Topic: Industry

Make Something Great: Become an Open Source Contributor

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You may think that contributing to an open source project is only for developers. But code is by no means the only thing software is made of. Whether you’re a designer, writer, doctor, or lawyer, the open source community needs you. Andrés Galante shares everything you need to know to set out on your journey, from first steps to becoming a core contributor.

Mental Illness in the Web Industry

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In the midst of a seemingly endless stream of harassment and discrimination exposés throughout the tech industry, A List Apart thinks we should also be talking about mental health. In this article, we feature the stories of five web professionals who were willing to share their struggles in the workplace.

Focus on What You Do Best and Outsource the Rest

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There’s all this other “stuff” that has to get done in support of what you actually do for a living. It slows you down and takes away from overall productivity in your specialty, yet you think you have to do it yourself no matter how hard it is for you. Suzanne Scacca says it may be a good investment to offload and outsource some of the tasks that aren’t in your wheelhouse. It just might free up your time to do more of what you do best.

Another 10k Apart: Create a Website in 10 KB, Win Prizes!

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In 2000, Stewart Butterfield launched the original 5k competition to celebrate the merits of simplicity and brevity in web design. Ten years later, An Event Apart joined forces with Microsoft to launch the first 10k Apart, adding progressive enhancement, accessibility, and responsive design to the mix. Now, An Event Apart and Microsoft Edge are back with an even tougher challenge: design a compelling experience that can be delivered in 10 KB or less and works without JavaScript.

Finding Opportunities in the Mistakes We Make

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You flung yourself headlong into your career. Suddenly you realize you’re barely keeping your head above water and you’re not even sure where you’re going. Time to reflect, says Clarice Bouwer, and do some small experiments designed to find the course corrections that will get you back on solid ground.

Strategies for Healthier Dev

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Chen Hui Jing played basketball full-time for many years before teaching herself web development. So she knows a thing or two about fitness, and has learned how to port its lessons to a more sedentary lifestyle. Pulling together an impressive array of research, Chen suggests that brute discipline may not be the best way for knowledge workers to approach fitness. She proposes gentler strategies that will keep us alive and well and doing the work we love for years to come.

The Future of the Web

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Is the web’s way forward to be defined by a bunch of renegade mavericks armed with Flash or JavaScript? Matt Griffin argues that it may not be so bad to let web authors kludge together the things they’d like to build, and follow where their mistakes lead us.

Promoting a Design System Across Your Products

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Our industry has gotten really good at making living style guides out of parts: reusable components like color, typography, buttons and forms, voice and tone. We’ve also learned how to map skills to these parts by mobilizing the best people to make decisions across platforms. But, argues Nathan Curtis, a third element is crucial to any design system mission: products. What products will use our system? How will we involve them?

Looking for “Trouble”

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Venting isn’t exactly an innocent activity. Rolling our eyes at a struggling client—no matter how justified we may think we are—hints at a skewed sense of entitlement. It means we’ve forgotten that our experience working with others reflects their experience working with us. Orr Shtuhl shares how the team at Blenderbox changed their “venting culture” to proactively hunt for subtle flags of distress and take responsibility for their clients’ side of the experience.