I just attended IndiewebCamp Brighton, where I had a mind-expanding time with a bunch of folks as enthusiastic about the web as I am. It left me with a sense of hope that there are pocks of people keeping the dream of a free and open web alive.
Mark’s write-up of the excellent Indie Web Camp Brighton that he co-organised with Paul.
Trys threads the themes of Patterns Day together:
Jeremy did a top job of combining big picture and nitty-gritty talks into the packed schedule.
A nice write-up of Patterns Day from Hidde.
Really good advice from Maggie on running small community events:
No one else will organise the group you most want to be a part of. Whatever weird, specific things you enjoy – perhaps doing speed sudokus while smoking robusto cigars, or hosting a chemistry analysis session on sourdough bread techniques (I’m not judging either of these) – it’s worth trying to find the others. You are the most qualified person to create environments and experiences that you will personally enjoy, and in doing so you will attract people who like things that you also like. This is a decent way to make friends.
This is going to be a fun weekend!
Not got a personal website? Bring your laptop or mobile device, and we’ll help you get setup so that you can publish somewhere you control and can make your own.
Seasoned web developer? Learn about the different open web services, software and technologies that can help empower yourself and others to own their content and online identity.
I’m very excited that John is speaking at this year’s UX London!
Okay, if you weren’t already excited for Patterns Day, get a load of what Rich is going to be talking about!
You’ve got your ticket, right?
Fancy joining me in Pittsburgh in August next year to celebrate Brad’s birthday?
I love these black and white photos from the border:none event that just wrapped up in Nuremberg!
BarCamp London is back this year, the day after ffconf.
This free day-long online event all about accessibility and inclusive design is happening right now. You can join live, or catch up on the talks that have already happened, like the excellent talks from Russ Weakly and Manuel Matuzović.
Service designers of Brighton!
We meet for 1–1½ hours from 8.30am on the first Thursday of every month at Clearleft’s studio in Brighton.
These pictures really capture the vibe of this year’s lovely UX London event.
It’s clear that companies don’t value CSS skills in the same way as, say Javascript — which is reflected in pay disparity, bootcamp priorities, and the lack of visibility in job descriptions. It’s not uncommon to see front end job specifications listing React, Redux, Typescript and more, with barely a passing mention of HTML and CSS, despite being core web technologies. New developers are encouraged to learn just enough CSS to get by, rather than cultivate a deep knowledge and appreciation for the language, and that’s reflected in the messy, convoluted code, riddled with bad practices, that many of us have to clear up afterwards.
With new or expanded modules for layout, typography, animation, audio (though sadly not speech) and more, it’s possible to specialise in a subset of CSS. Yet when aspects of frontend development not involving JavaScript are seen as ignorable by employers, few will get this opportunity.
Paul shares his big-picture thoughts after CSS Day:
But one CSS conference isn’t enough. This language is now so broad and deep, its implementation across browsers never more stable and complete, that opportunities to grow the community abound.
I’ve managed to convince Paul to come out of the shadows for one last heist—it’s gonna be good!
(And Paul shares a discount for 20% off your UX London ticket!)
Grease is a website starter that makes building performant, accessible, aesthetic websites fast & frictionless.
Interestingly, this starter kit uses cascade layers for managing CSS.
This free event is running online from 3pm to 7pm UK time this Friday. The line-up features Emily Bender, Safiya Noble, Timnit Gebru and more.
Since the publication of On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?🦜 two years ago, many of the harms the paper has warned about and more, have unfortunately occurred. From exploited workers filtering hateful content, to an engineer claiming that chatbots are sentient, the harms are only accelerating.
Join the co-authors of the paper and various guests to reflect on what has happened in the last two years, what the large language model landscape currently look like, and where we are headed vs where we should be headed.
This free online event is happening at 7pm UK time this evening. I saw Ben give a talk on this at Clarity, and it was excellent. There was a lot of crossover with what I’ve been trying to get at with the intersection of declarative design and culture, except Ben expresses it far more clearly than me. The bastard.
If you feel like you’re swimming upstream with your design system, it’s likely the result of a cultural problem—not a technical one. It’s time for you to look at your design system from a different angle.