October 8, 2021

🧶 ICYMI #24: Why flow matters more than passion

Howdy, y’all,

Hope you’ve had a good week, and happy Friday! Making a slight tweak to the format starting this week, inspired by one of my favorite newsletters, A11y Weekly – highlighting a featured content piece, and basing the title/subject line on that, instead of the date. Anyway… on to some things I found interesting this week.

🔦 Featured

Why flow matters more than passion (Sarah Drasner) - “Unfortunately, focusing on passion can create and permeate some toxic ideals… At worst, this can be used as a form of gatekeeping, at a time when programmers are needed and salaries are high… Passion is not a requirement for flow state: Engineers can find flow in their work no matter their motivation, passion or otherwise.”

✏️ Writes

• Redundantly Redundant a11y Accessibility (Scott O’Hara) - “…it’s not just unnecessary ARIA that can make web content overly verbose and redundant. Rather, unnecessary and misused HTML can make for awful aural experiences as well.”
• Distributing Challenge: On Building Highly Engaged Teams (Kurt Kemple) - “Challenge plays an essential role in our happiness… However, making sure that everyone on a team, in an org, or in a company is adequately challenged is a complicated task.”
• A Guide to Debugging CSS (Stephanie Eckles) - “Debugging in CSS means figuring out what might be the problem when you have unexpected layout results. We’ll look at a few categories bugs often fit into, see how we can evaluate the situation, and explore techniques that help prevent these bugs.”
• Understanding Logical Focus Order (Rachel Leggett) - “Logical focus order is a key element of web accessibility and is required by WCAG 2.1 in order to meet Level A standards. Let’s dive into what it is, why it matters, who it benefits, how to test for it, and some common pitfalls to avoid.”

🎤 Talks

Jamstack Conf happened this week! The Netlify team powered through a major power outage, and the show went on. Some talks from the event:

• Have Single-Page Apps Ruined the Web? (Rich Harris) - Spicy.
• Jamstack is Eating the World (Laurie Voss) - Insights from the 2021 Jamstack Community survey.
• The next generation of Jamstack performance is… less JS! (Yang Zhang) - On the resurgence of activity in new and existing frameworks – what limits modern frameworks, how does the next wave of approaches work, and what does it all mean for the future of the Jamstack?

💬 Tweets

In honor (/s) of the Facebook outage this week (an explanation, a TL;DR thread), my favorite related tweets:

🦄 Random

• It was nice to reflect on the CSS Zen Garden Days.
• A good refresher on some efficient Googling.

🌵 Personal

• A Korean drama series called “Squid Game” was recently released on Netflix, hitting #1 on the service in 4 days (and apparently on trajectory to be the #1 series on Netflix ever). The official description: “Hundreds of cash-strapped players accept a strange invitation to compete in children’s games. Inside, a tempting prize awaits — with deadly high stakes.” Fair warning that it’s extremely violent and dark, but an incredibly good show, if you’re looking for something to watch. We didn’t realize what we were in for, and binged it very fast.
• I finally created a private alt account on Twitter, originally to more privately reply to a handful of friends who make heavy use of their private alts. A benefit that I didn’t expect is that it feels like lightweight journaling – which is nice, since I’ve never managed to build a journaling habit. (By the way, I don’t share this to encourage you to go find and follow it, please don’t. But do experiment with journaling and reflecting in a manageable way, if you want! It’s been nice.)

Be well, and have a nice weekend,

Amberley