Previously… Edge Conference released their panellist lineup, and it was exclusively white male at the time of announcement. This didn’t go down well in some quarters. Matt Andrews wrote Diversity in tech: still an issue in 2013? and many supportive and dismayed tweets followed.
I’m not here to defend Edge Conf but I hope that as someone who speaks at conferences I can add a little something to the debate. Obviously being a white, male, conference speaker I have some self-interest in this, but I also hope that doesn’t preclude me from having an opinion; I’ve already had one reply to a comment I made on Twitter which said “your tweet would be interesting if you weren’t a white dude” – despite a white dude’s blog post kicking this whole thing off…
It’s almost the end of 2012 and I’m winding down for the holidays, so in lieu of new content I thought I’d share a few interesting quotations I’ve seen/heard/read recently, on professionalism, pride in your work, and being creative. Cheers to you all, see you in 2013.
Aesthetics are your problem and mine. Nobody else’s. I want everything we do – that I do personally, that our office does – to be beautiful. I don’t give a damn whether the client understands that that’s worth anything, or whether the client thinks it’s worth anything, or whether it is worth anything; it’s worth it to me. It’s the way I want to live my life. I want to make beautiful things, even if nobody cares.
Once [Steve Jobs and his adoptive father Paul] were building a fence. And [Paul] said, “You got to make the back of the fence that nobody will see just as good looking as the front of the fence. Even though nobody will see it, you will know, and that will show that you’re dedicated to making something perfect.”
To be really creative you have to deal with loneliness and pointlessness and you need to be brutally honest and critical of your own thoughts and actions. It’s what makes great creators, inventors and entrepreneurs.
As I’m sure you’re aware, Opera recently released a preview build of their browser Mobile Emulator which is notable largely because they’ve aliased a group of -webkit- prefixed properties, effectively supporting another vendors supposedly proprietary code in their own.
One more post about things I’ve written elsewhere, then I’ll be back to writing original content here again…
Another pair of articles by me got published today; they’re both introduction-level:
Adventures In The Third Dimension, on Smashing Magazine, is a beginners guide to CSS 3D Transforms, explaining the syntax with a few demos; and for Ubelly I wrote The Five-Minute Guide to CSS Animations, which does the same job for CSS Animations.
I’ve an article coming up for .net Magazine soon; it’s called 10 CSS Techniques for 2012, it’ll be the cover article, and I’m very excited about as I wrote it in collaboration with Andreas Johansson, Harry Roberts, Lea Verou, Nicolas Gallagher, and Paul Adam Davis, all of whom do great work.
After that I have two more articles to write, should be tech editing a book on CSS3, then probably starting work on my own second book. 2012 is going to be a very busy year.
I’ve been writing some articles for different websites in the latter half of this year, and it strikes me that I haven’t done a very good job of promoting them on here. So please allow me to correct that, with this brief rundown in reverse chronological order.
I’ve put together my list of the 20 Best CSS Sites of 2011 for .net Magazine. Choosing only 20 turned out to be really difficult, as I wanted to get a broad range of approaches. I’m sure there are plenty I missed out, including any that aren’t in the English language.
For The Sass Way I wrote about How Sass Can Shape The Future of CSS, showing how many of the features contained in the pre-processed CSS extension are under discussion for inclusion in future versions of CSS.
Webdesigntuts+ interviewed me about my book and my opinions on CSS3, including what I’m excited about for the future, and things to beware of when using cutting-edge properties.
And again for .net Magazine I discussed The Future of CSS Layouts, a subject I’m really excited about at the moment, which led to an article that was very popular with .net’s readership.
I currently have two more articles waiting for technical review and proofreading, which I hope will see the light of day shortly, and have promised to write another two as soon as I get time (as well as one for a dead tree publication). I’m very happy to be writing about my craft, and appreciate feedback or further requests for articles from other sources – although, I won’t be able to write quite as much next year as I’m planning to start my second book.