On the line - Productivity ideas from restaurant kitchens

Sometimes, the most productive thing you can do is to detach from the digital and return to the simplicity that is analog. There's profoundness in the level of productivity you can experience with some things so primitive.

Working with globalized variables maybe one of the trickier aspects to any design or code project. It’s sort of like accumulating a collection of a particular collectable, say Pokemon cards. It’s cool that you can collect these cards! I mean, who wouldn’t want an original 1st edition base set Charizard.

One of the more “abstract” but important and powerful systems within G2 Components is it’s “Context” system. Given the name, those familiar with libraries like React may immediately think of React.Context. It’s kinda close, but it’s much much more than that.

One of the biggest and most important challenges for the G2 Components project was defining and creating the Style system. The Style system is one of the core system that’s responsible for managing and powering the entire UI layer for the library.

In other words… smoothly transitioning from one thing to another thing! In traditional animation (think the good ol’ hand drawn stuff), this process of transitioning between two key poses (or key frames) is known as inbetweening.

Drag gestures are becoming increasingly more popular in Web UIs – and for good reason! They’re super easy to use!

In today’s Zoom session, I streamed the design and creation process for creating a handful of SwiftUI inspired layout components for G2: HStack, VStack, and ZStack. These components are designed to enable users to create many layout UI variations with very little code.

For years now, I’ve been thinking very deeply about design systems, with a focus on UI / component libraries. Based on my experience, I believe that a lot of the UI related pain felt by designers, developers, and other contributors, are due to an underdevelopment or even an absence of very important and often under-estimated core UI systems.

Every so often, I get randomly inspired to code something... experimental. Recently, I felt particularly ambitious, and thought it would be neat to create a self-resizing Card component with fancy animations.

You're working on some UI. It's a series of CSS problems. You figured out the styles required to solve it. All you gotta do is create a couple of new CSS class names.

Every so often, a tweet or blog post would make me reflect upon my career in the web development industry. Being a hybrid design/coder, I can't help but feel out of place within in.

If you work on a library or module (be it open sourced or closed), writing really good (at least adequate) release notes is one of the most important things you can do.

Happy New Year lovely Internet people! I hope all of you had a wonderful 2018, and have some fun-filled goals for 2019.

This year, I started mentoring at Out of Office Hours. I've had multiple sessions, and one very interesting thing I've noticed is that every single person I've spoken to has said…

Oh boy! It's only been… about 4 months since I wrote something. Not a day goes by where I don't think…

Recently, I had a catch-up chat with a product designer colleague from work (his name is Buzz and he is awesome). One of the things we talked about was the various things I did at Help Scout.

Goodness. Gracious. Why is writing so hard! Since re-launching my site, I've set a personal goal to write at least once a week. I gave myself a soft-pass this week, as I sorta missed my goal by a bit. But I was busy!

Oh wow, talk about a facelift! Black & pink have always been one of my favourite color combos. Not to mention, I've always wanted a dark site!