Just Dü It and The Legend of Link
Hey friends,
How many ears does Captain Kirk have?
Three. The left ear, the right ear, and the final front-ear. 🌌
Thinking Too Hard
This week, I've been thinking about specialist vs generalist skillsets.
I started my career in the web industry as a hybrid designer-developer. I built what I designed and covered everything from UX to Visual Design to Front-End Development and even some server-side logic. I was able to stay on for the complete lifecycle of a project. Yet because of how WIDE the responsibilities were, it was hard to be GREAT at all parts. There was too much to cover!
When I became a manager, it became clear that hiring generalists was even harder. We decided to specialize and slice the design work from our team's responsibilities. We had more work than we could handle and we needed ALL the hands we could get. Specializing let us focus on being great at something and more easily hire for the skills we needed.
Fast-forward to now and we're slowly climbing out of a tech recession. Business is slow. RIGHT NOW it's valuable to have a wide skillset because the shape of the work is changing — a flexible skill set makes it easy to fit into different resource-shaped roles on a project.
So where does that leave us?
David Eisinger, Development Director at Viget, gave us some timeless advice recently. He shared this quote from Neal Stevenson in The Confusion:
"Pay attention, that's all ... Notice things. Connect what you've noticed. Connect it into a picture. Think of how the picture might be changed; and act to change it. Some of your acts may turn our to have been foolish, but others will reward you in surprising ways; and in the meantime, simply by being active instead of passive, you have a kind of immunity that's hard to explain."
David's point was that:
- The most capable, most interesting, and smartest people: they want to know EVERYTHING, and find ways to connect them... So keep your interests super wide.
- But be active. Even if it turns out not to be the right thing, doing something is better than nothing.
So cast wide, be active! JUST DÜ IT! Even if the shape of the work changes, if we're actively changing as well we'll be able to exist in those interesting gaps!
Interesting Web Bits
- A coworker of mine surfaced Motion One, (which has apparently been around for awhile) but aims to be "the jQuery of WAAPI" (Web Animations API). I found WAAPI to be promising, but a bit brittle still, so it'd be interesting to peel this apart and find how they attempted to smooth over the rough parts of the API.
- After yeeeeeeears, Zelda is finally getting her own game. (Although it should be called the Legend of Link for consistency reasons! 😂)
- Hugo Landau talks about the demise of of the mildly dynamic website.
- If you're looking to pick up a hobby, you could try typographic knitting ... or you could just admire what Rüdiger Schlömer creates...
- A really neat liquid physics demo but with LAYERS!
- If you didn't see it, Figma is releasing a slides builder... but it's not base functionality. Gotta pay, yo.
- Remember Hypercards? No? (They were before my time too...) But someone built a hypercard simulator.
- Fun drawing physics simulator/game/thing.