Thursday snack-time thought: Chunky peanut butter should clearly be cheaper than smooth since they did less work to make it.

When evaluating code remember you are viewing someone’s compromises not their plans. Assume good intent.

Introducing the Button element – HankChizlJaw hankchizljaw.io/wrote/introducin…

🆒

But if you’re using an Amazon Aurora managed database its dead simple to spin up read replicas so your site doesn’t fall over because you have too many bloated SQL queries overwhelming your poor database. So that’s cool.

Our site talking to the database: “Gimmie some of that sweet, sweet UTF8 characters…”
Database: “Ok here ya go, I left out those 4-byte characters for ya since you didn’t ask for them”
Website: **Emojis are displayed as ???**
The Rest of the Internet: “This site sucks”

Cooool so long story short not only does your database need the proper character encoding but the thing talking to your database needs to ask for data using the same character set. I guess that is better than just outright failing…

Our database is set to UTF8mb4 which can handle storing 4-byte characters (aka emojis basically). But clients accessing the database can specify what character set they understand.

One of the most boring topics on earth is design systems.

Today I learned databases and character encodings are hard.

Someone is locked out of Slack so someone else is relaying communications from them via a Google Doc.

Slack.docx

World’s Oldest Torrent Still Alive After 15 Years dlvr.it/QlnsBf

Web design is coming full circle. #javascriptmousetrails twitter.com/ricardomendieta/stat…

I’m sorry NO. One of the worst parts of my time at Apple was the toxic culture this line of thinking bred. Swearing at and insulting people’s work is not okay and is never helpful. Criticism for criticism’s sake is a power move. twitter.com/kocienda/status/1045…

Rebranding web rings as “the blogchain”. Looking for investors.

Picture it: A tech conference where they give out 7,000 winter jackets to the homeless instead of 7,000 backpacks to people that already have 7,000 conference backpacks.

The worst is when you need to enter your password to allow a program to do something and then it pops up a confirmation dialog to let you know again.

The best feature of macOS Mojave is the list of recently opened apps that aren’t part of your Dock. I dig it.

How do you get design teams to adhere to a style guide? How do you know when to break it? I wrote about a simple solution we created at BuzzFeed:

medium.com/@cap/the-design-syste…

* Holding tissue to 3-year olds nose *
Me: Blow

3-year old sucks air in

Me: Blow

3-year old sucks air in

Me: Blow out, not suck in

3-year old: I can’t do it

Me: …

How do you teach that?