Kíla!

Evening session

Morning session

Evening session outdoors

One ma-hoosive outdoor session!

Afternoon session

Session in the square

Reading 84K by Claire North.

Seville

Going to Cáceres. brb

Going to Seville. brb

I love the way that Claire L. Evans writes.

adactio.com/links/21423

What an excellent personal website!

adactio.com/links/21422

I went along to this year’s State Of The Browser conference on Saturday. It was great! Technically I wasn’t just an attendee. I was on the substitution bench. Dave asked if I’d be able to jump in and give my talk on declarative design should any of the speakers have to drop...

Exploring the graphic design history of Penguin books:

The covers presented on this site are all from my own collection of about 1400 Penguins, which have been chosen for the beauty or interest of their cover designs. They span the history of the company all the way back to 1935 when Penguin Books was launched.

adactio.com/links/21420

Obviously I’m biased, but I very much agree with Sophie.

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I hope to make something that could only exist because I made it. Something that is the one thing that it is. Not an average sentence. Not a visual approximation of other people’s work. Not a stolen concept that boils lakes and uses more electricity than anything in my household.

adactio.com/links/21418

What are your own scribbles, your own ordinary plenty, not worth much to you now but that someone in the future may treasure?

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I do not want any software

I believe that this mindset is the healthiest way to design and build things that people will use and not hate us for building. For me, it’s a way to remind myself that all humans have a whole rich, challenging life outside of the little screens I’m making for them. So that even when I’m focused on user needs and user problems, I can keep it just out of the corner of my eye: the person I’m making this for doesn’t actually want to be here, and that’s OK.

We want speedy internet and fast-loading services because we want to stop pushing buttons and opening accordions as quickly as possible.

adactio.com/links/21416

Monday session

Debating complexity is pointless because it’s a subjective metric. Every developer has a different gut feeling about simplicity, complexity and the appropriate amount of complexity for a given task. When people try to find an objective definition, they come to wildly different results. And that’s okay.

Instead, we should focus on hard metrics from a user perspective. Performance, efficiency, compatibility, accessibility and fault-tolerance can be measured, tested and evaluated, automatically and manually.

Any amount of complexity is fine as long as these goals are met.

adactio.com/links/21414

Sunday session

Since the early days of the web, large corporations have seemingly always wanted more than the web platform or web standards could offer at any given moment. Whether they were aiming for cross-platform-compatibility, more advanced capabilities, or just to be the one runtime/framework/language to rule them all, there’s always been a company that believes they can “fix” it or “own” it.

Applets. ActiveX. Flash. Flex. Silverlight. Angular. React.

adactio.com/links/21412

Here’s a nice interview with Rich all about how things work at Clearleft.

adactio.com/links/21411

I’m very glad to see that work has moved away from a separate selectmenu element to instead enhancing the existing select element—I could never see an upgrade path for selectmenu, but now there are plenty of opportunities for progressive enhancement.

adactio.com/links/21410

Wednesday session

At this point, it really does seem like “AI” is “bullshit you don’t need or is done better in other ways, but we’ve just spent literally billions on this so we really need you to use it, even though it’s nowhere as good as what we were already doing,” and everything else is just unsexy functionality that makes what you do marginally easier or better. I’m sorry we live in a world where enshittification is being marketed as The Hot And Sexy Thing, but just because we’re in that world, doesn’t mean you have to accept it.

adactio.com/links/21408

This is a masterpiece.

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Tuesday session

I’ve noticed a really strange justification from people when I ask them about their use of generative tools that use large language models (colloquially and inaccurately labelled as artificial intelligence). I’ll point out that the training data requires the wholesale harve...