myself clearing out old bookmarks—yes, bookmarks: that formerly beloved browser feature that seems to have lost the battle to 'address bar autocomplete'. But this nostalgic act of tidying led me to despair.
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Experiments in Constraint-Based Graphic Design
Basalt is system for graphic design that allows a designer to think in terms of relationships between objects, and it makes it easy to build and reuse abstractions.
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Lightweight API Design in Swift
This week, let’s take a look at a few core language features that enable us to design really lightweight APIs in Swift, and how we can use them to make a feature or system much more capable through the power of composition.
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The Danger of “Simplicity”
Opinions and discussions of various topics, mostly related to programming.
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Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible
Slack has just recently rolled out a “WYSIWYG text input” widget to its Web browser interface. (Apparently, the phased rollout started at the beginning of November 2019, but it’s just now starting to hit the workspaces that I participate in.) The user experience of using this new input method is really, really, really…
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Apple's New Map: Midwest and Western U.S.
On November 18, 2019, Apple’s new map expanded to parts of the Midwest and much of the Western U.S.:
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CSS Utility Classes and “Separation of Concerns” (2017)
Over the last several years, the way I write CSS has transitioned from a "semantic" approach to something more like what people call "functional CSS." In this post I explain how I got to this point and share some of the lessons and insights I've picked up along the way.
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Simple Does Not Mean Ugly
Hi, my name is Adam Ramirez. I am a UX Designer who focuses on Design Facilitation and Product Analytics with 10 years of experience under my belt. In the past 5 years, I have been working to deliver the best possible user experience to my clients and their users.
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Dark color: Things to know about color when adopting dark mode
Things you should know about color when adopting dark mode.
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Lesser Known Coding Fonts
In the past few months, I’ve become interested—fascinated even—by programming fonts. As programmers we look at text all day: code, logs, command outputs, monitoring tools, etc. If we’re going to be looking at text all day, we might as well make it easy and pleasant for our eyes to read that text.
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Earth and Sun
Interactive article about Earth and Sun.
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Verb-Noun vs. Noun-Verb
Behind the scenes - how I'm making redblobgames.com - interactive explanations of game development algorithms and math
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Dark mode in a website with CSS
This page has a dark mode. Try it! Supporting prefers-color-scheme was easy, though there were a couple surprising details to address.
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Text Rendering Hates You
Rendering text, how hard could it be? As it turns out, incredibly hard! To my knowledge, literally no system renders text “perfectly”. It’s all best-effort, although some efforts are more important than others.
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At Dynamicland, the Building Is the Computer
Dynamicland is a non-profit that resides somewhere between an academic research lab and a Silicon Valley startup, between physical and digital, and between computing’s distant past and its future.
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Escher-Like Spiral Tilings
The artist M.C. Escher drew many lovely tilings, which he called “regular divisions of the plane”. He worked hard to ensure that his tilings were of lifelike animal forms such as birds and fish. He filled notebooks with hand-drawn sketches of tilings, many of which later found their way into his woodcuts. If you’d…
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Most software companies ignore user behavior
And other things that they do at their own peril. And how to be better about it.
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Words that do Handstands
The other day I ordered a book on art history from Amazon… which reminded me of the movie Angels and Demons , which reminded me of ambigrams. Ambigrams are those stylized words that look the same when you turn them upside down. Here is the classic, by John Langdon .
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Why All of Our Games Look Like Crap
We spent years working on this game. We're betting our family's future on it. So. Why does it look so bad? We've been writing indie game...
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Rules for Intuitive UX
Obey the Law of Locality · ABD: Anything But Dropdowns · Pass the Squint Test · Teach by example
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Casting Glass from 3D Printed Molds
31 Jul 2019 | self-Amos , glass art , kiln casting , fabrication , kilncasting , lost-resin , lost-wax
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Tokyo subway’s humble duct-tape typographer
With a few rolls of of duct tape and a craft knife, security guard Shuetsu Sato elevates the humble worksite sign to an art form.
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SVG Jigsaw Generation in Clojure
Silly, terrible, no-good very-bad jigsaw puzzles. Featuring Voronoi diagrams, KD-trees, and Clojure.
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Front-end design, React, and a bridge over the great divide
I'm Brad Frost, an independent creator, web designer & developer, teacher, speaker, writer, musician, and artist based in Pittsburgh, PA.