Tools As Ways of Being

You have a dependency that provides a CLI tool, how do you use it? Even though you did npm i from your project root, if you run it won’t work because that tool is not in your global path. You could install globally, but then if you have in multiple projects and you run in another project it might not be the same version of the tool. For...

I’m playing with making cross-document view transitions work on this blog. Nothing fancy. Mostly copying how Dave Rupert does it on his site where you get a cross-fade animation on the whole page generally, and a little position animation on the page title specifically. To animate the page title, I need a unique ID to target the element I want...

Ever hear that idiom, “Don’t miss the forest for the trees”? The idea being, you miss the bigger picture because you’re focused on the minutia? Feels like the tech equivalent is: Don’t miss the product for the artifacts. Here’s Ryan Rendle in a recent piece on design artifats: There’s a factory-like production of the modern design process which...

Imagine you’re on a social network and you start getting tons of followers. You love it! Your follower count is going up! Instead of a nobody with a couple hundred followers, you’ve bypassed the 1k+ mark and it keeps going! You’re ecstatic! This is the “next step” you were aspiring to. But then you start looking around. The people you’re...

It’s a notifications’ world, we’re just living in it. Companies can’t help but try and get your attention via email, text, or push notifications and drive you to their app. Push notifications in particular are a powerful tool — and where there’s power, there’s abuse. I’m sure you, dear reader, have had your notifications abused by overly-eager...