Now № 3
It’s been a tough and emotional few weeks. It’s hard to view COVID and police brutality spiral out of control in the US from afar. Meanwhile things are approaching some level of normalcy in Ukraine.
I haven’t written as much as I’d hoped over the past month, but I’ve been productive in other ways.
I spoke at the UX Salon WORDS 2020 (conference slides, video) about UX writing at the wireframe stage of product development.
I’ve also finished up the my site redesign. Next on the list are a few content updates and turning it into a Jekyll theme that I can share.
Reading
I finally got around to reading Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism. July is going to be my detox month. 😱
Spotify’s Failed #SquadGoals is damning indictment of the oft lauded Spotify model. My personal experience (not with Spotify, but same idea) matches the author.
I stumbled across 3 closely related pieced by Craig Mod. As stunning as Apple’s hardware is (yes, my iPad is a joy), the software is getting worse.
- Brilliant Hardware in the Valley of the Software Slump
- Getting the iPad to Pro
- Fast Software, the Best Software
The plethora of low quality technical blog posts of late is summed up in Most tech content is bullshit:
At the beginning of my career, I would never, ever, post anything technical on the internet. I thought that if someone was brave enough to post a blog post or take part in a tech discussion, they always know what they are doing. I couldn’t be more wrong!
This is similar to the bullshit industrial complex.
Listening
I got 2 new albums this month:
Brian Eno’s Mixing Color. It’s exactly what you’d expect from him: music that’s interesting at any level. It’s calming background music while I work and great as a center piece while I’m relaxing in the evening.
I discovered Zoë Keating. Her older EP One Cello x 16 is great. Highly recommended if you like modern classical music.