I see this as "zombie obedience": unthinkingly following rules without deeply understanding the goals that drove those rules to be defined in the first place. In design (& other things too!) try to follow the spirit of the law, not the letter. Spirit should win if they conflict!

Here's another example: round boxes are much harder to put square icons into without them looking out-of-proportion. When common cases don't work well with your design system, maybe, just maybe, the problem is your design system or the rigidity of its application?

I'd love to have been a fly on the wall for the argument among Apple designers that resulted in MacOS Tahoe's curious decision to put left navbars into a separate box with its own border. Doubling borders takes up more space, is more visually noisy, and IMO looks amateurish.

Since 2020 I've volunteered on the "TC39" JavaScript standards committee to design the new "Temporal" built-in date/time API with native support for time zones, DST, arithmetic, date-only/time-only types, and more. Today, it shipped in Chrome. Try it out!

⚠️ ~85% of 3D printers marketed for high performance polymers can’t reliably print PEEK, 77% fall short for ULTEM 1010, and nearly half can't reach the required temps to print ULTEM 9085. Learn more 👉 https://t.co/qIAssw1FY8 #additivemanufacturing #3dprinting #3dprinters

Summary: Disagreement is common in all workplaces, including tech startups. But arguing is often an inefficient and interpersonally risky way to resolve disagreements. Here's a set of practical techniques to speed up decisions while reducing strife. https://t.co/Jwo9QAjW50

I just finished a follow-up (link in reply) to @paulg's great essay "How to Argue". My take: after decades at startups and on open source teams, I've seen many techniques beyond zero-sum argument that help teams resolve disagreement. I now see arguing as a last resort.

This seat.

OMG, they finally did it! Only 9 years after I asked for it, Slack now has a history button. Thank you @SlackHQ for making my 2016 Christmas dreams come true. Next on my wishlist: 1-click access to Drafts or Sent. (hint: history toolbar has lots of room!) Maybe before 2034? 😂

Since 2020 I've been working with a top-notch group of open-source nerds to design and ship the new "Temporal" date/time API for JavaScript. https://t.co/EGxrIGxjk0 Temporal in V8 (Chrome, Node) is now much closer to shipping, thanks to the temporal_rs team. Congrats!

Here's the chat:

I just got the weirdest @ChatGPTapp result. I'm used to hallucinations, but I think this is the first time in years that I've gotten word salad.

Me: stereotypes of California are completely unjustified. California:

Trees not only help with climate change; they also make the world funnier!

All around us, the world is packed with beauty. I am so grateful to be alive to see it.

I travel a lot and I’m amazed why many hotels and most AirBnBs don’t have vampire-level blackout blinds that interlock in the middle. That’s why I always pack a few binder clips. Saves my sleep every time! https://t.co/qhjIzVZCFk

I am proud to live in Berkeley, the nerd capital of the world.

Every day I try to remember that being alive is kinda awesome. Sure we all will have problems and things that aren't going well. But there's so much beauty around us. Our problems are so small in comparison.

Designers & marketers: in B2B and "practical" B2C apps, you should focus your creativity on discoverability and making user workflows easier & faster. Don't be like @plume where a frustrated art director is using oddball, hard-to-read fonts that add zero (negative?) value to UX.

A skill I've learned from a few decades of work: when someone does something that makes me angry, I'll usually wait a bit to respond. The angrier I am, the longer I wait. This gives me time for the emotion to settle, and to let my thinking brain decide what to do.