Work
I’ve always been an engineer, and I’ve mostly worked in the front end/design systems niche, and that means that I have good taste when it comes to evaluating a screen or a wireframe but not necessarily the articulation of my designer peers on why it is so. A few small projects I’ve been playing with recently have been forcing me into acquiring the ability, so I’ve found myself attempting to solve a UX issue the engineering way - what is the objective best way to arrange these boxes so that the user can get the task done the easiest/with/most cognition/with least clicks? Figuring out the answer to this question is time consuming and hard to verify, so clearly I’m doing something wrong. For small/toy projects, I should probably just pick any approach and if it’s not optimal it will make itself known later? At least there will be movement.
I’m also hearing a lot of discourse about how the optimal UI patterns for most things already exist. There are lots of pattern libraries and things to refer to, but how do y’all keep track of these things? As an engineer I haven’t needed to refer to live websites too much, mostly documentation. Maybe I should use raindrop better?
Life
Goa was a dream. Landing felt familiar, and new, and like home. I ate chonak 3 times, modso 3 times, 1 bangde, 1 leppo, 1 kurli curry, 1 set of shells, 5 handmade fire-cooked makki ki rotis with sarsoon da saag and curd whose starter arrived here from Pakistan with the trains in the partition. I ate fat peanuts sent by special order from Chandigarh and til-laddu and gajak and ghar ka gajar-matar and bahar ka gajar ka halwa and hot hot puris and bihari aloo sabzi and a fanTASTIC croissant ham sandwich with plum jam and ros omelette and several kele phodi. Homecoming is meeting friends who live in your heart even if you don’t talk too much, being big spooned by a small cat, and finding uncanny comfort in should-be-new arms.
I spent Thursday evening to Tuesday morning travelling, so that is most of the week. Not much code work got done, but it was perfect for writing and thinking, which I am very pleased about.
A friend had a baby two weeks ago and I visited! How are they so small and yet somehow functional.
Health
Sleep is obviously more restive in Goa, even if it happens from 6am to noon because of late night shenanigans. What a privilege to take hearing birds chirp for granted.
Coming back home the bus took a little longer than I expected, so unfortunately I had a nausea headache that lasted most of the day yesterday, but I’m better now.
Media diet
In the last seven days I have read 4 books. How have I managed this? I was travelling and sick, remember? God forbid I read anything useful, however, this was all gay science fiction.
- Her pitiless command trilogy (Winterglass, Mirrorstrike, Shattersteel) by Benjanun Sriduangkaew: I continue to be a massive fan of her work, for she continues to follow a very successful formula - writing compelling characters set in a world where most cultures are derived from the global south, chock full of neopronouns, a word I haven’t come across before every 30 pages, and excellent smut to bookend all the action. I’m running out of things to read that she has written, so I hope she’s writing more!
- Emily Tesh’s Some desperate glory has an excellently placed trigger warning at the beginning of the book, which I really wish more publications would do. I also wish I’d found the longer content notes from the author earlier, but boy was the trepidation unfounded and the book such an excellent read. There is definitely room for the author to grow - the protagonist felt a little unidimensional even as she demonstrated growth, and other things she should have discussed - for example, clearly in the society she has built there would exist trans characters and we don’t see them, but this doesn’t take away from the conversations the book wants to have with you about authoritarian states, optimal decision making, and the fallacy of the duty of motherhood. My notes here.