I’ve enjoyed a nice, week long holiday. I wanted to write a few articles, it turned out I had the opposite of a writer’s block. I wrote a few more.
Specialists
There seems to be a trend to devaluate the value of good specialists. I think we shouldn’t blame the specialists but take a good, critical look at the process instead. This thinking about specialisms was triggered by a meeting I had with some colleagues where I didn’t understand most of what was said.
Books
I did read some — highly recommended — books too. A quote in a small book about typography by Tim Brown made me realise again that every specialist must understand the value of their profession in the bigger scheme of things.
Stephen Hay wrote a book about the responsive design workflow. I could have quoted the whole book, but instead I wrote this very positive review. You should just buy it, it’s absolutely worth it.
Right now I’m enjoying the new book by Peter Gasston about the modern web. A quote in the introduction made me think about the fact that not all new hardware is getting faster, which is a new but important trend.
Stories
The incredible Bret Victor released a video of one of his talks in which he argues that many of the applications we use to create computer art don’t create computer art. The create emulations of older art forms. An incredible talk, as always. I changed one of his quotes a bit so I could easily make the same statement about web design tools. Which is a pet pieve of mine.
Just like the lack of interest in progressive enhancement. I just can’t stop talking about it. I even spoil fascinating stories about my grandparents with moralising endings about progressive enhancement. Just like my grandparents used to do with their god. I’m getting old, hahaha.
Nonsense
So instead of idling, I’ve been writing useful stuff. But the writing I’m most happy about is what I did on my resurrected blog Love Nonsense. I wrote a small welcome back message about the state of Nothing, and I wrote a longer piece about the beauty of QR-codes, thanks to a wonderful present some friends gave me.
The Daily Nerd
I did not update the Daily Nerd at all last week. I did read some interesting articles, but instead of collecting them here, I tweeted them right away. If you don’t mind a mix of Dutch and English tweets, and you want to read what I link to, you might want to follow me on twitter, since this site will not be updated as much anymore. Definitely not on a daily basis. I found out that I enjoy writing longer blogposts more than writing small comments.
It’s been a busy holiday is published on The Daily Nerd.
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