Bookmarks: January 2023

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Please enjoy some curated links to online content I have enjoyed this past month. 😊

Tech and Web

A Debugging Manifesto - Julia Evans

An image panel from Julia Evan's "A Debugging Manifesto". A friendly approach to reframing software bugfixing as a learning activity.

If something is breaking, it’s often because there’s something wrong in my mental model

A CSS challenge: skewed highlight - Vadim Makeev

A CSS skewed highlight effect by Vadim Makeev. A really nice highlighter effect with modern CSS. It achieves the slant using gradients, rather than separate elements or pseudo-elements. It also leverages a little-known CSS property for getting the effect to work across line breaks.

Clever Code Considered Harmful - Josh W. Comeau

A screenshot of complex, unreadable haskell codefrom Josh W. Comeau's blog. A well-articulated case against complex and overly "clever" code. The most compelling takeaways for me are:

  • consider whether your code can be understood by a junior dev,
  • when complexity is necessary, encapsulate it to prevent it bleeding all over your codebase.

Unicorn Icons - Kushmeen

An GIF of gorgeous animated icons by Kushmeen. 👏🏻 I love these. And I immediately want to start a project where I can use them.

The 12-Bit Rainbow Palette - Kate Rose Morley

A well-designed 12-colour rainbow palette by Kate Rose Morley This pleases me a lot. In fact, I have half-formed plans to implement a similar rainbow palette on this here blog. Stay tuned.

Career

Lessons learned since posting my salary history publicly - Jamie Tanna

A screenshot of Jamie Tanna's published salary history. This is really interesting to consider, and something I would love to do later in my career. Being a woman in tech means I'm statistically likely to be underpaid for the work I do, and that's some heavy baggage to carry. I appreciate this transparency and I hope it can become a norm in the industry.

Miscellaneous

How to Do Laundry When You're Depressed - KC Davis

A TED talk video thumbnail of KC Davis. A poignant TED talk on the burden of daily caretaking tasks. It's focussed on shifting your self talk from one of punishment to one of compassion. As someone with a chronic health condition that can affect my functioning, this was tearful and healing.

Care tasks are morally neutral.

Anything worth doing is worth doing half-assed.

Wonders of Street View - neal.fun

A Google Street View screenshot of a skier jumping over two other people high in a snowy mountainscape. A sometimes hilarious, sometimes awe-inspiring collection of the weird and wonderful snapshots that can be found on Google Street View.