Week Notes 012

The Week

This week was pretty good, overall. Fairly calm and uneventful. Following on from last week, the improvements I saw in how the team is working together are still going strong. Lots of collaboration and none of the tension that was there before. And I'm still trying to focus on listening and asking questions more than I express my own opinions. I did catch myself jumping in on a few too many things where I probably could have waited for a second to give others time to chime, though. I think I need to put a sticky note on the bottom of my monitor to help me remember.

One highlight was getting to pair with a consultant designer the client brought in. He has been great to work with on the project so far. Getting to pair with him to build out the start of the styleguide this MVP will be using was pretty fun. We talked a lot about building stuff and how difficult it can be sometimes building an MVP versus building a product that's planned to be around for a long time. Letting perfect be the enemy of good on an MVP project like this one is definitely something that's held the whole team back. It's difficult to let go of that feeling that we should do everything as well as we can, to follow all of the best practices or push back against a decision we think is going to hurt us in the long run.

Because there probably isn't a long-run for projects like this one. It's something we're getting to market quickly to learn, probably pivot, and then throw away to build the next thing better. I've had difficulty keeping that in mind through this whole process. And this designer had a lot of the same problems with it, so it was nice to commiserate on that.

Pairing with him a few days this week was also great practice for me in terms of the kind of job I'd like to have one day. I've been investing heavily into learning front-end skills and UX principles because I'd like to be a great UX engineer. I've gotten some experience with that over my last couple projects, but I've still technically been a fullstack engineer. I'd really love to break out of that and focus in much more on the front-end part of web development.

So, that's my week. Things are looking up. How about you? Learn anything cool? Facing a challenge it would be helpful to talk about? Tell me about it.

The Links

• Inertia in Range Inputs

  This has some great demos using GSAP. My favorite is the lightbulb.

• Riderflow

  A little different thing week: A game dev IDE for Unity from JetBrains. I've always wanted to make my own games for fun, but was put off Unity by the poor dev workflow. This looks good enough to make me interested in doing a little game dev again.

• Childish Font Sizes

  Great insights on readable type.

• Zag.js

  Little framework-independent library for making components built on state machines. State machines are fascinating to me, so I'll be checking this out soon.

• Windland - a Three.js Experience

  Keeping with my 3D theme from last week, here's another three.js demo from the folks at Codrops.

• Picture-perfect Images with the Modern img element

  Great guide to the improvements and capabilities of the humble <img> element.

• CSS Transitions Guide

  Fantastic article from the always fantastic Josh Comeau, covering the basics as well as some interesting tricks.

• Interactive 3D SNES Controller

  It would not be a weeknotes link round-up without a cool, CSS-only demo.

Send-off

And that's it, folks. Thanks for reading, and I'll be back next week. Have a great weekend!