2,270 karma · joined May 22, 2009
You can find more info about me on my website https://davesnider.com
Can contact me dave.snider [at] gmail.com
5-15 years ago I couldn't write native CSS. Today? I prefer it. It's improved to such a degree that I think most people aren't even aware of how much better it's gotten, because they escaped to Sass / CSS-in-JS for years.
Is this good for business? Probably not. Is it fun for me? Absolutely. Sometimes the road calls to you more than the destination. We're all wired a little different.
Side note. I love the author's art and couldn't find a place to purchase it.
Unfortunately the Reddit / X changes this year should remind us these sort of 3rd-party workarounds will only exist for so long.
I know it's a dream, but I'm looking forward to simple Linux phones. Moving to GNOME / arch on my Desktop lets me do what I want to do and somehow, magically plays any game from Steam without a hitch.
Noticed some missing ones, including https://xata.io (I work there). Didn't see a way to add it (looks like a simple Django app so probably manually adding it into the admin).
Guess you have to contact the author directly or make a Github Issue.
- A working website they built themselves that captures some personality for who they are.
- A small-to-large project they wrote or contributed on with others where I could view the source.
- Small edits to libraries (Documentation counts!) of things they use.
- A video of them explaining something (anything!)
An interview lasts one-hour. Getting as much across BEFORE that one hour is important. My easiest interviews were the one where I could skip the script and ask the person about some project I could see they were working on.
There will be lots of comments to say that none of these things are needed. They will be technically correct, but you asked for things that would make you have the best shot. A year is a nice long time to build up the above.
- Covid made me realize how important being close to family was.
- Three straight years of serious wildfires, along with the general unease of a predictable rainfall pattern put me at unease.
- At that point I'd been working remote for 8 years. It took that long for me to feel confident I could easily get fun, well-paying jobs outside of the Bay Area.
- The Bay Area felt like a mono-culture despite it's marketing otherwise.
- The housing market was pretty silly. Got a lot more house for less money moving.
Things I miss:
- The produce is better in California.
- The restaurant variety in the Bay Area is superb.
- Harder to find certain type of nerd friends.
Surprises
- I don't actually miss the weather, and sort of prefer having seasons again.
- The schools are better where we moved. My wife is a teacher and was sort of floored by this. Both areas were "great" school districts, and I admit region to region can always have variance. Still, we didn't expect this.
I made a video about how to set it up if anyone is curious. The series was aimed at beginners, so feel to hop around if you just want to see what it looks like. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoG0AsS6oPo
That will at least get you to having some results quickly. I've found chatgpt is really more about the data you feed it, than anything else.
(disclosure: I work at Xata)
Getting $20-30 per DVD from this audience was much more lucrative than the cents you get per stream when competing against the algorithm of "what should I watch next". It's a VERY different market now. Smaller stuff just doesn't compete.
Once you remove the need to personally curate and review (think also towards the death of the film critic), you introduce a homogenization to the industry.
Streaming is fantastic for convenience. It is terrible for variety, despite the illusion that we're overloaded with choice. The modern streaming system hides everything in plain site. It is almost impossible for me to "browse" streaming sites the way I used to in a Blockbuster or Best Buy. Discovery is much harder.
There's a funny part about being a web designer and then having to build your own site. You sort of want to drop all the bullshit, and just focus on typography and spacing. No color, no tricks, just simple stuff. It can be surprisingly hard.
I went with Astro, which I think is much better for this kind of thing, and let me write very, very simple HTML + CSS with only a small bit of JS.
I think it's mostly the tone I don't like about this article. It speaks to a defeastism that feels infectious at the moment. It feels very contrary to the normal spirit of communities like HN, which overall I've witnessed being someone positive.
If you're stuck in a situation where you're not getting great feedback on what to work on, that seems like a great time to just build things and experiment on your own. Do it within the rails of the corporate environment you're in, or hell do it outside and put that energy into something else. Just because someone doesn't provide a map, doesn't mean you can't escape the labyrinth and get creative.
I think the problem is that the API concerns are more around LLMs having easy access points to their data than anything else. Still, this could have been avoided by providing free-use keys to trusted developers. It's not like there are that many of them. Just seems odd how dark they've been towards this user class. It's very similar to the Twitter changes.
The nuke approach they've done will send so many of their important, core users off the site.
This isn't about learning the full unix suite, it's about knowing enough to get the product you're working on running locally. Speaking from experience, I've known so many designers who were simply ineffective in their feature teams because they had no ability to even see the feature be developed locally. They all required a developer to push up a staging environement, generally later in the product build.
Designers who can actually run the software early and give feedback during this time have a leg up on those that can't.
1. Become very strong at raw CSS.
2. Learn how to use your terminal.
3. Start making "polish" PRs in whatever site / app you work on.
4. Pick up skills from engineers organically around you as you clean up the front of the frontend.
5. Learn that design is meant to move, and pick up animation!
If you really learn CSS, like becoming the best person at your company in it, you will become immensely valuable to your team. Every great coding designer I've known got there because they were frustrated their engineering team would miss details from their designs. They learned how to clean up behind them, and then next thing they knew they were delivering coded prototypes, and not designs to their feature teams. They knew static designs would fall apart, and had the stamina to work on the three issues that come up most in web design: text truncation, focus issues and media query issues.
Source. Coding designer that's been at it for 25 years. I've worked at every level of design: from grunt, to open source system-designer, to Head of Design at a public company for a 45 person design team. Gave it all up to get back in the code and hack!
Coding designers are the best! Pair them with a strong visual designer and a patient engineer and you will have an awesome product.
Side note. I've worked in dozens of front-ends over a long career. CSS is the only constant.
If I need to have a conversation with you to figure out if you know what you're doing, I'm wasting your and my time. I'd rather have a conversation about whether you're a good fit.
Sadly, I've since moved from the area, but always think back on some great times there.
2 years ago I made the switch to Linux, mostly because I was inspired by r/unixporn. I took a long weekend to install a barebones arch setup with i3. Everything needed to be touched, and I realized that although I'd been using computers for nearly 30 years, I really didn't understand how they worked.
Maintaining things like Linux, Vim, or some semi-complicated, interlinked toolchain makes me need to learn things constantly. Running updates becomes a lot more complicated, and every time I do it, I learn something new about how computers work that I didn't before.
Why do I do this? Well, I like learning! I also really enjoy my work and if fully retired, would still fiddle with computers as a hobby. Nothing against it, but I think a lot of people use their computers simple to get to their end task, and don't really care much about how that end task might sit on top of a bunch of other core systems.
In my heart, everytime I fiddle with Linux I'm reminded of the seven-year-old kid who sat at the family kitchen computer trying to learn just what the hell DOS was and why my games didn't work. These are magical machines, and it's fun learning why they work. That's what Linux gives me... something to explore.
This happened to me years ago when a Russian website copied a website I was running. We had an API that helped them get not just the design, but the data.
Google is pretty smart (sometimes) about figuring out content of origin. If you already have an established site with links pointing in your should be fine. If you're new and you're entire business can be copied that quickly, you have likely larger problems than SEO at this point.
I also find most technical documentation teams to be a lot more chill and flexible. Most of them have excellent team-minded work styles.
How to get started in this field? You can't throw a stone without hitting an OSS project that wouldn't want help with its docs. It's a great way to build up a network and some Github activity.
- Buku: Continues to be a fantastic little library for bookmarks in your terminal.
- NNN: A very extendable file browser in the terminal. It's become an easy way to wire up actions to files (like upload this file to a static bucket...etc)
- Pop Shell + Gnome: The perfect balance of "i need configuration" and "i want things to mostly just work well together". It's amazing how far the GNOME ecosystem has improved in the past two years.
- Mastodon: At the end of the day I'm pretty impressed that Mastodon has weathered the migration as well as it has. I can question some of the tech choices, but honestly, it only took me a weekend to learn how to set up and host my own instance on a cloud provider. There was years of work in the background that I just sort of walked into.
- Neovim: Continues to improve past Vim is good ways. It's been fun watching the ecosystem move and get so active over the past couple years.
- Alacritty: A very simple, configurable terminal. It provides everything I need, and nothing I don't.
Coincidentally I made a video[0] today to show off what this tool looks like once you set it up and also show off the archive bits. Regardless of how you feel about the situation, it's never a bad time to make a backup.
What we didn't know then in 2003-2004, was that Apple ended up eating the entire industry (at the time) and everyone just bought an iPod and called it a day. MP3.com rightly fell apart shortly after.
Weirdly enough, that assumed model and need now exists now that content has fractured again, this time with video. Which service is streaming that movie I want to watch? We're getting to the point where we need those registries as much as we need "caniuse" for browser comparability.
Should that directory concept have been attempted on a very important domain like mp3.com, itself having fallen apart earlier in the Internet bust? Probably not, but hindsight is easy looking back. Back then domains were more important.
Anyways, just answering to some trivia for you. I didn't have much to do with that site's origins.