If we were to follow Jiro’s and his apprentices’ journeys and imagine web development the same way then would we ask of our junior developers to spend the first year of their career only on HTML. No CSS. No JavaScript. No frameworks. Only HTML. Only once HTML has been mastered do we move onto CSS. And only once that has been mastered do we move onto JavaScript.
Here’s the main problem I’ve found with generative AI, and with “vibe coding” in general: it completely sucks out the joy of software development for me.
I hate the way they’ve taken over the software industry, I hate how they make me feel while I’m using them, and I hate the human-intelligence-insulting postulation that a glorified Excel spreadsheet can do what I can but better.
Monday session
This is a really thoughtful piece by Rich, who’s got conflicted feelings about large language models in the design process. I suspect a lot of people can relate to this.
What I do know is that I find LLMs useful on occasion, but every time I use one I die a little inside.
I’ve had my head down for the past six months putting the line-up for UX London together. Following the classic design cliché, the process was first divergent, then convergent.
I spent months casting the net wide, gathering as many possible candidates as I could, as well as accepting talk proposals (of which there were lots). It was fun—this is when the possibility space is wide open.
Then it was crunch time and I had to start zeroing in on the final line-up. It wasn’t easy. There were so many times I agonised over who’d be the right person to deliver the right talk.
But as the line-up came together, I started getting very excited. And now when I step back and look at the line-up, I’m positively vibrating with excitement—roll on June!
I think it was really useful to have a mix of speakers that I reached out to, as well as talk proposals. If I was only relying on my own knowledge and networks, I’m sure I’d miss a lot. But equally, if I was only relying on talk proposals, it would be like searching for my keys under the streetlight.
Putting the line-up on the website wasn’t quite the end of the work. We got over 100 proposals for UX London this year. I made sure to send an email back to each and every one of them once the line-up was complete. And if anyone asked for more details as to why their proposal didn’t make it through, I was happy to provide that feedback.
After they went to the trouble of submitting a proposal, it was the least I could do.
Oh, and don’t forget: early-bird tickets for UX London are only available until Friday. Now’s the time to get yours!
I left Twitter in 2022. With every day that has passed since then, that decision has proven to be correct.
(I’m honestly shocked that some people I know still have active Twitter accounts. At this point there is no justification for giving your support to a place that’s literally run by a nazi.)
I also used to have some Twitter bots. There were Twitter accounts for my blog and for my links. A simple If-This-Then-That recipe would poll my RSS feeds and then post an update whenever there was a new item.
I had something something similar going for The Session. Its Twitter bot has been replaced with automated accounts on Mastodon and Bluesky (I couldn’t use IFTTT directly to post to Bluesky from RSS, but I was able to set up Buffer to do the job).
I figured The Session’s Twitter account would probably just stop working at some point, but it seems like it’s still going.
Hah! I spoke too soon. I just decided to check that URL and nothing is loading. Now, that may just be a temporary glitch because Alan Musk has decided to switch off a server or something. Or it might be that the account has been cancelled because of how I modified its output.
I’ve altered the IFTTT recipe so that whenever there’s a new item in an RSS feed, the update is posted to Twitter along with a message like “Please use Bluesky or Mastodon instead of Twitter” or “Please stop using Twitter/X”, or “Get off Twitter—please. It’s a cesspit” or “If you’re still on Twitter, you’re supporting a fascist.”
That’s a start but I need to think about how I can get the bot to do as much damage as possible before it’s destroyed.
This was a day of big conversations, but also one of connection, curiosity, and optimism.
Seeing it all laid out like this really drives home just how much was packed into Research By The Sea.
Throughout the day, speakers shared personal reflections, bold ideas, and practical insights, touching on themes of community, resilience, ethics, and the evolving role of technology.
Some talks brought hard truths about the impact of AI, the complexity of organisational change, and the ethical dilemmas researchers face. Others offered hope and direction, reminding us of the power of community, the importance of accessibility, and the need to listen to nature, to each other, and to the wider world.
Check it out—here’s the line-up for UX London 2025!
This is going to be so good! Grab a ticket if you haven’t got one yet.
UX London takes place over three days, from June 10th to 12th at a fantastic venue in the heart of the city. To get the full experience, you should come for all three days. But you can also get a ticket for individual days. Each day has a focus, and when you put them all together, the whole event mirrors the design process:
Each day features a morning of talks, followed by an afternoon of workshops. The talks are on a single track; four consecutive half-hour presentations to get you inspired. Then after lunch, you choose from one of four workshops. All the workshops are two and half hours long and very hands-on. No laptop required.
On discovery day you’ll have talks in the morning about research, content design, strategy and evaluating technology, followed by workshops on discovery and definition and behavioural design.
On design day there’ll be talks on interface design, a healthcare case study, inclusive design, and typography, followed by workshops in the afternoon on data visualisation and ethics.
Finally on delivery day you’ll get talks on conversion design, cross-team collaboration, convincing stakeholders, and improving design critiques, followed by workshops on facilitating workshops and getting better at public speaking.
Every workshop is repeated on another day so you’ll definitely get the chance to attend the one you want.
Oh, and at the end of every day there’ll be a closing keynote. Those are yet to be revealed, but I can guarantee they’re going to be top-notch!
Right now you can get early-bird tickets for all three days, or individual days. That changes from March 15th, when the regular pricing kicks in—a three-day ticket will cost £200 more. So I’d advise you to get your ticket now.
If you need to convince your boss, show them this list of reasons to attend.
See you there!
Research By The Sea was last Thursday. I’m still digesting it all.
In short, it was excellent. The venue, how smoothly every thing was organised, the talks …oh boy, the talks!
Benjamin did a truly superb job curating this line-up. Everyone really brought their A-game.
As predicted, this wasn’t a day of talks just for researchers. It was far more like a dConstruct. This was big, big picture stuff. Themes of hope, community, nature, technology, inclusion and resilience.
I overheard more than one person in the breaks saying “this was not what I was expecting!” They were saying it in a very positive way, though I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a silent minority in the audience who were miffed that they weren’t getting a day of practical research techniques devoid of politics.
As host, I had the easiest job of the day. All I had to do was say a few words of introduction for each speaker, then sit back down and enjoy every minute of every talk.
The one time when I had to really work was the panel discussion at the end of the day. I really enjoy moderating panels. I’ve seen enough bad panels to know what does and doesn’t work. But this one was tough. The panelists were all great, but because the themes were soooo big, I was worried about it all getting a bit too high-falutin’. People seemed to enjoy it though.
All in all, it was a superb day. If you came along, thank you!
Gotta be honest, #ResearchByTheSea is one of the best conferences I’ve been to in yeeeeeears. So many good, useful, inspiring, thoughtful, provocative talks. Much more about ethics and power and possibility than I’d expected.
Loved it. Thank you, @clearleft.com!
Research by the Sea was one of the best conferences I’ve been to in yeeeeeears. So many good, useful, inspiring, thoughtful, provocative talks. Much more about ethics and power and possibility than I’d expected. None of the ‘utopian bullshit’ you usually get at a product or digital conference, to quote one of the speakers!
From 2005 to 2015 Clearleft ran the dConstruct event here in Brighton (with one final anniversary event in 2022).
I had the great pleasure of curating dConstruct for a while. I’m really proud of the line-ups I put together.
It wasn’t your typical tech event, to put it mildy. You definitely weren’t going to learn practical techniques to bring back into work on Monday morning. If anything, it was the kind of event that might convince you to quit your job on Monday morning.
The talks were design-informed, but with oodles of philosophy, culture and politics.
As you can imagine, that’s not an easy sell. Hence why we stopped running the event. It’s pretty hard to convince your boss to send you to a conference like that.
Sometimes I really miss it though. With everything going on in the tech world right now (and the world in general), it sure would be nice to get together in a room full of like-minded people to discuss the current situation.
Well, here’s the funny thing. There’s a different Clearleft event happening next week. Research By The Sea. On the face of it, this doesn’t sound much like dConstruct. But damn if Benjamin hasn’t curated a line-up of talks that sound very dConstructy!
Those all sound like they’d fit perfectly in the dConstruct archive.
Research By The Sea is most definitely not just for UX researchers—this sounds to me like the event to attend if, like me, you’re alarmed by everything happening right now.
Next Thursday, February 27th, this is the place to be if you’ve been missing dConstruct. See you there!
Working on this project is great but ten minutes into it and I already miss the resilience of the web. I miss how you have to really fuck things up to make a browser yell at you or implode.
In which Rich nails Clearleft’s superpower:
“Clearleft is a relatively small team, but we can achieve big results because we are nimble and extremely experienced. As strategic design partners, we have a privileged position where we can work around a large company’s politics,” Rutter said. “We need to understand those politics — and help the client staff navigate them — but we don’t need to be bound by them. We bring a thoroughly user-centered approach to our design partnership, and that can be something novel to companies. By showing them what good design looks like (not so much the interface, as the actual process of getting to really well-designed products and services), we can be disruptive within the organization and leave them in a much better place.”
The power of prototyping:
Most of my work is a set of disposables rather than deliverables, and I celebrate this.
I like the three questions that Chris asks himself:
- What’s the quickest, cheapest thing I can create to help make the next design decision?
- What can I create to best demonstrate the essence of the concept?
- How can I most effectively share the thinking behind the design with decision-makers?
Friday morning kitchen session
I’m going to be hosting Research By The Sea on Thursday, February 27th right here in Brighton. I’m getting very excited and nervous about it.
The nervousness is understandable. I want to do a good job. Hosting a conference is like officiating a wedding. You want to put people at ease and ensure everything goes smoothly. But you don’t want to be the centre of attention. People aren’t there to see you. This is not your day.
As the schedule has firmed up, my excitement has increased.
See, I’m not a researcher. It would be perfectly understandable to expect this event to be about the ins and outs of various research techniques. But it’s become clear that that isn’t what Benjamin has planned.
Just as any good researcher or designer goes below the surface to explore the root issues, Research By The Sea is going to go deep.
I mean, just take a look at what Steph will be covering:
Steph discusses approaches in speculative fiction, particularly in the Solarpunk genre, that can help ground our thinking, and provide us—as researchers and designers—tenets to consider our work, and, as humans, to strive towards a better future.
Sign me up!
Michael’s talk covers something that’s been on my mind a lot lately:
Michael will challenge the prevailing belief that as many people as possible must participate in our digital economies.
You just know that a talk called In defence of refusal isn’t going to be your typical conference fare.
Then there are talks about accessibility and intersectionality, indigenous knowledge, designing communities, and navigating organisational complexity. And I positively squeeled with excitement when I read Cennydd’s talk description:
The world is crying out for new visions of the future: worlds in which technology is compassionate, not just profitable; where AI is responsible, not just powerful.
See? It’s very much not just for researchers. This is going to be a fascinating day for anyone who values curiosity.
If that’s you, you should grab a ticket. To sweeten the deal, use the discount code JOINJEREMY to get a chunky 20% of the price — £276 for a conference ticket instead of £345.
Be sure to nab your ticket before February 15th when the price ratchets up a notch.
And if you are a researcher, well, you really shouldn’t miss this. It’s kind of like when I’ve run Responsive Day Out and Patterns Day; sure, the talks are great, but half the value comes from being in the same space as other people who share your challenges and experiences. I know that makes it sound like a kind of group therapy, but that’s because …well, it kind of is.
Detective stories and tales of bughunting in software and hardware.
Sometimes bugs have symptoms beyond belief. This is a collection of such stories from around the web.
The new Salter Cane album is available on Spotify now:
I have a feeling that 2025 is going to be a year of reflection for me. It’s such a nice round number, 25. One quarter of a century.
That’s also how long myself and Jessica have been married. Our wedding anniversary was last week.
Top tip: if you get married in year ending with 00, you’ll always know how long ago it was. Just lop off the first 2000 years and there’s the number.
As well as being the year we got married (at a small ceremony in an army chapel in Arizona), 2000 was also the year we moved from Freiburg to Brighton. I never thought we’d still be here 25 years later.
2005 was twenty years ago. A lot of important events happened that year. I went to South by Southwest for the first time and met people who became lifelong friends (including some dear friends no longer with us).
I gave my first conference talk. We had the first ever web conference in the UK. And myself, Rich, and Andy founded Clearleft. You can expect plenty of reminiscence and reflection on the Clearleft blog over the course of this year.
2010 was fifteen years ago. That’s when Jessica and I moved into our current home. For the first time, we were paying off a mortgage instead of paying a landlord. But I can’t bring myself to consider us “homeowners” at that time. For me, we didn’t really become homeowners until we paid that mortgage off ten years later.
2015 was ten years ago. It was relatively uneventful in the best possible way.
2020 was five years ago. It was also yesterday. The Situation was surreal, scary and weird. But the people I love came through it intact, for which I’m very grateful.
Apart from all these anniversaries, I’m not anticipating any big milestones in 2025. I hope it will be an unremarkable year.
- Humans can not accurately describe what they want out of a software system until it exists.
- Humans can not accurately predict how long any software effort will take beyond four weeks. And after 2 weeks it is already dicey.