Jason Wilkens

Quality is a trap

Like cicadas emerging from the ground, design industry conversations about quality seem to periodically erupt on social media. Also like cicadas, these thinkpieces are as predicable as they are irritating.

ericwbailey.website • 7m read

‘What Resembles The Grave But Isn’t’

April is National Poetry Month, and we’re celebrating by featuring examples of “civic” poetry from new and familiar voices. Throughout the month we’ll be discussing what it means to be civic through the art of words. Join us on Twitter at #civicpoetry.

billmoyers.com • 2m read

The World's Most Satisfying Checkbox

Let's be honest, apps have become boring. A few months ago we set out to build an app to help you build better habits. Secretly, however, we wanted to see if we could transform the most un-fun kind of app (self-improvement) into something deeper and more meaningful.

andy.works

Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Aviation

At FlightAware, our software needs to gracefully handle all sorts of weird and wonderful situations. While we as engineers might hope for aviation data to be clean and well-standardized, the real world is messy.

flightaware.engineering • 4m read

Looking elsewhere.

There’s a word in the Welsh language that you might have come across, part of that wonderful class of words that defy direct one-to-one translation into English: Hiraeth. Broadly speaking, hiraeth is a deep sense of longing for some other time, people or place where you felt at home.

robbowen.digital • 13m read

How to Do Soul-Craft with State Tools

We seem to be grieving literacy in public lately. Thoughtful essays keep appearing—in The Guardian, The Atlantic, and across this platform—all asking why reading now feels so difficult, for ourselves or for our students. A shared anguish runs through these pieces, and rightly so.

jacmullen.substack.com • 8m read

React Router RSC Preview

tl;dr React Router has preview support for RSC! RSC content from loaders/actions in existing routes RSC-first "Server Component Routes" Client components with "use client" Server Functions with "use server" Check out the demo Middleware for batching and caching queries Stable release blocked by RSC

remix.run • 9m read

Only Five People Have Seen This New Impossible Color

There are only so many colors that the typical human eye can see; estimates put the number just below 10 million. But now, for the first time, scientists say they’ve broken out of that familiar spectrum and into a new world of color.

scientificamerican.com • 5m read

React for Two Computers

I’ve been trying to write this post at least a dozen times. I don’t mean this figuratively; at one point, I literally had a desktop folder with a dozen abandoned drafts.

overreacted.io • 72m read

You should know this before choosing Next.js

Picking the technology stack for a project is an important and consequential decision.

eduardoboucas.com

Iosevka

Terminal emulators have a stricter compatibility requirements for fonts. Therefore, Iosevka and Iosevka Slab all contain two specialized families, Term and Fixed, targeting terminal users. In these families, the symbols will be narrower to follow terminals’ ideology of column count.

typeof.net

Using Shaderview directly in a browser:

Method 1: Use a local copy of the files: Download the minified JavaScript module, save it locally, import the element and register it: <script type="module"> import ShaderviewElement from './path/to/element.js'; customElements.

keithclark.github.io • 3m read

Your App Should Have Been A Website (And Probably Your Game Too)

The smartphone boom changed everything. Suddenly, apps were everywhere, connecting people, solving problems, and entertaining us. But for a while now, they’ve started to feel more like a burden than a blessing.

rogueengine.io • 6m read

OKLCH, explained for designers

OKLCH is a new color space that improves design and development with a wider color gamut. Learn why it's the new standard for web colors. Last week, TailwindCSS released their v4 version with revamped color tokens using OKLCH.

desktopofsamuel.com • 3m read

Moving on from 18F.

Note: This post gets into the last few weeks of American politics. If that’s not your cup of tea, or if that’s a stressful topic for you, please feel free to skip this one. (Also, it’s a bit long. Sorry about that.) Last week, I finished my tenure as a designer at 18F.

ethanmarcotte.com • 10m read

Aspect Ratio Changes With CSS View Transitions

So here I am playing with CSS view transitions (again). I’ve followed Dave’s instructions for transitioning the page generally and am now working on individual pieces of UI specifically.

blog.jim-nielsen.com • 2m read

Components AI — A new way to explore generative design systems

Build custom design tools without writing any code. Create responsive components, pages, and sites that you can use in any type of web project. Style markup templates with curated themes or your own design tokens. Import or define design tokens to use in all of your designs.

components.ai

Introducing Ombré...

And then I stumbled my way into . While it's still very early on in development, here was a paradigm that made shader programming feel more like writing regular JavaScript code.

ombre-ui.com • 3m read

Hey, it's Jason

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