Kernings & Chrome

User Experiences I come across every day. Good, bad, and ugly.

[hidrees]

In honor of dusting off my Tumblr, here’s the little ad-free call-out I got when I logged back in. B- on font color/background choice, A+ for emoji usage.

[tariqramadan]

A being will live what others have already experienced, the days will repeat themselves, experiences will be similar, as will the questions, the doubts and the suffering … we will even return to our place of origin, to ourselves, but nothing – the self, the questions, the experiences or the quest – will ever be the same. The quest for meaning, which is always begun again by every human intellect, is to human consciousness what a fingerprint is to the body: shared by all, and unique to every individual. A universal singularity.

Tariq Ramadan (via tariqramadan)

[bijan]

Only on Twitter

I am often asked about Twitter’s prospects in a world of Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat.

While those services are all popular products, they aren’t Twitter.

Twitter is the only place to have an open public conversation. Comments on Instagram posts are fine but limited to the author and the commenter at best. The commenter is subordinate to the author. There isn’t a public conversation with snapchat stories. And Facebook is really about private conversations.

A good recent example happened yesterday. I am excited about the new AppleTV because it’s now open for developers. I tweeted that out.

My friend @fredwilson tweeted back with a counter argument and we had a fun and interesting back and forth. A few other jumped into the mix which was great. Then @pmarca retweeted one of my replies which expanded the public conversation and the public discourse continued.

There are many things I love about Twitter. The people. The simplicity. The immediacy. The transparency. The mission. The community. That blue bird.

But the dynamic, public conversation experience is uniquely Twitter.

There is nothing else like it.

❤️

[meninthistown]

Bubs.

[avianawareness]

(via The Pencilsword: On a plate - The Wireless)

This is amazing.

[oldmanyellsatcloud]

Wow. I’ve never seen a comic tastefully handle how both sides of the coin can hurt themselves like this.

[hidrees]

Baked potatoes at Summerhill Market

[hidrees]

I went to my very first press approval at Somerset Graphics this morning. Just happened to have my camera at hand and took shots of some of the projects there.

[hidrees]

You find Inkwell, the true black-and-white Instagram filter, beautiful? Sorry: Instagram photos filtered with the purplish monochrome Willow get way more hearts than Inkwell photos. I’m just saying. I mean, it’s just data.

[allenlau]

Time Management

As I mentioned before, I write daily on “Allen’s Thoughts”, my Wattpad internal blog.  Many people ask me what I write on “Allen’s Thoughts”.  Well, join Wattpad and you will find out :-)  “Allen’s Thoughts” covers a wide range of topics about the company and everyone in the company can participate through comments.  

Also, quite a few people asked me if I can share them on Making Things Out Of Nothing.  Although I do want to cross post on here, sadly many of the posts are not suitable for externally consumption.  

But it is not all or nothing.  I will sharing some of the posts here.  Today I will starting with “Time Management” that I shared with the Wattpad team a few Fridays ago.

—

It’s Friday.  I am going to pick a lighter topic today.  In one of the 1:1s, one of you asked me how I manage my time.  While I wouldn’t claim I am an expert in time management, I do put a very high value on time.  We’re all given the same 24 hours in a day.  What you do with it, how you spend it, invest it and how you let it leak away is entirely up to you.

Here is another way to think about it:  Other companies have 8386 hours until the end of the year to complete their 2015 company goals.  So do we.  Using our time wisely can give us an unfair advantage.

Here is how I manage my time.  To be respectful to your time, I will keep it down to just over 10 bullet points (and max 140 characters each):

- My calendar won’t lie.  Be very disciplined about it.  The most important task(s) should get the lions share. - I can always find ways to further optimize.  I constantly do a “post mortem” with myself so that I can “waste less time” in the future. - Avoid “fear of missing out” or FOMO.  You won’t miss the next “FB just acquired WhatsApp”. - Keep your notification to the absolute minimal.  You are not obliged to react to every push notification. - Set a time limit.  Even for important tasks.  e.g. our 30-minute 1-on-1s forced us to make good use of time. - Don’t let other people drive your priorities but still be supportive to your colleagues, users and customers (remember to set the right expectations). - Don’t be afraid to say no.  I have a “politely say no” Gmail template and I use it frequently. - Focus on what needs to get done rather than what you love to do.  Hopefully they should be the same but in many cases they might be different. - Make full use of your fragmented time.  You can always find a task that can fit into that 2 minutes while waiting in line. - Ignore the spammers or unsolicited email. - Give yourself a (small) quota of how many Internet posts (images, articles etc.) that you would read.  There is unlimited content out there.  You can’t finish them all. - You don’t need to read the full posts.  In many cases, just read the headline is fine. - Don’t click on anything from BuzzFeed despite the “5 things you don’t want to miss” subject line.

Everyone is different so what works for me might not work for you.  It will be great if you can  share your tips here so that we can all learn from each other!

[hidrees]

Allen on time management.

I will say that I'm guilty of reading and sharing some BuzzFeed stuff though.

[hidrees]

Books, books, books, books

On average, I read about 120 books a year. I topped at ~200 in 2011 when I was on co-op and had a long commute to work. I maintain a database of all the books I've read on my iMac. I hope to organize it and put it up on the Internet some day.

I read most of my waking hours when I'm not working, eating, hanging out, or sleeping. I don't sleep a lot. This gives me a lot more time to read. The stuff I read ranges from books to news to press stories and biographies. Complete books are the only ones that qualify for my official count. i.e., I don't count news articles or similarly sized electronic reading as a book.

I get asked for book recommendations a lot. One day, I decided to start a tumblog of book reviews. That blog lives here. Every couple of weeks, I realize I haven't posted a review in a while and I sit down and pump out a bunch for my queue. (Un)fortunately, I never get around to writing a review for most of the books I read.

[hidrees]

Just realized Tumblr changed its font. I must not have been in my dashboard in quite a while to miss something like that.

[hidrees]

Two Weeks at BuzzFeed • Cap Watkins

As one could probably guess, I’ve been a little heads-down the last couple of weeks on-boarding at my shiny new job. Luckily, I have friends like Hunter, who remind me to come up for air, look around and think about what I’ve been experiencing.... | Cap Watkins | Sr. Product Design Manager at Etsy. Formerly at Amazon, Formspring and Zoosk. Draws pretty pictures on the Internet all day.

Not asking for permission feels weird. This is one of those things I super didn’t see coming. I’m so used to having someone around to thumbs-up decisions and all of a sudden I find myself as that person. It’s been a little unnerving - like having the net pulled out from under the tightrope. I still ask for people’s opinions and get feedback on what I’m doing, but being the final call is a very different feeling than I thought it would be. While I’m definitely enjoying the good parts about it, I also now really appreciate the need to build strong, autonomous teams and mentor great managers who can run the show together.

^ This really hit close to home for me. One of the big changes in my new role is the total freedom to thumbs up/thumbs down things. The team at Wealthsimple is incredibly generous with their feedback, but also extremely trusting of my abilities. I couldn't have asked for better people to be working with.

[indianajosh]

To suggest that this is about irreconcilable values, an attack against the freedom of speech and expression is a farce. It is also a corpulent, untruthful summation of European values, which are liberal only when it benefits those in power.

It is a criminal offense to deny the holocaust in Western Europe. In France in particular, religious attire of a certain type is unlawful. The colour of your skin in Germany or the wrong amount of facial hair on the wrong skin colour in Belgium can undermine your opportunities for employment, earning a promotion or renting an apartment.

Non-European values are unwelcome here in the land of liberty.

[…]

Lives have been lost, as hundreds and thousands are every day in cities and towns and villages across the globe – to crime, war, disease and famine. Yet, how is it that these daily routines do not set in motion immediate meta-narratives of human incompatibility? Is it because these happen in towns with names like Bangui or Beni, where life is cheap and ideology irrelevant?

A lot of good gems in this piece. Basically, this is a conversation about cultural hegemony and the resonant forces of imperialism and colonialism, not some reductive Huntingtonesque “Clash of Civilizations” or an attack on some European post-Englightenment values bullshit. It’s 2015 (what does that even mean? It just sounds important to state the year, okay?), let’s be better.

[hidrees]

I'd like to live to see the day when a murderous crime happens somewhere in the world and Muslims don't feel obligated to condemn it on every form of social media. The double standards have got to stop.

Enough.

[hidrees]

One bit of advice: it is important to view knowledge as sort of a semantic tree -- make sure you understand the fundamental principles, ie the trunk and big branches, before you get into the leaves/details or there is nothing for them to hang on to.

-- Elon Musk, Reddit AMA

[hidrees]

This is the bit.ly empty state for when your link has yet to get any clicks. Puffer fish everywhere!

[hidrees]

A cat met up with a big male rat in the attic and chased him into a corner. The rat, trembling, said, 'Please don't eat me, Mr. Cat. I have to go back to my family. I have hungry children waiting for me. Please let me go.' The cat said, 'Don't worry, I won't eat you. To tell you the truth, I can't say this too loudly, but I'm a vegetarian. I don't eat any meat. You were lucky to run into me.' The rat said, 'Oh, what a wonderful day! What a lucky rat I am to meet with a vegetarian cat!' But the very next second, the cat pounced on the rat, held him down with his claws, and sank his sharp teeth into the rat's throat. With his last, painful breath, the rat asked him, 'But Mr. Cat, didn't you say you're a vegetarian and don't eat any meat? Were you lying to me?' The cat licked his chops and said, 'True, I don't eat meat. That was no lie. I'm going to take you home in my mouth and trade you for lettuce.'

-- Tamaru in 1Q84, by Haruki Murakami

[hidrees]

Designers who can go deep in technology like a computer scientist, and who can also understand people like a social scientist, are the designers who can think and create at the scale of millions of users. They are the ones who can manage the shifting standards and technologies that seemingly change every week. They are the ones the world needs right now.

-- John Maeda