Brief books for people who design, write, and code

A Book Apart

If you want to build principled software, avoid becoming VCware. Stay user-supported. It is now possible for tiny teams to build principled software that mil...

100% user-supported

Kitten is a small web development kit for creating and serving sites using HTML, JavaScript, and CSS.

Kitten

because you’ll have more awesome friendships • be consistent • suggested post ideas • setup advice • getting initial readers

Why and how to write things on the Internet

https://www.benkuhn.net/writing/#build-a-consistent-writing-habit

Discover micro-interactions, easter eggs, and other seemingly extra design details that infuse life, personality, and fun back into the web.

Design Spells · Design details that feel like magic

Designer News is dead. Designer News was an online community for product designers. For years it was the best forum to discuss designing software.

Designer News is Dead

https://solomon.io/designer-news-is-dead/

The lessons of yesteryear's OS are getting lost in translation

Forgetting the history of Unix is coding us into a corner

https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/16/what_is_unix/

Relearn CSS layout

ECSS sets simple rules for simple styling. No more naming everything, no more technological dependencies. Only intentional, consistent, simple, expressive, predictable, sustainable CSS.

ECSS — Simple Rules for efficient CSS

Notes on personal libraries, collections and small indexes on the web

The Magic of Small Databases

https://tomcritchlow.com/2023/01/27/small-databases/

My daughter wanted a Unicorn monster truck. Had Dali-e make her one.

You’re a NYC product designer who can code and you believe the future of LLMs is open source.

DM me your portfolio, I have a marvelous job opportunity.

Demo time!

This week I rebuilt my portfolio using my read.cv profile.
read.cv/andy 👉 f26dwlm8t.sites.cv

Try it with your info by prefixing your username to the url like this:
srd-f26dwlm8t.sites.cv

You can view and edit the source code here 😉
https://sites.read.cv/f26dwlm8t

In desperate need of a solo trip in a cabin in the woods somewhere.

🔥 apparently Fridays CAN be even better

https://built.organic

Working on real invites today, but DM me if you want an account.

We need some kind of "Certified Organic" svg sites can add to their footer if they want lol. Especially if it linked to something on built.organic as some kind of loose third-party verification.

Books and standup comedy are the rare mediums that are usually created by a single person. Because of this they can be more daring and go to more interesting places than their big budget Hollywood versions.

I think single creator/small team apps can be like that too.

What I imagine is happening inside my RAM when I get the beach ball of death

@andy I'm in the process of redoing my personal (non company) site – if you need / want beta testers who don't mind  encountering big bugs and writing reports, happy to do it because read's data model covers basically everything I need anyway.

Imagining a portfolio service where:
➊ YOU design how it looks
➋ THEY code it professionally, by hand
➌ Limited to just home, projects, project, about, contact via email/socials
➍ Has basic CMS

Flat set up (/ redesign) fee, then monthly hosting.

Hot or not? What should it cost?

A Book Apart is going out of business... 🥲 The best time to buy some design-related books, tho! 

https://abookapart.com

We are gathered here today to give a funeral to one of my first solo products: Lnky.io

#24 on ProductHunt 😸
10k+ user accounts 👥
Never monetized 🤷

🪡

For good time, read aloud:

🥾&🐈&🥾&🐈‍⬛&🥾&🐈&🥾&🐈‍⬛ 🪩🕺

Curious how@many “designers” use code rather than Figma or similar to put together designs? 🎨 

I’ve never been good at Figma but I can throw together spicy designs using Tailwind and code 👨‍💻

You can tell me to jump into a pit of snakes, roll up a boulder up a hill or build a castle brick by brick on my own, I can do that. 

BUT you can never make me look, read and sort out my own notes, thats worse than anything I know. no way

Astro CLI is one of the best out there hands down

Brian Eno, asking the real question:

"Why aren't programmes for grown-ups made with the same assumptions: viz, people are inpatient, want results quickly, prefer good rapport to endless options, are more concerned about easy usability than high fidelity"

Browsers could be more helpful with debugging SVG shapes... visualizing control points manually is tedious

→ ↘︎ ↓
↗︎ ⌘ ↙︎
↑ ↖︎ ←

📣 Say hi to Bobtail, a riff on the vibes of old-school forums, a deliberately unwalled garden for small communities. I’m getting closer to an open beta, and I’d love to start letting folks try it out. Sign up for an updates-only email list here: https://buttondown.email/bobtail

I think devotion to building a company and learning to work through the tensions is an exhilarating and fun experience

I don’t find the success of early prototyping or the liquidity events to be only reasons to do it. Exiting feels like the moment a great movie is forced to end.

At this point I'm about to open one of those PSDtoHTML businesses like it's 2011. Figma → Astro/Sanity. (iirc @nickisnoble was talking about this recently too).

Happy Monday who’s ready to grip n rip this mfn week 😤

This has been in the works for quite some time now, and we're really glad to finally be able to share this with you 💜

Let's make the internet fun again! 🧙‍♂️

https://designspells.com/

Tips for designers learning to grow:

Stay current with the latest trends and developments in the design industry. However, be very particular about what to follow, what to ignore, and what to avoid.

I hate NDAs. Designers have to be silent for most of their tenure at a company. When they leave, they have to sneak their work out for their portfolio or they’ll have nothing to show employers. 

We get hired based on what we make, but we can’t talk about or show what we make.

rip designer news, it's finally actually dead https://solomon.io/designer-news-is-dead/

Inspired by @ron:

We should have a “first-annual Posts unused domain yardsale”

Barter / sell / trade / collab on the unused domains you registered for a side project years ago but haven’t actually used. 

Who’s down? What day?

Good advice in there. I found this book https://every-layout.dev/ very helpful for the concepts around the sustainability principle.

I took a long break social platforms. The good news? Rhizoma is coming super soon. Feel free to reach out if you like books as much as I do: https://rhizomaa.vercel.app/

Happy Sunday, I just stopped by to see what people are creating and what @cindywu is eating today

Rhizoma is open for everyone. No more testing, no more breaking changes. Just fixing bugs, and adding features. Be gentle when testing: https://rhizoma.cc

Evolution of the Scrollbar
https://scrollbars.matoseb.com/

First week of https://built.organic, pretty amazing!

Know your elders:

http://toastytech.com/guis/index.html

I'm thinking of giving it another try with Lunacy and Penpot. Anybody else using? How's your experience?