buttondown-email-hoyklb.txt (5613B)
1 Net Noodlings with Nathan logo 2 [1] Net Noodlings with Nathan [2] 3 Subscribe 4 [3] 5 RSS 6 [4] 7 Archive 8 July 1, 2024 9 10 Just Dü It and The Legend of Link 11 12 Hey friends, 13 14 How many ears does Captain Kirk have? 15 16 Three. The left ear, the right ear, and the final front-ear. 🌌 17 18 ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 19 20 Thinking Too Hard 21 22 This week, I've been thinking about specialist vs generalist skillsets. 23 24 I started my career in the web industry as a hybrid designer-developer. I built 25 what I designed and covered everything from UX to Visual Design to Front-End 26 Development and even some server-side logic. I was able to stay on for the 27 complete lifecycle of a project. Yet because of how WIDE the responsibilities 28 were, it was hard to be GREAT at all parts. There was too much to cover! 29 30 When I became a manager, it became clear that hiring generalists was even 31 harder. We decided to specialize and slice the design work from our team's 32 responsibilities. We had more work than we could handle and we needed ALL the 33 hands we could get. Specializing let us focus on being great at something and 34 more easily hire for the skills we needed. 35 36 Fast-forward to now and we're slowly climbing out of a tech recession. Business 37 is slow. RIGHT NOW it's valuable to have a wide skillset because the shape of 38 the work is changing — a flexible skill set makes it easy to fit into different 39 resource-shaped roles on a project. 40 41 So where does that leave us? 42 43 David Eisinger, Development Director at Viget, gave us some timeless advice 44 recently. He shared this quote from Neal Stevenson in The Confusion: 45 46 "Pay attention, that's all ... Notice things. Connect what you've noticed. 47 Connect it into a picture. Think of how the picture might be changed; and 48 act to change it. Some of your acts may turn our to have been foolish, but 49 others will reward you in surprising ways; and in the meantime, simply by 50 being active instead of passive, you have a kind of immunity that's hard to 51 explain." 52 53 David's point was that: 54 55 • The most capable, most interesting, and smartest people: they want to know 56 EVERYTHING, and find ways to connect them... So keep your interests super 57 wide. 58 • But be active. Even if it turns out not to be the right thing, doing 59 something is better than nothing. 60 61 So cast wide, be active! [5]JUST DÜ IT! Even if the shape of the work changes, 62 if we're actively changing as well we'll be able to exist in those interesting 63 gaps! 64 65 ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 66 67 Interesting Web Bits 68 69 • A coworker of mine surfaced [6]Motion One, (which has apparently been 70 around for awhile) but aims to be "the jQuery of WAAPI" (Web Animations 71 API). I found WAAPI to be promising, but a bit brittle still, so it'd be 72 interesting to peel this apart and find how they attempted to smooth over 73 the rough parts of the API. 74 • After yeeeeeeears, [7]Zelda is finally getting her own game. (Although it 75 should be called the Legend of Link for consistency reasons! 😂) 76 • Hugo Landau talks about the [8]demise of of the mildly dynamic website. 77 • If you're looking to pick up a hobby, you could try [9]typographic knitting 78 ... or you could just admire what Rüdiger Schlömer creates... 79 • A really neat liquid physics demo [10]but with LAYERS! 80 • If you didn't see it, Figma is releasing [11]a slides builder... but it's 81 not base functionality. Gotta pay, yo. 82 • Remember Hypercards? No? (They were before my time too...) [12]But someone 83 built a hypercard simulator. 84 • [13]Fun drawing physics simulator/game/thing. 85 86 Don't miss what's next. Subscribe to Net Noodlings with Nathan: 87 [14][ ] Subscribe 88 Brought to you by [16]Buttondown, the easiest way to start and grow your 89 newsletter. 90 91 References: 92 93 [1] https://buttondown.email/nathanlong 94 [2] https://buttondown.email/nathanlong#subscribe-form 95 [3] https://buttondown.email/nathanlong/rss 96 [4] https://buttondown.email/nathanlong/archive/ 97 [5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmO_fnFM49k&utm_source=nathanlong&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=just-du-it-and-the-legend-of-link 98 [6] https://motion.dev/?utm_source=nathanlong&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=just-du-it-and-the-legend-of-link 99 [7] https://www.theverge.com/24180615/legend-of-zelda-echoes-of-wisdom-trailer-nintendo-direct?utm_source=nathanlong&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=just-du-it-and-the-legend-of-link 100 [8] https://www.devever.net/~hl/mildlydynamic?utm_source=nathanlong&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=just-du-it-and-the-legend-of-link 101 [9] https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2024/05/type-knitting-rudiger-schlomer/?utm_source=nathanlong&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=just-du-it-and-the-legend-of-link 102 [10] https://grantkot.com/ll/?utm_source=nathanlong&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=just-du-it-and-the-legend-of-link 103 [11] https://www.figma.com/slides/?utm_source=nathanlong&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=just-du-it-and-the-legend-of-link 104 [12] https://hcsimulator.com/?utm_source=nathanlong&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=just-du-it-and-the-legend-of-link 105 [13] https://midzer.de/wasm/numptyphysics?utm_source=nathanlong&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=just-du-it-and-the-legend-of-link 106 [16] https://buttondown.email/