Posted on
by

In the last five years (which were actually 3 years, 5 months and 21 days) Simon got married, lost 2 stone, stopped writing books and talking at conferences. To instead work on his own company, Fictive Kin.

He gets weird technical emails from his business-partner Phil at Fictive Kin (or maybe I shouldn’t take notes and try to listen to mails being read at the same time). There are 11 colleagues in all parts of the world from SF to South Korea, and Aarhus (In Denmark, not in the middle of our street as Simon joked).
Slack is IRC for people who are scared of IRC. Everybody is on IRC, but nobody really is.
Everything is on trial forever. All sizes of projects, some secret, some he is on, some he isn’t. And sometimes on multiple at the same time.
The devs he works with like to make everything dark and sinister. They have VPN’s. Every project has a VM and he has to use the terminal. He has to reload or put vagrant up. But than he gets errors. terminal errors.

Git
On who’s branch is stuff, my branch, your branch, is it the right branch, and then we have a conflict. How do I fix this? There is documentation somewhere. Is it on the wiki? On Slack? No, it’s on Workflowy. Why is anything ever on Workflowy. Why is it called Workflowy?
A lot of these projects have really weird names. Somebody made something, worked hard on it, put it out to the world and called it Tasty Pie. And that’s a real thing!

Is this how I design now?

He can disconnect and be happy, because he is learning stuff. I hope nobody anywhere ever gets comfortable with everything. As it means we aren’t learning anymore.
The amateur doesn’t stand still, the professional often does.

Responsive design.
A better language to determine what we do.

We stopped making pretty pictures of websites, that other people make into a website.
Rethought our strategy to HTML and CSS. Used to keep HTML lean and have extremely long CSS with lot’s of specificity, but we flipped now and added more classes to make it more useable. More animation and SVG. Better at delivering meaningful content. Using Pattern libraries and the device landscape. Thinking about what deliverables are. Delivering components of websites.
Speeding up website performance. accessibility. I think we’ve done pretty well.

It’s not about tools, PhotoShop got out, sketch got in. Still a lot about languages. languages like HTML and CSS. As a designer I often think about my role.
There’s still a huge role for somebody who can think as a designer.

This work continuously asks us to read and learn. Nobody knows it all, but also nobody does it better than you. It’s about picking your own path. And where you can in turn help your colleagues. Part of the bloody mess we call designing for the web.

Tellerrand = think outside the box. Look beyond everything evolved, look over the edge.

Look beyond ourselves and move the industry forward. So, my beauties. Go forward and do that.

 

Posted on
by

Update: The camp was organized by the awesome Marc Thiele and not by Aaron and Jeremy as I wrote earlier.

So, I guess this #indiewebcamp was quite a success for me as I have a site now. This domain has been mostly empty (the front page at least) for 7 years now, probably longer. Still it doesn’t feel as everything has worked out as I wanted, as I ended up with WordPress in the end.

The theme I have for now, SemPress, has the same problem as almost all WordPress themes have: They are just too complex, but yet not very customizable in it’s design. Why does a theme need 12 content pages, but only 1 CSS file (not counting the rtl one)?

On the other hand I saw a lot of people with not very well-known CMS’s or even custom made systems who were all doing the same trick in one way or another. These systems might nice, but how long will they be around? And how much support, extensions, etc. do they have? While all this stuff was already around for WordPress, and I haven’t done much more than configuring everything, testing, and re-testing it. I doubt I wrote more than 5 lines of code.

There will probably be a few systems I’ll try out, but for now I’m staying with WordPress I guess. These two days gave me enough stuff to think about and do, as I don’t fully understand half of what I have installed so far and neither does everything work perfectly yet.

The things I still want to change:

  • A nicer and more customizable design (hack SemPress, extend it, or build something myself?)
  • Post to app.net, ello? and Pinboard.
  • Get teacup running at a separate and private location, and find out how to permanently extend the default options.
  • Figure out why quill won’t work, it’s the only tool so far that can’t find the MicroPub endpoint.
  • Find out how to let all those tools post into draft, or at least not visible on the blog directly.
  • Do something with favourites on twitter (post them to instapaper) and retweets (separate page on the blog, or a separate tag? Although that means I need to make another exception for a certain tag on the main blog).

Before I forget it, many thanks to Marc for organizing this, to Aaron and Jeremy for presenting this, and to Amy for making notes. Will reference those quite a few times in the near future.