107 lines
5.5 KiB
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107 lines
5.5 KiB
Plaintext
Net Noodlings with Nathan logo
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[1] Net Noodlings with Nathan [2]
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Archive
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July 1, 2024
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Just Dü It and The Legend of Link
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Hey friends,
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How many ears does Captain Kirk have?
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Three. The left ear, the right ear, and the final front-ear. 🌌
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━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
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Thinking Too Hard
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This week, I've been thinking about specialist vs generalist skillsets.
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I started my career in the web industry as a hybrid designer-developer. I built
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what I designed and covered everything from UX to Visual Design to Front-End
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Development and even some server-side logic. I was able to stay on for the
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complete lifecycle of a project. Yet because of how WIDE the responsibilities
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were, it was hard to be GREAT at all parts. There was too much to cover!
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When I became a manager, it became clear that hiring generalists was even
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harder. We decided to specialize and slice the design work from our team's
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responsibilities. We had more work than we could handle and we needed ALL the
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hands we could get. Specializing let us focus on being great at something and
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more easily hire for the skills we needed.
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Fast-forward to now and we're slowly climbing out of a tech recession. Business
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is slow. RIGHT NOW it's valuable to have a wide skillset because the shape of
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the work is changing — a flexible skill set makes it easy to fit into different
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resource-shaped roles on a project.
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So where does that leave us?
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David Eisinger, Development Director at Viget, gave us some timeless advice
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recently. He shared this quote from Neal Stevenson in The Confusion:
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"Pay attention, that's all ... Notice things. Connect what you've noticed.
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Connect it into a picture. Think of how the picture might be changed; and
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act to change it. Some of your acts may turn our to have been foolish, but
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others will reward you in surprising ways; and in the meantime, simply by
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being active instead of passive, you have a kind of immunity that's hard to
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explain."
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David's point was that:
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• The most capable, most interesting, and smartest people: they want to know
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EVERYTHING, and find ways to connect them... So keep your interests super
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wide.
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• But be active. Even if it turns out not to be the right thing, doing
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something is better than nothing.
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So cast wide, be active! [5]JUST DÜ IT! Even if the shape of the work changes,
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if we're actively changing as well we'll be able to exist in those interesting
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gaps!
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Interesting Web Bits
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• A coworker of mine surfaced [6]Motion One, (which has apparently been
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around for awhile) but aims to be "the jQuery of WAAPI" (Web Animations
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API). I found WAAPI to be promising, but a bit brittle still, so it'd be
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interesting to peel this apart and find how they attempted to smooth over
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the rough parts of the API.
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• After yeeeeeeears, [7]Zelda is finally getting her own game. (Although it
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should be called the Legend of Link for consistency reasons! 😂)
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• Hugo Landau talks about the [8]demise of of the mildly dynamic website.
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• If you're looking to pick up a hobby, you could try [9]typographic knitting
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... or you could just admire what Rüdiger Schlömer creates...
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• A really neat liquid physics demo [10]but with LAYERS!
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• If you didn't see it, Figma is releasing [11]a slides builder... but it's
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not base functionality. Gotta pay, yo.
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• Remember Hypercards? No? (They were before my time too...) [12]But someone
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built a hypercard simulator.
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• [13]Fun drawing physics simulator/game/thing.
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Don't miss what's next. Subscribe to Net Noodlings with Nathan:
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[14][ ] Subscribe
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Brought to you by [16]Buttondown, the easiest way to start and grow your
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newsletter.
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References:
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[1] https://buttondown.email/nathanlong
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[2] https://buttondown.email/nathanlong#subscribe-form
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[3] https://buttondown.email/nathanlong/rss
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[4] https://buttondown.email/nathanlong/archive/
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[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
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[6] https://motion.dev/?utm_source=nathanlong&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=just-du-it-and-the-legend-of-link
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[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
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[8] https://www.devever.net/~hl/mildlydynamic?utm_source=nathanlong&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=just-du-it-and-the-legend-of-link
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[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
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[10] https://grantkot.com/ll/?utm_source=nathanlong&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=just-du-it-and-the-legend-of-link
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[11] https://www.figma.com/slides/?utm_source=nathanlong&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=just-du-it-and-the-legend-of-link
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[12] https://hcsimulator.com/?utm_source=nathanlong&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=just-du-it-and-the-legend-of-link
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[13] https://midzer.de/wasm/numptyphysics?utm_source=nathanlong&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=just-du-it-and-the-legend-of-link
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[16] https://buttondown.email/
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