HTML lists are boring. They don’t do much, so we don’t really think about them despite how widely used they are. And we’re still able to do the same things we’ve always done to customize them, like removing markers, reversing order, and making custom counters.
There are, however, a few “newer” things — including dangers — to know when using lists. The dangers are mostly minor, but way more common than you might think. We’ll get to those, plus some new stuff we can do with lists, and even new ways to approach old solutions.
To clarify, these are the HTML elements we’re talking about:
Ordered lists <ol>
Unordered lists <ul>
Description lists <dl>
Interactive lists <menu>
Ordered lists, unordered lists, and interactive lists contain list items (<li>) which are displayed according to what kind of list we’re dealing with. An ordered list (<ol>) displays numbers next to list items. Unordered lists (<ul>) and menu elements (<menu>) displays bullet points next to list items. We call these “list markers” and they can even be styled using the ::marker pseudo-element. Description lists use description terms (<dt>) and description details (<dd>) instead of <li> and don’t have list markers. They‘re supposed to be used to display metadata and glossaries, but I can’t say I’ve ever seen them in the wild.
Let’s start off with the easy stuff — how to correctly (at least in my opinion) reset list styles. After that, we’ll take a look at a couple of accessibility issues before shining a light on the elusive <menu> element, which you may be surprised to learn… is actually a type of list, too!
Resetting list styles
Browsers automatically apply their own User Agent styles to help with the visual structure of lists right out of the box. That can be great! But if we want to start with a blank slate free of styling opinions, then we have to reset those styles first.
For example, we can remove the markers next to list items pretty easily. Nothing new here:
/* Zap all list markers! */ ol, ul, menu { list-style: none; }
But modern CSS has new ways to help us target specific list instances. Let’s say we want to clear markers from all lists, except if those lists appear in long-form content, like an article. If we combine the powers of newer CSS pseudo-class functions :where() and :not(), we can isolate those instances and allow the markers in those cases:
/* Where there are lists that are not articles where there are lists... */ :where(ol, ul, menu):not(article :where(ol, ul, menu)) { list-style: none; }
Why use :where() instead of :is()? The specificity of :where() is always zero, whereas :is() takes the specificity of the most specific element in its list of selectors. So, using :where() is a less forceful way of overriding things and can be easily overridden itself.
UA styles also apply padding to space a list item’s content from its marker. Again, that’s a pretty nice affordance right out of the box in some cases, but if we’re already removing the list markers like we did above, then we may as well wipe out that padding too. This is another case for :where():
OK, that’s going to prevent marker-less list items from appearing to float in space. But we sort of tossed out the baby with the bathwater and removed the padding in all instances, including the ones we previously isolated in an <article>. So, now those lists with markers sorta hang off the edge of the content box.
Notice that UA styles apply an extra 40px to the <menu> element.
So what we want to do is prevent the list markers from “hanging” outside the container. We can fix that with the list-style-positionproperty:
Or not… maybe it comes down to stylistic preference?
Newer accessibility concerns with lists
Unfortunately, there are a couple of accessibility concerns when it comes to lists — even in these more modern times. One concern is a result of applying list-style: none; as we did when resetting UA styles.
In a nutshell, Safari does not read ordered and unordered lists styled with list-style: none as actual lists, like when navigating content with a screen reader. In other words, removing the markers also removes the list’s semantic meaning. The fix for this fix it to apply an ARIA list role on the list and a listitem role to the list items so screen readers will pick them up:
Oddly, Safari considers this to be a feature rather than a bug. Basically, users would report that screen readers were announcing too many lists (because developers tend to overuse them), so now, only those with role="list" are announced by screen readers, which actually isn’t that odd after all. Scott O’Hara has a detailed rundown of how it all went down.
A second accessibility concern isn’t one of our own making (hooray!). So, you know how you’re supposed to add an aria-label to <section> elements without headings? Well, it sometimes makes sense to do the same with a list that doesn’t contain a heading element that helps describe the list.
<!-- This list is somewhat described by the heading --> <section> <h2>Grocery list</h2> <ol role="list"> <!-- ... --> </ol> </section> <!-- This list is described by the aria-label --> <ol role="list" aria-label="Grocery list"> <!-- ... --> </ol>
You absolutely don’t have to use either method. Using a heading or an ARIA label is just added context, not a requirement — be sure to test your websites with screen readers and do what offers the best user experience for the situation.
OK, so, you’re likely wondering about all of the <menu> elements that I’ve been slipping into the code examples. It’s actually super simple; menus are unordered lists except that they’re meant for interactive items. They’re even exposed to the accessibility tree as unordered lists.
In the early days of the semantic web, I mistakenly believed that menus were like <nav>s before believing that they were for context menus (or “toolbars” as the spec says) because that’s what early versions of the HTML spec said. (MDN has an interesting write-up on all of the deprecated stuff related to <menu> if you’re at all interested.)
Today, however, this is the semantic way to use menus:
Personally, I think there are some good use-cases for <menu>. That last example shows a list of social sharing buttons wrapped up in a labeled <menu> element, the notable aspect being that the “Share article” label contributes a significant amount of context that helps describe what the buttons do.
Are menus absolutely necessary? No. Are they HTML landmarks? Definitely not. But they’re there if you enjoy fewer <div>s and you feel like the component could use an aria-label for additional context.
Anything else?
Yes, there’s also the aforementioned <dl> (description list) element, however, MDN doesn’t seem to consider them lists in the same way — it’s a list of groups containing terms — and I can’t say that I’ve really seen them in use. According to MDN, they’re supposed to be used for metadata, glossaries, and other types of key-value pairs. I would just avoid them on the grounds that all screen readers announce them differently.
But let’s not end things on a negative note. Here’s a list of super cool things you can do with lists:
The video of Chris Coyier’s talk at CascadiaJS 2022 is now available. It’s his first in-person talk in more than two years, so it’s great to see our good friend back on stage slinging gems on what makes the web good these days.
Container Queries! WAAPI! Scroll Timelines! offset-path! FLIP! Variable fonts! Fluid type! We really are all-powerful front-end developers these days.
Chris really packs a bunch into a 25-minute slot. It feels good to pause for that brief amount of time to reflect on the great new things for building websites and celebrate the fact that we get to use them.
And there’s nothing better than watching Chris greet the enture room as a bunch of “web nerds”. 🤓
Like it or not, meetings are essential to a good working environment and communication. Therefore, it’s crucial that we work on making them as productive as possible. Today we’ll explore myriad ways to keep meetings coordinated, well documented, and talk about how to recognize and steer away from anti-patterns.
I’m timid to write this because I have not always hosted good meetings. I have, however, hosted thousands of them, so I’ve learned both from some mistakes and successes. In all likelihood, if you do any kind of management or lead work for a while, you’ll also see your own spectrum of meetings: meetings with different types of agendas and purposes, meetings with varying levels of awkwardness, meetings that didn’t have a formal outcome. We’ll dive into all of these in this article, as well as some tips for each.
The truth is, a meeting by its nature can almost never be perfect because it is by definition a group of people. That group of people will consist of different people: with different tastes, different opinions, different priorities, and different values. There’s a high chance that not everyone will agree on what a great meeting is. So half of the journey is aligning on that.
The Good, The Bad
One thing’s for sure: we can agree on what a bad meeting is. So let’s start by using that as a ballast:
There’s no clear purpose or direction
It feels chaotic
The wrong people are there
People are generally disrespectful of one another
Everyone feels it’s a waste of time
From those assertions, we can then derive what a good meeting is:
The purpose of the meeting is clear
There’s an agenda (we’ll dive in to the complexity of this in a moment)
There are the right people in the room. Not too many where communication is overly complicated, not too few where the people you need to move forward aren’t there.
There’s some order. People aren’t dropping in and out, talking over each other, or being generally inconsiderate
There’s a clear decision, outcome, and next steps at the end
Purpose of the Meeting and Direction
The first point and the last are connected: to have a good meeting, there is a core. You’ve all come for a unique purpose, and the end of the meeting should encapsulate what you’ve learned about that purpose and what the next steps are. Thus, the beginning and end of the meeting might sound a little similar:
We’re all here today to discuss how we’re going to support the next version of framework X. I have some new data to show you that frames the direction, Hassan and Jenna are here to talk about some of the details of the implementation, and Angela, we’d love to coordinate with you on a rollout process because it affects your team.
And at the end:
OK, so we decided we’re going in Y direction. Angela, your team seems comfortable doing Z, is that correct? And the rollout timeline we’ve agreed on is 5 weeks. The next steps are to explore the impacts of A, B, and C and reconvene in a week on our findings and process.
This is just an example—it’s not important to model this precisely. But you should be aligning at the beginning and end of the meeting to make sure that nothing major is missing and everyone is on the same page. If you haven’t come to a decision by the end of the meeting, then your next steps may be either to figure out who will make the decision and inform everyone or roll over to a new meeting.
Ideally these sentences are encapsulating information everyone needs:
The shared purpose
What you’re doing about getting to that outcome
Who is owning what
How
When, what are the timelines
If there are people there who do not need to know this information, they probably shouldn’t have been at the meeting in the first place.
The Agenda
Beyond deciding that a meeting should have an agenda, there are so many ways and means an agenda can be used. Strangely enough, an agenda can also be a way to not have a good meeting, so let’s explore that, too.
An agenda should ideally always state the purpose of the meeting. I personally love to then include some bullets as talking points, as well as space to take notes right in the document during the meeting.
Sometimes people use an agenda to write thoughts down before the meeting, and I would strongly suggest you steer clear of this—there’s nothing wrong with a person keeping notes for themselves for the meeting but if you come to a meeting where an agenda is locked top to bottom with material, it can sometimes shut down the collaborative aspect of the meeting—which means it shouldn’t be a meeting at all, it should just be a shared doc, to be consumed async. Part of the purpose of the meeting is the discussion itself. Again, louder:
Part of the purpose of the meeting is the discussion itself.
Not all meetings are the same
There are also different kinds of meetings. Let’s go over what type of agenda you might use for each:
Brainstorming session: perhaps you don’t want a full agenda, just the purpose and a notes section, or even a Miro board or other whiteboarding tool to use for capturing people’s thoughts, with small areas stubbed out.
Weekly discussion or daily standup: I typically have folks add whatever they like to ours, prefacing their contribution with their name and a small category, for instance, RD for rapid decision, D for discussion, and P for process. Here’s an example:
- [Sarah, RD] should we block off 4 hours to triage our iceboxed issues?
Our team uses a kanban board during the standup and people take turns talking about what they’re doing for that time period. It’s nice how it helps solidify the tasks and priorities for the week, and allows for some course correction if there’s accidental misalignment before the work is done.
We also talk about what was done or shipped in the previous week so we can celebrate a little. Especially on tasks we know took the person a long time or took a lot of effort.
We found through trial and error that twice a week check-ins suited us: once on Monday to kick the week off, and again on Wednesday to keep us aligned and the momentum going.
Cross-Functional meetings: This is one where a more formal agenda with some preparation can be really helpful, so that all parties have enough information about the purpose and what’s being discussed. If you have a lot of information, though, I would suggest creating a one-sheeter and sharing that ahead of time instead of adding everything to an agenda. Sometimes if I know everyone is too busy to read everything async, I will give the first 5 minutes to the group to read through the one-sheeter on the call so we’re all on the same page. People usually appreciate this. YMMV.
All this said, agendas are very useful, but I’ve seen strange culture arise from making strict rules around them. The point of the agenda and meeting is to collaborate on something. That point is nullified if folks are putting process ahead of that impetus.
The best cultures I’ve worked at use both meetings and agendas as tools for working together effectively- tools that everyone equally feels responsible for making useful.
All Kinds of Awkward
OK, you led a meeting! You gave people purpose, you set direction and timelines. But why was it so awkward?!
Not all forms of awkward are bad, really. There are different kinds of awkward, and some are quite natural, some are more harmful. Let’s analyze this for a moment, starting from most innocuous to something more insidious.
You all didn’t know each other well
The team I got to work with at Netlify was some of the silliest, most collaborative, and trustworthy groups I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with. We actively cultivated this culture and it was great fun. Every meeting started with goofing off and chatter. Then, when we got to business.
The meeting would flow effortlessly because we were all comfortable together. One time a friend in the People department asked “what do you do to break the ice with your team”, and I jokingly responded “ice? Our team? No… we don’t need that… maybe we should be frozen?”
Not all conversations are going to be like this. We knew each other fairly well and actively worked to have vulnerability together. If your meetings with other groups you don’t know well have awkward moments, that’s actually pretty natural, and nothing to be too concerned with. You can try to make conversation and that can help, but trying to force it too much can also feel a bit stilted, so just ease up on the guilt for this one. There’s nothing wrong with you, I promise.
There were too many people
During the pandemic, my husband and I would sometimes try to replace in-person dinner parties with zoom versions of the same. What we learned was they didn’t quite work at scale. When you have an in-person party with 12 or more people, everyone doesn’t really stay in one huddle together, they break off to smaller conversations. When we started hosting the zoom parties with smaller groups, the calls became more fluid, relaxed and comfortable.
There’s a certain scale at which conversation begins to feel performative because there are so many eyes on a person when they’re speaking. Meetings are very much the same. Try not to invite too many people to a meeting. If you are worried folks might not feel included unless you invite them, you can either mark them as optional or let them know you’ll be sure to tell them the outcome.
If you’re inviting too many people because there’s a company culture that everyone should be involved in every decision, that might be a sign of a wider issue that needs some solving. Companies at a certain scale start to have issues functioning if there is no clear understanding of ownership. If you’re inviting everyone out of fear of hurt feelings often, it’s likely not a problem with your meetings, and more a sign that you need some clarity. See the DRI section at the end of this chapter for more information on how to mitigate this.
There’s something people aren’t saying
This kind of awkward is probably the most harmful. If the meeting is awkward because people don’t feel comfortable telling the truth, or there’s an elephant in the room, or there’s a smell that needs to be dealt with. Elephant smells? Ok, moving on.
We should watch out for this and try to do something about it. Personally, I’m a “walk towards the fire to put it out” kind of person, and will actually just acknowledge that it’s awkward because it doesn’t feel like we’re being transparent with one another. I’ll state what I know from my perspective and then ask if other folks are feeling the same.
If you do this, you’ll usually have to wait a beat or two. People will likely be a bit shocked that you came right out and said it. It will take them a couple of seconds to adjust and consider what will happen if they tell the truth, too. It’s crucial that you not speak to fill the silence in these moments. It will feel very uncomfortable, but I promise, you have to let the silence hang for a bit before someone speaks up. Typically from there, people will all start speaking, and you can actually dig into the problems.
Conflicts
There’s an entire chapter devoted to conflicts because the topic is big and nuanced enough to warrant its own time and space, but let’s apply some of the principles here, because there is an intersection of good meetings and dealing with conflicts directly.
The most important piece here is that conflicts are not something to be avoided. It’s not bad that people feel passionate about their work, it’s great. Not all conflicts are negative- the point of the meeting may be to bring to light where folks aren’t aligned. There probably is some base premise or problem they are all trying to solve, but they see the solution differently. It can help to find the alignment there so the ideas can be fleshed out without being attached to a particular person’s identity.
The identity thing can be a pitfall, because if you have two people discussing their idea instead of an idea, it can feel to them like someone is rejecting them rather than a concept.
We want to try to guide towards an approach where it doesn’t feel like anyone is attacking one another, and also manage actively against people being disrespectful to one another. It’s the job of a manager to disambiguate healthy conflict from attack so that respectful discourse is encouraged. If folks are putting out ad hominem attacks, it’s on you to reel that in and move the conversation towards the work instead. Otherwise, it really is hard for the conversation to stay productive.
Typically I’d say it’s good to hear people out, and then reign things back in by discussing what you think you’re hearing and tying it back to a shared purpose. Then we find where we have common ground. Here’s an example:
“What I’m hearing is that Rashida feels that team X is migrating a system that affects her team while they are trying to release a big feature. Is that correct? And that Jerome feels that it’s crucial that team X be able to migrate the system soon for stability purposes. Is that correct?
“OK, well, it sounds like we have a shared goal of making sure the company can ship features with some stability. Perhaps we can talk through what timelines are immovable and which are not so that we can stay coordinated?
“I’m sure we all want to be able to ship said feature without any hiccups and also get the new system up and going”
Here, we stated what we thought we were hearing, which allows for the person to either feel heard or correct us if we’re mistaken and there’s a miscommunication. (Sometimes there is!)
Then we stated the shared goal from both parties, as well as risks and constraints that may play a part in some of the conflicts that need to be ironed out.
You’ll note in the last sentence, we try to tie a knot for a vision of stability that addresses both of their understandable needs.
A couple of things to note: I’m giving an example here and you absolutely don’t have to do it like me. The most important thing is that folks feel heard and that you all agree on what the conflict is. And that you remain open to that discussion, while finding the base premise of why you’re even talking about it.
It’s also way easier said than done. If you have a conversation that goes off the rails, I’d suggest spending a bit of time after you’re off the call to write down what you think happened.
I tend to give myself a section to just talk through the facts of what happened, and then another to talk through my feelings of what went poorly and what could have been better. It helps to check in with the facts separately because our human brains can sometimes try to protect us and see a particular version of an event. Hard to do, but checking in with just the facts helps ground that a bit.
There can be times where a strong conflict happens during a meeting and you’re at an impasse, and you need to give folks time to regroup. I’d suggest calling another meeting in a week as a follow up, and try to hear people out individually in the meantime. Sometimes people need a little distance from a matter, or they’re having a hard day, and that’s totally ok.
The DRI
The DRI stands for “Directly Responsible Individual” and is one of the most important pieces that we haven’t covered yet. A good meeting must have a DRI, and it is not necessarily the person who called the meeting. It might not be you. But you must designate who owns the project and ultimately makes decisions when there’s one to be made.
Why do you need a DRI? Well, as much as you do want to hear input from everyone, eventually you have to make a decision, and there are plenty of things in software development that don’t necessarily have one true answer.
Note that the phrasing is not PWMD (Person Who Makes Decisions) though that acronym looks pretty hardcore. Instead, we use Directly Responsible Individual because that’s also core to deciding who this person is. They are the person who is going to own the outcome.
That’s part of why not everyone can get equal say- if it’s your project and you are on the line for the outcome of whatever decisions are made, you can see how you would also need to own decision making. And likewise, if people who have no skin in the game decide things, they might not understand all the moving parts or invest as much in the gravity of the matter.
The appointment of the DRI not only unlocks the groups to make final decisions and move forward, but also places the responsibility on the party that will carry the weight.
There are several systems of ownership you can explore, such as DACI, which separates out Driver, Approver, Contributors, and Informed so that everyone knows their roles, and several others such as RACI and RAPID. Use whichever system makes the most sense for your organization.
I find it best to identify this person early on in a project and make sure it is restated at the start of a meeting (it can be included on the agenda as well), as it helps greatly if you find yourself at a crossroads. This person can unblock you and help the group move forward.
Moving Forward
It may at times feel like meetings are a drag on a software engineering process, but it doesn’t always have to feel this way. There’s something special about collaborating with a group of people who are respectful and working towards a common purpose. Good meetings can provide clarity and save people hours and days of work when they’re headed in the wrong direction. Having clear ownership, documentation, and only the right people in the room can keep many teams in lockstep, even when problems are complex.
Buy the Book
This is just a sample of the kind of content from my latest book coming out soon…
Surely Webflow is thinking: if people invest in learning Webflow, they’ll be able to build what they need for themselves and their clients in Weblow, and they’ll stick around and be a good customer.
Surely Netlify is thinking: if people really grok Jamstack, they’ll build their existing and future sites using it. They’ll get comfortable using Netlify’s features to solve their problems, and they’ll stick around and be a good customer.
Surely Salesforce is thinking: if we train people to learn Salesforce and build Salesforce-specific software, not only will they be a good customer, but they’ll bring more customers to us and help big companies stay good customers.
This is not created by Figma themselves, but by Pablo Stanley, who must be thinking: I can teach people to use Figma, and along the way show them how cool and powerful Blush is, which will gain Blush good customers.
Surely Apollo is thinking: if y’all know GraphQL, and learned it in the context of Apollo, you probably continue using Apollo and bring it to the teams you’re on, which might make for great customers.
This one is an outlier because these are paid courses, but my guess is that Automattic is thinking: there is already a ton of WordPress learning material out there, why not leverage our brand and deep expertise to make content people are willing to pay for.
Surely Atlassian is thinking: if we are the place where people literally learned Git, we can sprinkle in our tooling into those lessons, and you’ll use those tools for your Git workflow, which will follow you through your entire developer career. Not to mention this is good SEO juice.
Helping your customers learn your platform is certainly not a new concept. The word “webinar” exists after all. It’s a funny word, but effective. For example, AWS Marketplace sponsors CodePen emails sometimes with the idea of getting people to attend webinars about certain technologies. Wanna learn about Apache Kafka? You can do that for free coming up Thursday, February 25th. Surely AWS is thinking if people learn how this technology works, they’ll use AWS and AWS Marketplace partners to spin it up when they get to using it.
What feels a new here is the idea of packaging up learning material on a microsite with a fancy design and making it feel in-line with modern learning platforms. Like you are going to some expensive code school, except you’re getting it for free.
I’m a fan of all this. It’s good marketing for companies. It’s a good learning opportunity for everyone else. It’s also very biased. Learning materials you get directly from companies is going to tell you all about how great the technology of that company is. You should know that going in, if it’s isn’t obvious.
I’m also a fan—perhaps an even bigger fan—of paying for high-quality learning material. Our learning partner, Frontend Masters, has no particular bias to technology because you’re their customer. If they help you, they succeed and you succeed as well.
Here’s a little hodgepodge of videos I’ve recently bookmarked (and watched). I couldn’t decide if each one of them should be a separate blog post or if I should do this combined list post thing. If I had a lot more to say about each video I would have split them off, but I went with the combined post and fewer words here. Let me know in the comments if you have a preference on that kind of thing.
Here’s Tom Scott explaining why the web is such a mess
Cookies. It all cookies fault. Kinda. Also humans.
This is the same Tom that did that super neat video that updated it’s own title with the view count.
I don’t know this person’s name but I appreciated how it gets the details right in this recreation of the Discord sidebar
Except the fact that the :hover was on the <li> itself rather than a link that went somewhere sensible, but hey, I guess it’s slightly better than the actual Discord markup where it’s <div class="listItem_">.
Heydon gets all weird about progressive enhancment
I can’t embed it here because, even though it looks like Heydon switched over to Vimeo rather than just straight up <video> tags, the privacy settings have it locked to briefs.video only.
I liked the point about “the basic layout is not a broken layout,” except, doesn’t it seem like in that exact case it wouldn’t matter if you wrapped the grid-template-rows in a @supports or not? I love that @supports is a thing, and even more so now that we’ve passed the awkward years where @supports itself didn’t have full browser support, but I don’t find myself reaching for it that much, as it’s only really useful if you need to do something different than “just let it not work,” which I don’t find terribly common.
Houssein Djirdeh and Jason Miller get into “modern JavaScript”
We’ve gotta be so careful about compiled code. There is an example where one line of JavaScript gets compiled into 7000 bytes, which is bigger and far slower than intended. Taking care of older browsers when you have a significant number of users using that old browser is a really great thing, but you might be surprised at the browser support of “modern JavaScript” and find you are compiling more than you need to.
The kicker is that you only really control what you write, but probably most of what you ship is third-party. That means npm, which is absolutely loaded with very non-modern JavaScript. The sweet spot, they say, is calling ES 2017 the compile target in general. If you need even older support, use the ol’ differential serving trick.
They go back and forth trying to figure out how to make this little spiky virus-looking thing. I totally relate to their approaches! Neither of them are like amazingly clever with either the HTML or CSS — they just try to get it done. That’s why I could never get into CSSBattle myself. I appreciate people’s trickery (duh), but my actual CSS writing style is almost like verbose-on-purpose.
What did I learn about building websites in 2020? A lot. But what I learned is not nearly as important as how I learned it. So instead, I want to share a couple of strategies I used to unblock learning in less-than-ideal times.
I spent almost a decade teaching design and, let me tell you, the conditions for curiosity were all wrong this year. You are not alone if you’ve found yourself battling brain fog, deep existential crisis, and long spans of nothingness instead of basking in a creative renaissance. I spent most of this year in a tiny apartment under a terrifying lockdown in epicenter-of-the-pandemic New York with my husband, two cats, and a very energetic toddler. I’ll save the details for a therapist, but let’s just say this year did not go as planned.
But then again, whose year did? The entire world plunged into crisis. I only feel deep gratitude for having weathered this storm and for having cultivated the skills I needed for my little family to thrive despite the chaos.
I spent years speaking at conferences about mental models and growing creativity. This year, I’ve had to focus on the other side of that coin: helping people recover their creativity when it feels out of reach. The first thing I usually recommend to anyone feeling creatively blocked is that they start actively wasting their time.
Waste your time
I had ambitious plans for 2020, having plotted out a rigorous study plan for myself. That plan is now in the garbage next to my travel plans and willingness to wear anything but yoga pants.
What I am capable of after a good night’s sleep, coffee in hand, is one thing. What I can manage after a sleepless night followed by a full day of Zoom meetings while simultaneously trying to wrangle a toddler is another thing entirely.
The loss of childcare meant that the only time to indulge in learning was after a long day of work after my daughter was tucked into bed, and I was completely exhausted. The last thing I wanted was disciplined study in pursuit of a goal, so I changed my approach: focus on breadth, widen the scope of topics, let my mind wander, and feed my curiosity. As a bonus, this shift often kept me from losing the evening to bingeing Netflix or doom-scrolling the news late into the night.
When you’re low on motivation or approaching burnout, create the opportunity to “waste time” and play. Follow what interests you, not just the things you “should” be interested in. Do not let your velocity or productivity enter the equation – respect that a life of learning is much more complex than that. Practice curiosity and protect your ability to play, it is critical to learning and creating. If you’re curious about why that is, look up inquiry-based or constructivist learning. What you’ll learn will have nothing to do with building websites, and that’s the point.
Nostalgia
Many talented people felt their ability to create disappear this year, for a variety of reasons. I want to be clear — that’s a normal human reaction to all of this. There is no “one weird trick” for unblocking productivity when the world is on fire. But, if building websites brings you the joy and/or money you need, and you want some advice from someone trained in jump-starting learning, I’ll say this: revisit your foundations. Not the foundations, but your foundations.
When things are this uncertain for this long, we reach for coping mechanisms. Why not use one to unblock learning? In a recent New York Times article, psychologists said that ‘conjuring nostalgia during stressful times is a healthy coping mechanism,” and I totally agree. Between re-watching 90’s movies and cooking comfort foods, I dove back into what brought me to tech: design, CSS, color functions, typography, design patterns. I played around in Illustrator, dusted off old repos, looked at happy projects, and remembered old trends. I avoided burning energy on the hot new thing. Instead, I revisited the foundations of my understanding through the lens of experience.
I’m not suggesting you stay in your comfort zone, but I am saying it’s okay to start there. The important thing is starting.
Routines and Structures
There is disruption on every level: global, national, and personal. I don’t know anyone who hasn’t experienced a disruption to their lives. When our routines are disrupted and our basic needs (including health and psychological) are threatened, we are unable to learn well. One of the most effective things a teacher can do in the classroom is to make sure their students eat breakfast, so focus on your needs. Getting a good night’s sleep contributes to learning. Caring for your mental health contributes to learning. Punishing yourself for struggling does not.
This year, as all of my support structures disappeared, there was not enough Natalya to do everything and be there for everyone. Accepting that was difficult. I spent a lot of energy shifting my focus from “the year I wished for” to the one I was experiencing. I used every trick in the teacher’s handbook on myself to keep my love of learning intact, feel some progress, and keep up. No matter how much I did, I still felt like I didn’t do enough. It was just the kind of year when everything felt like it took more energy (because it did). Setting up new routines and structures is work. Factor that into your equation when evaluating your progress.
This is where I would usually rant about how teaching and childcare are real skills and difficult jobs, dedicating several paragraphs on how important and valuable the work of teachers and caregivers is. But anyone who has been homeschooling or caring for someone this year is already well aware.
Creating the right conditions for effective learning is a lot of work, so give yourself credit if you’ve been taking it on.
This has been a deeply unsustainable year for so many. Showing up and making it through each day and making any progress is enough. Not giving up and trying again, day after day, is success.
What I learned…
Ah, the reason you’re reading this. I would love to talk about the cool design and tech stuff I learned this year, but I won’t. What I learned as an individual in 2020 is not nearly as important as what I hope we learned as an industry.
I hope we learned that the most important thing to know about building websites is that there are real people building them, and we need to make sure they can thrive.
Lunch perks and swag are cool, but what about childcare, accessibility, and support structures? What about flexible hours and remote-first practices? We should notice that the companies which supported people before the pandemic are doing better than the ones struggling to pivot to do the work they should have been doing all along.
I wish it didn’t take a global pandemic, but we need change. Let’s use this knowledge to build a better society with stronger principles and more thoughtful structures—not just better websites.
I feel like Jerod Santo really understood what I was trying to say in Weaved Webs, when I was trying to cover the emerging WordPress (“versus”) Jamstack conversation.
If you asked El Duderino if you should go Jamstack he’d probably tell you, “It’s a complicated case. Lotta ins. Lotta outs. Lotta what-have-yous. Lotta strands to keep in my head, man.”
This conversation is very much not over. Look at what I get to do:
🚨SPEAKER UPDATE 🚨
How can we all keep pushing the web forward? Let's talk!
Manuel Matuzović details 10 bad HTML patterns for a close button. You know, stuff like this:
<a class="close" onclick="close()">×</a>
Why is that bad? There is no href there, so it really isn’t a link (close buttons aren’t links). Not to mention the missing href makes this “placeholder link” unfocusable. Plus, that symbol will be read as “multiplication” or “times”, which is not helpful (an “x” isn’t either).
What do you use instead?
There are plenty of good patterns too. If you prefer the visual look of a ×, then…
… it’s pretty common for my personal blog to get more traffic than the entire corp eng blog for a company with a nine to ten figure valuation and it’s not uncommon for my blog to get an order of magnitude more traffic.
I think this is odd because tech companies in that class often have hundreds to thousands of employees. They’re overwhelmingly likely to be better equipped to write a compelling blog than I am and companies get a lot more value from having a compelling blog than I do.
First, yes. There is a crapload of value in having a good blog (top of funnel traffic, showcasing culture for hiring, establishing industry leadership…) yet so few companies do it well even when they have more than enough resources to do so.
Dan doesn’t just speculate on this, he interviewed people at companies that have actually good engineering blogs: Heap, Segment, and Cloudflare. Then he listed their internal process for blogging. The first step in all three is the same: “Someone has an idea to write a post”. That makes sense, but I would think there is something deeper going on with good blogs: engineers that want to come up with ideas because it is encouraged and incentivized. And then after the ball is rolling, there is a positive feedback loop and as few blockers as possible.
Random observations from me:
We recently started using Appcues at CodePen, and it was on our radar at all because people at CodePen read their blog and liked it.
While Appcues largely blogs about stuff that is directly related to stuff their software can help with, Logrocket, a software product for tracking JavaScript errors, has a blog that isn’t terribly different than CSS-Tricks. It’s just about front-end everything and every single blog post has a section in it that is a pitch for the product. Looks like they’ve been doing it for about 3 years now, so my hunch is that it works extremely well.
All the browser vendors to a pretty good job of blogging overall, but at the same time, feel a bit disjointed. What blog(s) should I be reading for Mozilla/Firefox stuff? I don’t know really. Is it the official looking one? Or the “hacks” one? Or the planet one? Or nightly one? Or the one for releases? Google seems to have the same problem. There isn’t an obvious hub of writing.
Stripe has a strong engineering blog, but then take it to another level by producing a fancy publication (Increment) that is both online and in print.
Eighteen years into this game, I love to reminisce back to the good ol’ days of the early to mid-2000s when there was an explosion of creativity on the web. It felt fresh and unbridled, with boundaries expected to be pushed at every turn, and they were. This was mainly down to one thing, the thing of nightmares to some, Flash! It, of course, had some big inherent flaws, but love it or hate it, certainly helped pave the way for what we expected from the open web. Sure, it was probably a more drawn-out process than we’d hoped for, but with some savage new advancements made over the last few years, I now feel that things are really starting to get proper juicy.
Several things come to mind that get me excited these days in designing and developing for the web, some widely adopted now like SVG (even though technically old) and WebGL animation, which draw some obvious parallels to the Flash era. Certainly, CSS Grid stood up and made itself known, shouting from the parapets about how the shackles of layout are now a thing of the past. Kudos to awesome people like Rachel Andrew and Jen Simmons for their serious efforts in educating us mere mortals in this area, helping make the learning curve and adoption that bit more palatable and accessible.
Looking around today you can see how advancements like Grid have helped elevate the rise of more asymmetric layouts, with design styles like Brutalism design going through a bit of a trend over the last year or so. But over time it felt as though typography might have taken the back seat a tad with all the other successes happening in pushing the web forward. Now enter variable fonts 🥳
Variable fonts have certainly piqued my interest this past year or so. Not only do they give us the obvious boost in performance with fewer https requests and smaller sizes compared to the bundles of web fonts we all inject into our pages, but we also gain more control over typography in terms of readability and accessibility. Say goodbye to cheekily adding muddy sacrificial faux bold or italic styles to our CSS!
Taking this further, I feel that variable fonts have really unlocked the door to new creative possibilities that we’re only just scratching the surface of. Having the ability to interpolate between different values of the axes just screams out for animation. We have the standardized set of 5 registered axes like font-weight, font-stretch, font-style, etc. which are straight forward enough to appreciate, but when it comes to custom axes via font-variation-settings, things start getting crazy and fun. Type designers can use the interpolation in custom axes to create some really off the wall things beyond, well… text. Just check out Typearture’s fab variable font experiments to see what I mean.
A few months back I was privileged to be invited to experiment with and test Greensock’s newly released GSAP 3, which I’m also most definitely excited about. It boasts a new simplified API and 50+ new features, yet is only about half the file size as the previous version. This is currently my catnip though: layering GSAP on top of variable fonts in CodePen to create some lovely kinetic typography in the DOM. This kind of magic, until now I guess, has been more attributed to WebGL, Processing and After Effects. Now, throw some GSAP plugins on top again, and you can definitely create some very cool and unique stuff. I would suggest, however, that you use this new creative power of animating variable fonts in whichever way you do it sparingly, as reflow could become an issue with jank.
I’m excited to see what people will create using variable fonts over the next year as it becomes more widely adopted. Not just limited to typographic treatments in layouts, but also in terms of animation and micro-interactions. It looks like a big undertaking for designers in creating such fonts, but credit to them. I’m sure we’ll be all the more appreciative. Thanks in advance type designers!
