vogt
vogt on Hacker News
My grandfather, Dick, was a Korea war veteran who founded a manufacturing company. He was a grizzly, old school guy with a bit of a drinking problem. As the legend goes HAM was the only thing that brought him joy. He had an entire room of the house with equipment that nobody was allowed in, until I was born (first grandchild privileges).
I always think of him when I see ham crop up online. The dish in their back yard was enormous. But yeah, in my head, ham is basically populated with guys like this, cranky old men who start ball slide part companies and smoke 2 packs a day
Yeah - all of that sounds like a pain. No argument from me. Sometimes, things rot and we have a bigger mess than before.
There are many circumstances in which a design system is at best a lateral move and at worst a huge distraction. My issue with GP sentiment is that many of the hardcore pragmatists here on this lovely discussion board have one or two bad experiences and throw the baby out with the bathwater entirely. I just wanted to be a voice on the other side of the aisle.
So have I, and they weren't. So we're no better off where we started. I at least made concessions on my side of the argument, but you are free to dig your heels in.
I hear this take often - particularly on HN - and I think that it is well off base IME. For many small + medium sized companies, sure, this can be true. For a scaled org with 10s or even 100s of teams building UI having an internal design system aligned perfectly with brand/marketing/content/accessibility makes a ton of sense.
It's not about reinventing the wheel out of ego. It's about "We have 150 dev teams and want to make sure there's a documented way that our company is aligned upon for building things like forms for our customers". How should the company consistently apply error states? What a11y affordances are we baking into our UI? Radix and shadcn provide much of that out of the box, are they doing it in such a way that complies with our internal controls?
Maybe for some managers it's about ego and ownership above all else. Yes, those teams probably should be using MUI, or a themed Radix, or something. But those managers are going to suck no matter what.
Can't believe I'm saying it but twitter has become the main spot for me. Read.cv as others have pointed out is also good. Way less signal and noise than X of course, but the content is almost always very high quality.
Yes. Why care about the factual accuracy/level of insight/caliber of the content I put out when the only thing that matters is that it gets seen?
Agree on desktop, not so much on mobile
The cipher is for any email spam crawlers, not hiding my identity. Pretty common practice on this site.
if the author of this has any interest in collaborating with a designer please let me know. Huge fan of this and would be happy to contribute. peter at peter[HNusername].co
Heh, that sounds _exactly_ like my feed as well. There also is a calendar of dogs pooping that I've gotten about a hundred times. Seeking Arrangements also showing me tons of ads despite the fact that I make it no secret that I'm happily married on twitter, which is funny too.
Design twitter is still very hot which is why I recently rejoined, to connect with more folks in my industry. But the ads(and bots) definitely seem like a much worse problem than when I had an account in 2016.
>CEO said there'll be no severance or healthcare.
Classy. Learning a lot about how certain people treat their employees during these last couple of admittedly insane years. Good for future reference, I guess - though not much solace now. I feel for the employees.
That sounds cool. I'm glad you remember it fondly - not to gripe among the privileged, but I have never worked in a cool office like that. With all of the endlessly discussed disadvantages and implications (maybe the employer is doing it so you're secretly expected to be there absurd hours, whatever, I don't know), I do always wonder what it would have been like to have spent some of my career anywhere besides my house and a building out of "Office Space".
At this phase, to your point, it's the commute for me. 15-20 sounds perfect, I can't do 1 hour anymore.
Worst commute I ever had was fresh out of school, I worked briefly as a contractor at SimpliSafe when they were 6 people in an office. I would walk a mile from my apartment in Attleboro, MA to the MBTA commuter rail station, 45 minutes into South Station, change to the green line, change to the red line at Park St, 20-30minutes to Inman Square, then walk another, I don't know. 20 minutes? So, depending on the day - which trains I caught, how congested the T was, somewhere in the neighborhood of 1h45m - 2h15m, one way? In January in Cambridge MA - yeesh!
On some level I regret not sticking around, I didn't last long and boy did they blow up. I probably would have died on that commute at some point from a heart attack at 22, though.
My hunch is that on some level, it is. The CEO of this company has a place out where I live in the middle of nowhere, and owns a bar in a nearby town pop. ~500 or something like that. I follow the bar on Instagram because I do think it is neat - it's been around like 100 years and is falling apart but has a very cool charm to it. Every time they open the bar when he is in town and post videos, it seems like a big Burning Man hangout. The type of people you describe are often tourists around here.
Yes, practical exposure to any industry - particularly ones the teenager has an interest in - is a great thing.
I went to what was called a “vocational” high school in the US. In schools like this you rotate between a week of academic class and a week of your chosen specialization. Every week for four years. I was in the “graphic design and publishing” shop so I was learning Photoshop, Illustrator and running offset lithographic printers (small ones lol) with actual industry vets. Other students had auto body, facilities management, electrical, cosmetology, nursing. Freshman year is called your “exploratory” year, where you select something like ~8 of the available trades the school has on offer, with the end goal being you try them and figure out which to commit to. I remember going through Culinary Arts and nearly spilling a bowl of hot soup all over a table of elderly people. That line of work was never in the cards for me.
I’m not in graphic design anymore and “desktop publishing” barely exists as it did then, but the path certainly lead me to where I am today. I have NO clue what I’d be doing without that education.
The closest thing I have found is ReelGood. They let you pick all your services and search, browse, and whatever selection you make in opens a new link. Not perfect but pretty good. Plex are attempting something similar but I was less impressed when I tried theirs. that was over a year ago, though
Pretty cool. I lived out that way for a bit in the early 2010s (Abrams + Munger). I take it you're from Garland originally, or did you grow up in the city?
Wow, this is a great blast from the past. I grew up on the road where this airport
http://www.airfields-freeman.com/MA/Airfields_MA_C.htm#norfo... was. You would walk right out our front door and the field with runways was right in front of you. I vividly remember being about 6-7 years old (so, 1993-1994) and seeing a plane crash in the field. Was hoping to find mention of it but didn't see any. Either way, total nostalgia flood. Simpler times. Thanks OP!
And police force, who are not burdened by the demands / low staffing DPD are.
This is pretty cool. May buy one and will provide feedback if I do.
Yeah, you see a similar phenomenon in the northeastern US. Places like New Bedford and Lowell, Massachusetts were doing much better when whaling and textiles were in their golden years. Now, not so much.
Location: middle of nowhere Texas, USA
Remote: Preferred
Willing to relocate: prefer not but will consider Austin, TX
Technologies: Figma, Design Systems, UX research + design, a11y, CSS/SCSS, Es6, React, SolidJS, Git
Resume: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bQaEb_BpW_WlpoRX3V2_CmX1MFx...
Portfolio/personal site https://petervogt.co
email: peter at peter[myHNusername].co
Design systems lead looking for a new home. 10 years experience in design, legit front-end dev skills as well. Previously worked in venture capital, lead design at a YCW15 batch startup, consulting, and lead design systems at USAA
I was a console and laptop guy for my whole life, built my first PC I think age 32-33. It was initially daunting but /r/BuildaPC and analyzing many builds on PCPartpicker.com really helped. I also had a couple of people at work who helped me physically assemble it, which was huge.
Honestly, it's much more straightforward than it seems when you think about how complex PC internals seem without much prior knowledge. I would say find some builds you like on PCPartPicker.com and try to emulate them. When it comes to assembling specific parts together, find YouTube videos that closely emulate your setup. For example, the last PC I built used a Lian Li mini case which is very small and can only house very specific sizes of some parts (mainly MoBo and power supply). But it's a very popular case, so there were a ton of very detailed youtube videos on doing a Lian Li mini build. That stuff really helps.
Another thing, highly recommend getting some type of screwdriver / tool kit like this: https://www.ifixit.com/products/mako-driver-kit-64-precision.... I am sure some frugal stickler will come along and tell me why I am dumb for overpaying for this kit, but I really enjoy the convenience factor and did not exactly have a robust set of hand tools laying around - which I expect is the case for many building their first PC.
Yeah I went from Vyvanse to XR to IR over the last 7 years and am happy with IR. I feel as though my ADHD symptoms are mitigated appropriately and the side effects are virtually non existent. Vyvanse was great for productivity but I felt like an absolute laser-focused robot and was not at all pleasant to be around.
I know you were being tongue in cheek, but I am pretty sure this launched right around 2017. In fact, I don't think it's been updated since. I always thought this was a really great idea, but I admit it is strange seeing it crop up again now (looking exactly as it did years ago).
The last sentence summarizes all of this thread perfectly IMO.
Without giving away too much detail I’d ask if that designer is a one person or very small department? That would be my guess. It makes these arguments a lot easier to win if you have a mature design practice with good leadership who can say “What biz/sales/product are asking for is not feasible as it violates our established criteria for dark patterns”.
This is, of course, toothless in small or medium sized orgs that only maybe have a few floating designers, for example.
Agreed 100%. Most of the comments here conflate the work of designers with stuff they are _compelled_ to do by marketing, PMs looking to pad their KPIs, “growth” departments (is that term even around anymore), or in many startups cases, bad CEO/head of product decisions. I have been in the design industry as a working professional for over a decade and have never, ever met a designer who willingly implemented a dark pattern.
I have, however:
-Had a VP who insisted I styled the unsubscribe link to our paid subscriptions 10px font and deliberately violate WCAG contrast guidelines (not that he could be bothered to learn or listen on what that means, he just wanted it invisible)
-Had a founder ask me to deliberately bury an app settings button in the primary menu three layers deep to (aspire to) throw folks off the trail of account deletion
And I could go on like this.
I live out here. 10 miles may as well be an inch. It is VAST.
All of the towns around here have a population of 2000 or less, save for Alpine at a whopping 20k. Personally, I have zero concerns about being in the radius of any of all that.
We loved it so much we moved out here. Couldn’t be happier. Weather is great, people are friendly. No Uber Eats but in the long run that is a net positive I think. this part of Texas is certainly the best in my eyes and one of the best parts of the whole country.
My good-faith two cents: one step is better than zero here, even if this isn’t, as you plainly state, much more than a hollow gesture. I doubt Amazon senior leadership are thrilled that this has been in the headlines since this past weekend.