Design for a Small Planet – Scott Jenson

So, let’s start with a simple premise: how can we make design less opaque and encourage teams to make small changes more efficiently? Not every product decision needs to be a big, complicated design process.

This checklist, in four parts, is meant to be a simple, lightweight way for the team to get the ‘gist’ of the issue and make a shared decision quickly. It’s a starting point, a way to get the critical information in once place so the entire team can understand and discuss. The four parts are:

Gather: Bring the right info together into a single place

Impact: List the size of the problem and possible risks

Sketch: Create a preliminary sketch of a solution

Team Huddle: Get the product team to discuss and agree on a solution.

SCALABLE: Save form data to localStorage and auto-complete on refresh

When I was in Amsterdam I was really impressed with the code that Rose was writing and I encouraged her to share it. Here it is: drop this script into a web page with a form to have its values automatically saved into local storage (and automatically loaded into the form if something goes wrong before the form is submitted).

	// With the help of Jeremy Keith, I was able to create a fully scalable code sample that you can copy-paste into your project.
	// It will save the user input value on blur, this includes radio buttons, checkboxes and date inputs besides regular text/number inputs.
	// The only condition is that you give the form element on your page a data-attribute of data-form-topic="foo".
	// This code snippet saves the data-attribute as the key to the localStorage, and the value of it will be an object with key/value pairs of the respective inputs name and value.
	// Please refer to this gist somewhere in your code if you use it :)
	// Happy coding!

	// VARIABLE DECLARATIONS
	// objects
	let savedData = {};
	let autocompletedData;

	// HTML elements
	const inputs = document.getElementsByTagName("input");

	document.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded", () => {
	const form = document.querySelector("form");

	if (window.localStorage) {
	if (!form) {
	return;
	}

	if (!form.dataset.formTopic) {
	return;
	}

	let getFormTopic = localStorage.getItem(form.dataset.formTopic);
	if (!getFormTopic) {
	return;
	}
	autocompletedData = JSON.parse(getFormTopic);

	var formTopic = form.dataset.formTopic;
	console.log(formTopic);

	function getKeyValue() {
	for (const dataKey in autocompletedData) {
	let value = autocompletedData[dataKey];

	let formField = document.querySelector(
	"[name = " + dataKey + "]"
	);

	switch (formField.type) {
	case "radio":
	formField = document.querySelector(
	`input[name = '${dataKey}'][value = '${value}']`
	);
	formField.setAttribute("checked", "checked");
	break;
	case "checkbox":
	formField.setAttribute("checked", "checked");
	break;
	case "file":
	break;
	default:
	formField.value = value;
	}
	}
	}

	getKeyValue();
	}
	});

	if (window.localStorage) {
	function saveFormDataToLocalStorage(e) {
	const form = e.target.closest("form");
	let submitData = new FormData(form);

	for (let [dataKey, value] of submitData.entries()) {
	savedData[dataKey] = value;
	console.log(dataKey, value);
	}

	window.localStorage.setItem(
	form.dataset.formTopic,
	JSON.stringify(savedData)
	);
	}

	Array.prototype.forEach.call(inputs, function (input) {
	switch (input.type) {
	}

	input.addEventListener("blur", function (e) {
	e.preventDefault();

	saveFormDataToLocalStorage(e);
	});
	});
	}

view raw script.js hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Indie Newsletters – Registry of cool personal and independent email newsletters

You are viewing a humanly curated list of fine personal & independent email newsletters that are updated regularly. No algorithms ever!

And remember: you can subscribe to most newsletters via RSS rather than email.

The Chimeralogists

I might just be pattern-matching, but I recognise myself in what Robin describes here:

No one can explain what you do. Let’s face it, you don’t do a great job explaining it either. People come to you for advice on issues that they introduce with “I’m not entirely sure how to describe this problem or what exactly I’m looking to do here, but…” Your colleagues and your communities genuinely value your contributions even as they remain entirely mystified by the exact contour of your position.

Fragile Technologists – Terence Eden’s Blog

If you’ve made a computer do something - anything - in a logical fashion, you’re a programmer. Scratch? Programmer! CSS? Programmer? Conditional formatting in Excel? Programmer!

Emily F. Gorcenski: Angelheaded Hipsters Burning for the Ancient Heavenly Connection

Twitter is a chatroom, and the problem that Twitter really solved was the discoverability problem. The internet is a big place, and it is shockingly hard to otherwise find people whose thoughts you want to read more of, whether those thoughts are tweets, articles, or research papers. The thing is, I’m not really sure that Twitter ever realized that this is the problem they solved, that this is where their core value lies. Twitter kept experimenting with algorithms and site layouts and Moments and other features to try to foist more discoverability onto the users without realizing that their users were discovering with the platform quite adeptly already. Twitter kept trying to amplify the signal without understanding that what users needed was better tools to cut down the noise.

Twitter, like many technology companies, fell into the classical trap by thinking that they, the technologists, were the innovators. Technologists today are almost never innovators, but rather plumbers who build pipelines to move ideas in the form of data back and forth with varying efficacy. Users are innovators, and its users that made Twitter unique.

Letters to a Young Technologist

A handsome web book that’s a collection of thoughtful articles on technology, culture, and society by Jasmine Wang, Saffron Huang, and other young technologists:

Letters to a Young Technologist is a collection of essays addressed to young technologists, written by a group of young technologists.

Save .ORG | SaveDotOrg.org

I’ve signed this letter.

Tellart | Design Nonfiction

An online documentary series featuring interviews with smart people about the changing role of design.

As technology becomes more complex and opaque, how will we as designers understand its potential, do hands-on work, translate it into forms people can understand and use, and lead meaningful conversations with manufacturers and policymakers about its downstream implications? We are entering a new technology landscape shaped by artificial intelligence, advanced robotics and synthetic biology.

So far there’s Kevin Slavin, Molly Wright Steenson, and Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, with more to come from the likes of Matt Jones, Anab Jain, Dan Hill, and many, many more.

StyleURL - share CSS tweaks instantly

This is an interesting tool: mess around with styles on any site inside Chrome’s dev tools, and then hit a button to have the updated styles saved to a URL (a Gist on Github).

List of Brighton & Hove Design, Development, and Various Other Tech / Nerdy Meetups

An up-to-date list of Brighton design and dev meet-ups. There’s quite a few!

ANNOUNCEMENT: We've moved all of these meetups to a better maintained website called Brighton Brains - add it to your bookmarks, share it on your social media, etc. :D

Brighton & Hove Design, Development, and Related Meetups

Development

AsyncJS https://asyncjs.com/

A JavaScript meetup for Brighton & Hove

Codebar https://codebar.io/

Non-profit initiative that facilitates the growth of a diverse tech community by running regular programming workshops

BrightonPy http://www.brightonpy.org/

Brighton and Hove Python User Group is a collection of people interested in the Python programming language and related technologies in the city of Brighton and Hove

Brighton ALT.NET http://brightonalt.net/

Brighton ALT NET is a monthly get together for anyone interested in C# and .NET development.

Brighton PHP http://brightonphp.org/

Your PHP User Group for Brighton and Sussex

Brighton Ruby https://www.meetup.com/Brighton-Ruby-Group/

A group for Rubyists on the South Coast, centred on Brighton. A broad church, we're nice first, 'right' second.

Brighton Java https://www.meetup.com/en-AU/Brighton-Java/

Brighton Java is a group bringing together Java users, enthusiasts and learners. We’re interested in the whole world of Java – android development, server frameworks, Groovy, interesting tools, applications, Clojure, development methodologies and so on and so on – anything Java.

Brighton Drupal https://groups.drupal.org/brighton https://twitter.com/badassuk

Brighton Area Drupal Association

Functional Brighton https://www.meetup.com/en-AU/Functional-Brighton/

Functional Brighton is a Brighton, UK meetup group that aims to bring together people interested in functional programming.

Codeclub https://www.codeclub.org.uk/

Code Club UK is a nationwide network of volunteers and educators who run free coding clubs for young people aged 9-13.

Coder Dojo Brighton http://www.coderdojobrighton.co.uk/

CoderDojo is a global movement of volunteers, set up to encourage kids and young people to become creators rather then just users of computers. The one rule at CoderDojo is to ‘be cool’.

Ministry of testing - Brighton and Hove https://www.meetup.com/en-AU/ministry-of-testing-brighton/

The Ministry of Testing exists to advance the software testing industry in a fun, safe, professional and forward thinking way. Our meetups exist as a way to bring people together to talk and learn about good and authentic testing. We encourage everyone who is interested in making better software products to come along and participate.

Design

UX Camp Brighton https://www.uxcampbrighton.org/

An ‘unconference’ for anyone involved or interested in user experience design, user research, interaction design, information architecture, usability, accessibility and other associated fields.

UX Brighton http://uxbrighton.org.uk/

Annual UX conference

Mixed

Data Visualisation Brighton http://www.datavisbrighton.com/

We're a diverse group of designers, developers, artists, scientists, analysts etc. all with a shared interest in data visualisation.

Brighton Mobile https://www.meetup.com/en-AU/Brighton-Mobile/

Brighton Mobile is a regular evening meetup where people come to socialise and learn with others working in mobile. Our aim is to let everyone learn from each other's successes and challenges in every area of Mobile technology.

Brighton Digital Women http://www.brightondigitalwomen.co.uk/

Brighton Digital Women is a community of people in Sussex from all sorts of professional digital backgrounds. Everyone is welcome at our relaxed, friendly meetups.

Brighton Farm http://www.brightonfarm.com/

The Brighton Farm is a networking group for web designers, developers and people with related new media skills who live in Brighton and the surrounding areas.

ProductTank https://www.meetup.com/en-AU/ProductTank-Brighton/

ProductTank provides an opportunity for Product People in Brighton to exchange ideas and experiences about Product Design, Development and Management, Business Modelling, Metrics, User Experience and all the other things that get us excited.

Games

Press Fire To Win http://www.pressfiretowin.com/

This group is for developers, artists, game designers and players - interested in independent games to chat, and find out about upcoming game-related events around Brighton and beyond.

Brighton Indies http://brightonindies.com/

Brighton Indies is a friendly pub meet up for people who make (or are interested in making) games (and game-like things) in Brighton (and nearby).

Brighton Game Collective Drinks https://www.meetup.com/en-AU/Brighton-Game-Collective/

Brighton Game Collective is a game development co-working space and community network in Brighton & Hove. This group is used to promote social events and activities organized by the Collective.

Science

Brighton Cafe Scientifique https://www.meetup.com/en-AU/Brighton-Cafe-Scientifique/

Brighton Café Scientifique is Science for the Sociable! Informal talks of about 30-45 minutes are given by experts in the field, at a level accessible to all.

Brighton Science Festival http://www.brightonscience.com/

Annual science festival

The Brighton and Hove branch of the British Science Organisation https://www.britishscienceassociation.org/brighton-and-hove-branch

The British Science Association (BSA) is a charity, founded in 1831. Our vision is of a world where science is at the heart of culture and society. Our mission is to support, grow and diversify the community of people interested and involved in science; and to strengthen their influence over science's direction and place in society.

STEMbusters https://twitter.com/STEMbusters

Informal social meet ups for those involved with STE(A)M communication (#SciComm), outreach & public engagement activities.

Brighton Astro https://brightonastro.com/

Brighton Astro is a place for cosmic enthusiasts from all walks of life to meet up, talk about the universe and gaze at the stars. Every month we host a FREE talk with drinks and nibbles and the opportunity to go out with our telescopes afterwards – weather permitting!

Maths

Brighton MathsJam https://mathsjam.com/cities/brighton/

MathsJam is a monthly opportunity for like-minded self-confessed maths enthusiasts to get together in a pub and share stuff they like. Puzzles, games, problems, or just anything they think is cool or interesting. We don't have organised talks, planned activities or even strict timings - just turn up and join in.

Making / Building

Build Brighton http://buildbrighton.com/

We are an enthusiastic group of makers working on individual projects, from toys to wind turbines, and collaborating on bigger builds such as robots and a filament extruder for 3D printers.

MakerClub https://makerclub.org/

MakerClub is teaching kids to be master inventors. Partnering with universities and makerspaces we are setting new standards in STEM education (science, tech, engineering and maths) with a growing network of after-school and weekend clubs for kids aged 8-13. We teach cutting edge tech and real-world problem solving.

Animation

BANG http://brightonanimators.ning.com/ https://www.wiredsussex.com/projects/bang.asp

The Brighton Animators Networking Group (BANG) provides an opportunity for animators to meet both online and offline and share knowledge. Anyone with an interest in animation should become a member of the BANG online social network, which includes details of their most recent meet-ups and collaborations as well as an active animation forum.

Misc

Brighton Nerd Night https://brighton.nerdnite.com/

Every month we regale our nerdy audience with three nerdish talks from some wonderful speakers. Think of us as being like TED talks but maybe not as smug (NB. someone else described us as that. No offence to TED.)

Brighton Virtual Reality https://www.meetup.com/en-AU/Brighton-Virtual-Reality/

This group is for everyone who's interested in the current and future state of Virtual Reality. VR is now a multi-billion dollar industry, with some of the best minds on earth working on it. Let's meet up and discuss the current state of tech, where it's going, and what we can do with it.

Brighton CTO Meetup https://www.meetup.com/en-AU/Brighton-CTO-Meetup/

Brighton is the home of 1,500 tech companies. While they target a wide range of customer problems, they likely face similar technology challenges. Including: fund-raising, team structure, IT support, product direction, people and tech leadership, etc. This group is an opportunity for tech leaders (CTO, CIO, Head of Tech) to meet up informally and share their experience.

view raw brighton-and-hove-meetups.md hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Service Worker Registration | Web Fundamentals | Google Developers

Hmm …seems like I should probably wait for the load event before triggering navigator.serviceworker.register().

Killing Old Service Workers for the Greater Good – Hackages Blog

Ooh, this is a tricky scenario. If you decide to redirect all URLs (from, say, a www subdomain to no subdomain) and you have a service worker running, you’re going to have a bad time. But there’s a solution here to get the service worker to remove itself.

The server-side specifics are for NGINX but this is also doable with Apache.

Tim Harford — Article — What We Get Wrong About Technology

Toilet paper, barbed wire, shipping containers, and replicants.

The Service Worker Lifecycle

The life cycle of a Service Worker—with all its events and states—is the one bit that I’ve never paid that much attention to. My eyes just glaze over when it comes to installation, registration, and activation. But this post explains the whole process really clearly. Now it’s starting to make sense to me.

Why I Quit Ordering From Uber-for-Food Start-Ups by Robin Sloan in The Atlantic

Something to remember the next time someone describes an experience as “seamless” and means it to be positive:

This is the Amazon move: absolute obfuscation of labor and logistics behind a friendly buy button. The experience for a Sprig customer is super convenient, almost magical; the experience for a chef or courier…? We don’t know. We don’t get to know. We’re just here to press the button.

I feel bad, truly, for Amazon and Sprig and their many peers—SpoonRocket, Postmates, Munchery, and the rest. They build these complicated systems and then they have to hide them, because the way they treat humans is at best mildly depressing and at worst burn-it-down dystopian.

What would it be like if you didn’t have to hide the system?

BBC - Future - The invisible network that keeps the world running

Tim Maughan reports on the same container ship trip that Dan W. is sending his postcards from.

I like the idea of there being an Apollo-sized project all around us, if you just know where to look.

First, towering above and over the ship, are the loading cranes. Vast structures mounted on huge, four-legged frames, they resemble the naked scaffolding of unbuilt skyscrapers, and trigger nostalgic reminders of Saturn V rocket launch towers from the 1960s.

Once in port at night I saw one suddenly fire into life next to the ship in a stroboscopic explosion of lights, before it tracked slowly above my high vantage point, bathing me in the orange glow of a dozen small halogen suns.

Form letter template for acquired startups — Gist

Just copy and paste.

Dear soon-to-be-former user…

	Dear soon-to-be-former user,

	We've got some fantastic news! Well, it's great news for us anyway. You, on
	the other hand, are fucked.

	We've just been acquired by:

	[ ] Facebook
	[ ] Google
	[ ] Twitter
	[ ] Other: _________________

	As you are aware, we've always provided a free service, and have never even
	tried offering a for-pay option. This means we've never had any income and
	have been operating at a loss for our entire existence. Since any schoolchild
	can see this is unsustainable, it should have been more-or-less obvious to you
	from the get-go that we were either going to crap up the site with ads at a
	few cents per-click, or that we've always intended to be an acquisition target.
	You can do the math on that one.

	Your personal data which, until just now, was critical to our core business
	will be deleted:

	[ ] Immediately
	[ ] Within a week
	[ ] Within 30 days

	We are excited to continue our core mission of connecting people with
	solutions at our new home. Please realize that this is so vague a statement
	as to be completely meaningless. But we just made so much money that at the
	moment we genuinely believe this horseshit. In reality, you will never hear
	about us or anything we create ever again. We are probably going to end up,
	like, implementing a new scrollbar for Google Reader or something.

	Thanks so much for making our business so valuable and enticing to a much
	larger company with more money than sense.

	Now grab your data while you still can and get out of here,

	Shiny happy Shit.ly management ninjas
	Connecting people with solutions
	"Shit.ly loves you!"

view raw gistfile1.txt hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Registration | Frontend 2011

A nice Huffduffer-style mad libs form gives this registration form a friendly quality.

LegiStyles™

Typographically thoughtful themes for NetNewsWIre. Even if you don't use the RSS reader, check out the gorgeous design of this site.