Children are petri dishes.
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The whole family has been ill for a large part of this week. I was off work for Wednesday, and after a 2 hour call with a colleague on Thursday I mostly lost my voice. Thankfully I'm largely feeling back to normal, apart from a bit of a sort throat and stuffy nose. Thankful for remote work!
Honestly, having a child in the UK means spending a fully salary on putting them in nursery - for everybody's sanity - only for them to infect the entire household with sickness after sickness.
Wouldn't change it for the world though. -
This interview with the founder of Teenage Engineering was particularly nice. I enjoyed his outlook on things, and found it especially interesting how down he was on Swedish design, something that for a lot of outsiders is held on somewhat of a pedestal.
It felt crazy but also amazing to see what good design really can be and you don’t see that in Sweden. I’m actually impressed when some Swedish friends can do great work because they have been fed with this bad kind of boring grey socialistic approach where everything looks the same. Just look at the colours. Everything is brown or beige.
Everything design-wise that I love is German or Italian, for me it’s the perfect combination. With the passion from Italy and the set of rules from Germany, that balance is perfect. I sum it up with a way of thinking that comes from culture and that’s something you can’t learn. I love to reference other cultures and I always tell my designers that you can’t control your output, you can only control the input. That’s why it’s so important to gather inspiration, read interesting books and explore subjects outside your profession, that’s what makes you able to create interesting things in your profession.
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I also finally got around to reading Alex Russell's post "The Market for Lemons" this week. Whilst not being a fan of Alex and particularly his bullying of anyone connected to Safari, there was a lot I agree with in this particular case, and I'd encourage people to read it too. The damage that the JavaScript community has done to the web over the last decade has been maddening to watch, with their bloated, inaccessible, overly-complex-for-the-sake-of-being-complex tripe that they've been pushing. I lament where the web could be if we hadn't have had this dark age.
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There's an unconvincing rebuttal to the above post too, but it largely is "15 million smokers can't be wrong" - you can read it here, but I'm not sure it's worth your time.
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In the Ruby world, Tom Stuart's fantastic talk from last years Brighton Ruby is online! I'm pretty sure Andy Croll is just trolling me by putting it live the day after I gave my own (significantly inferior) pattern matching talk at work; but regardless, if you write Ruby, you should make time to watch it.
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Also in the Ruby world, Ruby turned 30 this weekend! 🎉