October 16, 2021

🧶 ICYMI #25: Who pays for web frameworks?

Howdy, y’all,

Here are some bits and bobs I came across this week. I hope one piques your interest!

✏️ Writes

• Who pays for web frameworks? (Zach Leatherman) - The folks behind Remix Run announced this week that they had raise a seed round, and were taking the project open source. Zach Leatherman, maintainer of the 11ty framework, wrote a piece reflecting on “sustainability models for this style of web framework” and taking stock of approaches in the most popular frameworks in the current landscape.
• Buttons vs. Links (Eric Eggert) - Twitter had a moment recently about buttons and links again, and Eric Eggert wrote a nice post about these elements and their differences. (This is not new of course – as Marcy Sutton said in this go-to post about this topic in 2016, “I’m sure this conversation will continue to swirl around into eternity, as it has for many years.”) But still being talked about, and still important, especially interesting in the context of design systems. While we’re talking about buttons, I also came across this great post, “Making Disabled Buttons More Inclusive” (Sandrina Pereira). Oh, also, this Button Cheatsheet (Manuel Matuzović). Buttons. So hot right now.
• Managing tech debt (Matt Greenberg, Keya Patel) - “One of the most common points of tension between product and engineering is prioritizing technical debt. Why, when, and how to handle tech debt can be particular challenging questions for an organization and individual teams.” An interesting dive into the topic of managing tech debt.

🔨 Projects

• Divtober - In honor of Lynn Fisher recently joining the Netlify team, highlighting the Divtober project! Lynn maintains the “A Single Div” project, and every day in October (#divtober) has prompts for a single div CSS illustration. Check out peoples’ work with the #divtober hashtag on Twitter and Codepen. Absolutely wild what Lynn and others participating are able to build.
• Everyone has JavaScript, right? - A “new to me” project, via one of the talks for Jamstack Conf recently. A flow diagram of considerations in the delivery of JavaScript – because “We can’t always be certain that our JavaScript will reach our users.”

💬 Tweets

🦄 Random

• State of CSS Survey - The State of CSS Survey is currently open, if you want to participate! Meantime, here are the 2020 survey results, if you’re interested.

🌵 Personal

• I’m currently taking the Technical Strategy course through Reforge. I’ve increasingly struggled with focused attention, especially over the last couple years. Taking this course, I started experimenting with sketch-noting, which has been a nice semi-creative outlet, and has definitely helped so far with attention and information retention. I just need to get faster to make it tenable.
• Workers across industries are quitting their jobs in record numbers, for a variety of reasons. Everywhere is trying to hire, and if your inbox is anything like mine, it’s seeing a huge boom in recruiter outreach. One thing I’m seeing lots of conversation about, both #online, and in conversations with other friends in the industry, is about retention. As new hires come in at a way higher rate to be competitive, what does that mean for employees who joined earlier? It’ll be interesting to see what happens.

Have a great weekend, y’all,

Amberley