Engineers tell me "I can't design." I push back. Route structure, response payload, field naming. All of it shapes the user's experience. You're designing in code whether you call it that or not. www.indierails.com/72

Users don't read. They scan. The squint test takes 5 seconds: squint at your screen, see what jumps out, that's what the user notices first. If your CTA has the same visual weight as everything else, it's invisible. www.indierails.com/72

The most common Rails UI problem is key-value pair dumping. Half the labels in any Rails app are doing zero work, because a dollar sign already tells you it's a price. Cut the labels the data speaks for. www.indierails.com/72

Watching the storms over Afton from Stony Point.

@amyhoy.bsky.social Hap hap happy birthday!

John Athayde is starting things off at @blueridgeruby.com, stepping out of the garden and on to the stage. @johnathayde.com

Learning from permaculture by @johnathayde.com at @blueridgeruby.com A lot of lessons we can learn from permaculture and apply to sustainable software development and maintenance #blueridgeruby

This is a slide from my talk this week at Blue Ridge Ruby connecting Permaculture with Sustainable Software Development. Lots of cute animals and lots of fun concepts to help you shift frame on how we approach this work. I hope to see you there!

Couldn't happen to a nicer piece of software. Buh bye, Publisher!

I love chatting with @jeremysmith.co and I am really looking forward to both giving this talk and hanging out with everyone at Blue Ridge Ruby. Get your tickets asap!

Hundreds of HTML elements, anchored to each other randomly, by using the CSS anchor positioning feature. Because, why not? A new kind of popup hell. This, and other fun experiments at patrickbrosset.com/articles/202...

It's quite insane. As a firefighter, we have CISD (critical incident stress debriefing) any time there's an on-scene death. And this is dying of natural causes/accidents—watching state murder, live, is not good for you. Please talk to a professional. I would say "if impacted", but, you are.

I had so much fun in our wide ranging conversation with Jeremy and Jess. Check out the pod!

Merry Christmas! Kransekake complete! Not as perfect as the formal bakers but I’m happy. Much better than last year’s!

So it begins! Stollen done, pies wrapped, (all gluten free!), smoker going with a ham from our friends farm and brisket from our own, and kransekake is up next!

Most of the world prompts AI, saying "build me a house" and then complains that it sucks when it's not the house they had in mind. Tools like this prompt generator help see the possibility of specificity that you can get to: f-stop.vercel.app

Black Friday time! 50% off "Typography for Developers". Fix the basics of your application look and feel with good typography. learn.developerux.com/p/type-is-de...

The German company that makes the mechanical ladder used in the Louvre heist has used the image to advertise, with the text 'When you need to move fast' 10/10 response, no notes

Speaking at 10:30 this morning at NOVA Code Camp (novacodecamp.org ) today! (18 October). Come say hi!

#RailsWorld Day 1 in the books. From our fun morning boat ride with the Baltic Ruby crew to DHH's keynote, the great hallway track in a beautiful space here in Amsterdam, and the random cat in the window spotted on the way through... Lots of great talks and new and old Ruby Friends.

I’m a consultant. I’ve seen inside every kind of organization. Good managers/leaders doing important work don’t run their teams ragged, and especially don’t brag about it.

Playing with the Ladybird browser: A browser and rendering engine built from scratch (and not just on top of Chromium). Kinda fun to do the build from source ... feels a bit like 15 years ago. github.com/LadybirdBrow...

The RailsConf talks have been released! Here’s my talk on UX for Rails devs. Thanks to everyone who came out and I hope you enjoy it! youtu.be/ybUhVeTqGN4

WebDev has forgotten the utter pain of slow FTP. Stuck on a low-speed pool wifi and trying to FTP parts of a WordPress site. The sheer number of hours I spent in Adobe ImageReady trying to crunch images smaller so I could upload the site in less than an hour… countless.

Alright Ruby Friends, let's do this (thanks @joemasilotti.com for building it!) rubyfriends.app/profiles/QPDR

Really enjoyed @marcoroth.dev ’s talk on Herb - herb-tools.dev and a new way to handle view templating. Lots to dig into and I look forward to playing with it on a few of my projects. So much new coolness in the View layer!

Thanks to everyone who came out to my @rubycentral.org RailsConf25 talk! The Typography for Developers class is live as of today! learn.developerux.com/p/type-is-de...

It’s scything time again. Clearing out the overgrown garden and feeding the trimmings to the cow and boy goats before I head off to @rubycentral.org ‘s RailsConf this week in Philly. Hit me up to talk hobby farming, permaculture, or UX for rails devs. I’m presenting Thursday right before lunch!

Bringing out my old standbys for work soundtrack, hoping it will help get the juices flowing this AM. First up? The Thievery Corporation masterpiece “The Mirror Conspiracy”: music.apple.com/us/album/mir...

Meta’s web-to-app tracking proves you’re right to distrust Meta, and we need to end surveillance advertising.

Holy shit. One of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory's first-look images. This image is 3,840×2,160 but the original image is 40,000×21,047 px. Virtually every pixel is a star or a galaxy. VIRTUALLY EVERY PIXEL

I haven't mentioned this here much, but @pragprog.com has a @humblebundle.com with 19 Ruby and JavaScript ebooks for $18 or pay-what you will for smaller bundles or larger charitable donations. About one day left... www.humblebundle.com/books/javasc...

If you make me change my password and then reject it because I've already used that password, may your milk go sour, your company go bankrupt, your children forsake you, your fields lie fallow, and your name be whispered as a warning and a curse until the end of your days.

Ugh. For my local friends. Take note:

If you load this page it contacts 82 IP addresses executing 256 separate HTTP transactions to download 18MB of data writing 64 cookies to your device to tell you “no”

Why do government emails feel like they’re written by robots with no clue about real life? I share my experience with Companies House after my dad died and how trauma-informed content could make a world of difference. #TraumaInformed #ContentDesign #PublicSector #DigitalGov #EmpathyMatters

I could imagine this scenario where you interview a PM and you ask, “How did you arrive at the insight to form this hypothesis?” And the PM would say that they conducted research using AI. I could imagine a myriad of follow up questions to interrogate that answer.

A lot of designers have been tasked with these kinds of manipulative friction design at one point or another. It’s not UX in the sense of advocating for users—it’s manipulative interface design, incentive-aligned interface design serving business goals, not user needs.

user experience design

So awesome. I’ve wanted something like this for years!

Has anyone at Hubspot actually used the flows they designed? this is the most obtuse, archaic crap I've seen in years (besides MSFT Teams, which is still worse). I shouldn't have to pay a "domain partner" to attach a domain correctly. Adding it to an alternate brand and it adds it to the main one.

TFW you have the phone plugged into the lightning cable but forget to plug the other end in.

Ok seriously now. Which one of you crossed the streams?

I've said it before, but it bears repeating: remote identity proofing is dead. Liveness detection is dead. In-person identity proofing or GTFO.

My eldest daughter found an Easter Mad Libs book in the bin and has been plowing through them. Not exactly proper Holy Week flair but I remember doing these as a kid and I just have to chuckle at the ludicrous outcomes.

Have you ever wished you could make a real-deal complex shape in CSS? The web’s had circle(), ellipse() and polygon() for years. But in order to do anything more SVG-style syntax was required. Well, no more. Now, you can make complex shapes in CSS! webkit.org/blog/16794/t...

Apparently, Meta has used this pirated book database to train AI. My 2013 text "The Rails View" is in there. As are many other indie books from authors I know. Meta should be ashamed of themselves. This is just outright theft. www.theatlantic.com/technology/a...

The people behind Figma are assholes. Please avoid it. x.com/antonosika/s...

Chatting with an AI pretending to be a person is perhaps the most offensive thing I can imagine in customer service.

The universe has one word for deploying on a Friday: Chaos. Let's listen, shall we?