1,600 karma · joined June 29, 2011
... a whistle stop tour around the research basis for a lot of claims around data viz best practice (esp interesting re the dogma around not using pie charts which seems to be a consistent bugbear of designers going back to the 1930's but around which the research is inconclusive at best)
[edit: fixed a typo]
A more indepth look at the claims and counter claims... https://www.carbonbrief.org/factcheck-scientists-pour-cold-w...
>On business letters, order forms and websites, you must show:
>the company’s registered number >its registered office address >where the company is registered (England and Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland) >the fact that it’s a limited company (usually by spelling out the company’s full name including ‘Limited’ or ‘Ltd’)
https://www.gov.uk/running-a-limited-company/signs-stationer...
This change to Figma makes me less likely to choose it as my primary tool either as a designer or a developer. Though I guess this is a minority position as I'm compelled to use it all the time as Figma's become a kind of defacto standard in many sectors these days.
I read the article and didn't find it convincing, I would argue that it's clearly not always the most important thing. This isn't an "excuse" it's a calculation that teams make, the author feels that people make the tradeoff at the wrong point but instead of making that argument he frames decisions not to prioritise performance as "excuses" which is bullshit. There's always more performance optimisations one can make and there always comes a point where it just doesn't make sense to do so for all manner of reasons.
A trivial example: I have a script which downloads a few thousand GIS Shape files and converts them into geoJSON. It runs automatically once a month, usually whilst I sleep. A run takes about 5 minutes at the moment but there are a couple of things I could do to make it run in a fraction of that time but then the script would be two or three times longer and more complex, and I'd have to spend a couple of hours writing and testing code, (there'd also be some edge cases that I'd need to account for which the current setup allows me to ignore). I judge that to be a waste of time which would make anyone who has to take ownership of this script in the future's life more difficult. So that's my "excuse" and I'm sticking to it.
Truly a moral void.
> "The library for web and native user interfaces"
_A_ library, it's _a_ library not _the_ library.
Tangent: the idea that "we all agreed to say no thanks to that" is kind of symptomatic of broader issues I have with web dev. i.e. that there's very little recognition that different tools have different uses and knowing when to pick which is part of the job. Working with wood you wouldn't apply the same practices and methods to building the timber frame of 2 story house as you would to making an intricately carved toy elephant. Why when working with the materials of the web, HTML/CSS/JS, do we assume there's a best and right why to do it: "you must write tests!", "avoid using z-index!", "separate content and form", "immutable state!"; these are all the right answer in some situation and not in others.