349 private links
Some tips to make the website a bit better
A local-first alternative to Notion
The same content can create clarity for one person and confusion, stress, or exclusion for another, without changing a single word.
Accessibility is a must. Here are some examples
- When color disappears completely
- Buttons that look clickable even without color
- Links that are underlined or styled consistently
- Hierarchy created through spacing, borders, size, and structure
- When nice colors choices stop working
- Contrast that survives more than one type of vision
- Less reliance on subtle color differences
- Clear affordances that don’t depend on perfect perception
- The most color blindness is ignored
- Meaning that survives without red or green
- Icons, labels, or position reinforcing importance
- Safer decisions and faster understanding
- When text becomes slightly blurry
- Text that stays readable when slightly blurred
- Comfortable line height and spacing
- Zoom that doesn’t punish the layout
- When you can only see a small part of the screen
- Clear headings that anchor the page#
- Logical reading order
- Visible focus states that guide navigation
- When letters won't stay still (dyslexia)
- predictable layouts
- plain, calm language
- no uneccessary visual tricks
- When language stops making sense
- plain language
- clear labels
- information that unfolds gradually, not all at once
Sharing the joy of writing
while I’m thinking on this, this is generally the framework I use to come up with blog topics:
- What have I worked on lately/learned/tried that might be beneficial for people to learn about?
- What opinions do I have currently that I haven’t expressed thoroughly?
- What’s something cool I’m caring about recently?
- What’s my strategy around a certain topic? (that’s this post!)
An alternative to Obsidian.
In summary:
- Use “your” when communicating to the user
- Use “my” when the user is communicating to us
Often you don't need any prefix and can just use "Account", "Orders", "Cases"
A web blog posting month
Evergreen notes are written and organized to evolve, contribute, and accumulate over time, across projects.
The author has evergreen notes that they can use as sentence. They can be very short or becoming long. "Evergreen notes turn ideas into objects. By turning ideas into objects you can manipulate them, combine them, stack them. You don’t need to hold them all in your head at the same time."
A community word processor with light social features.
It is used for Poetry, logging, journaling, list making, being online in a more intentional way
My journal is now running on a new site that's pretty much the same on the front-end, except for the fact that it has a chronological list of my journal entries in all their glory (they are paginated 10/page). But at the back-end everything is stored in an SQLite database.
Source code: https://github.com/kevquirk/journal/
It's only later that I realized that the problem was not with the world, but with me. I let extremely toxic companies dictate what I should be thinking about and distract me from what is good for me and the people I care about.
About consuming too many content and junk.-content on social media:
The analogy with physical health is great because the remedy is exactly the same: you have to exercise. [...] The best way to exercise your brain is to write long texts and to spend time developing your ideas. [...] How to proceed? Don't overthink. Open any text editor and let your thoughts guide your fingers.
Si je crois fermement que les "Leads produit" d'une organisation doivent cultiver leur capacité à naviguer dans le flou, c'est-à-dire accepter un changement permanent, c'est bien à eux que revient l'obligation d'apporter de la clarté dans ce flou, une direction, une vision.
Et il y a un outil nécessaire pour ça : l'écrit.
Les articles sur Eventually coding permettent de se constituer un patrimoine, de prendre du recul, de mieux partager l'information dans une équipe distribuée sur plusieurs pays et donc asynchrone.
Toute personne à partir de Senior doit être capable d'écrire pour articuler document de design, stratégie et vision.
Les documents de design: l'ensemble des descriptifs sur un sujet. Ce sont des documents concrets qui décrivent l'usage actuel d'une technologie dans notre contexte.
Les documents de stratégies (ADR, RFC, Roadmap). Ce sont des écrits qui sont là pour clarifier, pour donner un guide de conduite par rapport à une technologie. Une stratégie est souvent le résultat de discussions contradictoires qui a vu l'équipe s'opposer. Une stratégie est là pour mettre en lumière les compromis et une décision. Le document exprime donc une opinion, à l'inverse des docs de sign.
Les documents de vision (North star document, engineering principles, manifesto, technology radar, engineering blog posts, ...) pour montrer une direction à plusieurs années dans le futur.
Stratégie ou vision ? Parfois la frontière est fine. La différence porte bien souvent sur l'échelle de temps. Une stratégie s'exprime pour les 6 prochains mois, une vision, c'est pour les prochaines années.
Comment démarrer?
Commencer par écrire plusieurs documents de design sur l'existant; puis regrouper les documents de design par thème, détecter les questions ouvertes et les contradictions, faire émerger des stratégies; enfin regrouper les stratégies par thème, projeter les impacts dans le futur.
Le Story telling:
L'enjeu c'est de trouver les problèmes à résoudre et de proposer des solutions. Les documents mentionnés ci-dessus ne vont pas suffire, mais, s'ils sont bien faits, ils vont vous permettre de créer le storytelling nécessaire pour une bonne promotion, et plus tard pour une bonne conduite de changement.
TILs (Today I Learned) are useless, have terrible signal-to-noise ratio, create FOMO.
True, but they are not meant to be the best raw material ever made. They are made to add some randomness in your feeds (or way your consume news or content). They are personal. They don't share or are structure as a lesson. Most of the TILs I read are on Mastodon, toots shared on the fly because someone learned something. The tag Today I Learned is missing, but it remains a TIL nonetheless.
TILs are a way to discover things. Why on earth do you need some random facts to spark your interest in something?
Good point.
There are other advantages to the TILs. They can be read on the fly, in public transportations. They don't need focus or immersion as a fiction book needs.
I think in between: a majority of TILs is undesirable, a few can be useful. A balance is healthy. It is sometimes convenient to put your concentration aside, and distract yourself while reading something short.
Key points
- Writing is a way of thinking. Write early and often and always.
- Write in plaintext to concentrate on writing rather than formatting.
- Keep a work journal to help focus your thoughts at the beginning of each day.
- Keep standing files, such as "someday/maybe", to capture far-off tasks and keep your main to-do.txt file lean, clean, and relevant.
- Write a personal manifesto to help define yourself.
- When creating drafts of your work product, focus on content and structure, rather than formatting.
- Use the lightweight markup language Markdown to provide basic structure and formatting hints to your drafts.
- Use a really good text editor, such as Sublime Text, that keeps your hands on the keyboard, for efficient writing and word processing.
- Backup and revision history are important. You don't want to lose anything.
Ban some words: beholder words, lazy words, salt and pepper words (meaning nothing) and generic adverbs.
The passive voice hides information. We want however to convey concise and efficient information in a technical paper. The writings should avoid the passive voice.
Given the volume of submissions to top peer-reviewed venues, there will always be more than enough technically correct papers to fill the venue. The function of peer review has become to decide which true things are worth knowing. In that sense, peer reviewers are the guardians of the scientific community's most limited resource: our collective attention span. To market a paper, the author must make a compelling case for why her idea deserves access to that resource.