🧶 ICYMI #29: How To Learn Stuff Quickly
Howdy y’all,
Long time no see! I don’t know about y’all, but the holidays came at me hard. I really powered down for several weeks, and I’m glad I did! Starting in the new year I moved onto a newly-formed team at work, and have been focusing all my energy on that. Time has just massively gotten away from me, and suddenly it’s the early days of February! I hope your 2022 is off to a good start.
🔦 Featured
How To Learn Stuff Quickly (Josh Comeau) - This post is a gold mine (no exaggeration). It’s a nice curated collection of useful practices and approaches that I’m already familiar with, for the most part – but putting into practice is the tricky bit! Josh talks about leveraging both guided and unguided learning, growth mindset, spaced repetition, learning in public, and more.
✏️ Writes
- “Evergreen” Does Not Mean Immediately Available (Eric Bailey) - Are you the co-worker who gets called out for having the “red update button of doom” in Chrome when you screenshare? (Absolutely not me, can’t relate).
- Atomic Design and Storybook (Brad Frost) - Brad Frost and Michael Chan talked atomic design and Storybook on Storybook’s new Storytime show. This post spills over from their conversation to unpack a bit more about using Storybook to create design systems.
- Etsy’s Journey to TypeScript (Salem Hilal) - Etsy’s monorepo has over seventeen thousand JavaScript files in it. The Etsy team concluded that TypeScript would help solve some of their pain points. This post is a fun walkthrough of their adoption and migration strategies.
🔨 Projects
- Coding kitty - Nyan cat’s cousin is your co-worker who loves them some lo-fi beats! 🎧
- Burds! - “Just a bunch of burds, jumpin’ around.” Just delightful and oddly soothing. 🐦
- How airports lie to you with DNS - An edition of Wizard Zines from Julia Evans. The neverssl.com hack is so clutch. ✈️
💬 Tweets
An illustrated analogy for the CSS box model. Beautiful visual explainers never get old for me.
CSS Box Model — an illustrated analogy. pic.twitter.com/n3IqdL4ZMQ
— Annie🦄⚡ (@anniebombanie_) January 24, 2022
A 🧵 explainer from Maggie Appleton about “the block protocol” – a standardized format for reusable blocks:
1/ We’ve been working a new protocol at @hashintel
— Maggie Appleton 🧭 (@Mappletons) January 31, 2022
It’s called the block protocol (but NOT about blockchain or NFTs!)
It allows you to build reusable blocks (aka. components) that are interchangeable across website/apps
It takes a minute to explain, but I’ve drawn pictures… pic.twitter.com/9uhsPdAPSh
Let’s talk about “glue work”:
Seeing some chatter about a woman tweeting she was “yelled at” by her boss for writing too many docs, and saying female engineers should hear this every day. Replies are either “wow fuck your boss” or “omg amazing.” If you think her boss sounds like an asshole, let’s chat. 1/10
— Kat Cosgrove (@Dixie3Flatline) February 4, 2022
🎧 Podcasts
- Happy 10-year, 500-episodes milestone to ShopTalk show! Check out a recent episode, Melanie Sumner on Ember, Accessibility, and the Web.
- What a high performing data team (and stack) looks like - The Data Stack Show, featuring Paige Berry, a staff data analyst at Netlify.
🦄 Random
- Setting Intentions to Give Yourself a Break This Year—10 Ideas - What better time to revisit new year’s intentions than the beginning of February? You don’t need to be a YNAB (You Need a Budget) fan to appreciate this post. If your more aggressive resolution hasn’t stuck, maybe consider more of a gentle nudge instead.
🌵 Personal
- I’ve been more drawn to the tactile pursuits lately. I inherited my mom’s sewing machine, got it all serviced and happy, and set about making my first quilt (🧵)!
Happy February, and have a lovely weekend,
Amberley