#so i was like. learning a bit of html HAS to be easier than fighting with this stupid builder

[spark1edog]

also i’ve been in a hole for the last few days making two (2) neocities sites

[lilydalexf]

Old School X is a project interviewing X-Files fanfic authors who were posting fic during the original run of the show. New interviews are posted every Tuesday.

Interview with MustangSally

MustangSally has 33 stories at Gossamer. Even if you haven’t read it, you’ve probably heard of at least one of them, Iolokus, since it’s an X-Files fanfic classic. All her fics hit big and are well worth your time. I’ve recced some of my favorites here before, including And Dance by the Light of the Moon, All the Children are Insane, and Iolokus. Big thanks to MustangSally for doing this interview.

What's the story behind your pen name?

I could tell you but then I would have to kill you.

Does it surprise you that people are still interested in reading your X-Files fanfics and others that were posted during the original run of the show (1993-2002)?

Yes and no. Yes, because life has moved on since the early nineties and the characters and the fans are in vastly different places now. Our current tech would make the premise of the X-Files impossible. No, because of the longevity of some of the Star Trek TOS work (there’s an archive of hard copy fanzines at the University of Iowa). Top-drawer authors started out in TOS fandom.

I’m just greatly saddened that my physical body is showing wear and tear while the fic doesn’t. Fic gets to stay smooth-skinned and muscular, captured at the peak of perfection.

What do you think of when you think about your X-Files fandom experience? What did you take away from it?

At the risk of sounding atrociously trite, I think of the friends I made.  I met some very remarkable women that I’ve been able to stay friends with online for over twenty-five years.  We may have moved to Facebook and post entirely too much about our pets and which of our body parts has sagged this week, but we’re friends.  It’s a furiously funny, feminist, and well-educated group of women with jobs in the highest levels of academia, finance, communications, and media.  I’m amused by the fact that if I have a question about how a virus replicates, I can ask a PhD I’ve been drunk with in Las Vegas.

Back in the day, I had a job that sent me traveling around major cities in the US and UK. I could post on a message board and within ten minutes there were people I could go out for dinner and drinks with. We already knew we had something we could talk about for at least a couple of hours. Additionally, most of these people were women so there was an added level of security. Social media didn't really exist during the show's original run. How were you most involved with the X-Files online (atxc, message board, email mailing list, etc.)?

Well, it was mostly atxc and the Yahoo! groups mailing lists that spiraled out into Geocities sites and, eventually, LiveJournal. The amusing thing is that getting in on the ground floor of social media and the Internet has helped me get jobs!  When I look at a new piece of software, I think, ‘this is hella easier than uploading to Geocities.’  We had to walk uphill both ways, in the snow, on dial-up, fighting off dinosaurs with our AOL CDs while writing HTML code. What did you take away from your experience with X-Files fic or with the fandom in general?

DO NOT FEED THE TROLLS.

The past four years in politics have basically been the ugliest online kerfuffle the world has ever seen. I survived the Shipper Wars of ’96 and I thought those were brutal, but that was NOTHING. The only way to win an argument online is to not have the argument at all. Arguing with a troll is like mudwrestling a pig: You both get filthy and only the pig is happy.

Also, READ THE FUCKING TERMS OF SERVICE.

What was it that got you hooked on the X-Files as a show?

I had the most terrible straight-girl crush on Scully. I wanted to be her best friend, I wanted to BE her.  I wanted to order Chinese food and paint each other’s nails and talk about bones.  Scully and Princess Leia and I could all just hang out poolside with hot and cold running waiters and poolboys, drink margaritas, and bitch about how unfair it all was – if the stupid men would just get OUT OF THE WAY AND LET US DO OUR JOBS, the world would be so much better. What got you involved with X-Files fanfic?

This question is really about Iolokus, isn’t it?  You can’t fool me. [Lilydale note: I can neither confirm nor deny the motivation for this question, but I cannot complain about the answer.]

Simply put, I was enraged. The moment it was revealed that Scully’s ova had been used in experimentation, I lost my feminist mind. It was the most obscene defilement imaginable.  Scully wasn’t nearly as angry as I was.  What I thought needed to happen was for Scully to become a fiery force of vengeance against the MEN who had done this to her.  Clearly, I was not going to get that level of satisfaction from the show, as I was imagining Kali-like carnage on a global scale. I emailed RivkaT (whom I did not know well at that point) with a proposition that we work together. Strangely enough, we didn’t meet face to face until we were well into the project, but we did talk on the phone quite a bit. The rules were simple – everyone had to be punished in truly horrific ways, and at some point, we had to see if we could write a car chase (only because that seemed impossible).  Then it basically turned into a very twisted game of chicken to see who could be the most outrageous in terms of killing people off or writing really horrific things that fit within the structure of the narrative.  I did, in the end, write the car chase, but RivkaT one-upped me by throwing in a helicopter (a FOX News helicopter, at that).  

Really, RivkaT?  A helicopter? What is your relationship like now to X-Files fandom? I am terribly proud of what I wrote, pleased that it brought pain and pleasure in equal amount to people, and, again, thrilled by the people I became friends with. I admit that I stopped watching the show when Scully announced her pregnancy.  I could only see a long jump over a shark tank for the rest of the series. I haven’t watched the new episodes, either.  It is complete in my mind and doesn’t need to be continued.  I wouldn’t say no to having a reunion with some of my fic friends, although we’re still chatting online like everyone does.   Were you involved with any fandoms after the X-Files? If so, what was it like compared to X-Files?

Rivka and I wrote in the Buffy fandom for a few years, but then we moved on to real adult jobs that left absolutely no time for me to write. I’m in education, and I regularly sweat blood for fear that someone is going to find my old fic. The Buffy people were fun; there was a certain *shininess* to them that I really enjoyed. The X-men authors were just batshit and delightful, and some amazing stuff came out of Marvel fandom, particularly in the Thor/Loki and Steve/Bucky subgenres. I’ve learned to appreciate a good coffee shop AU and one famous Erik/Charles fic where all the main characters are crabs. Seriously, crabs—it’s hysterical. [Lilydale note: Other Crabs Cannot Be Trusted by groovyphilia currently has almost 2,500 kudos at AO3.]

Every few years, I’ll have a student try to explain to me what fandom is and I just smirk. Do you ever still watch The X-Files or think about Mulder and Scully? No. Not really. Do you ever still read X-Files fic? Fic in another fandom? I fell into an X-Men hole a few years back and had a great old time wallowing in the Cherik muck, and there was a flirtation with BBC Sherlock as well. Strangely enough, I became interested in A/B/O fics only because of what they were saying about the role of women in our society. The limitations on the male omegas seem absurd and then you realize those are the same limitations put on women all. the. time.

Is there a place online (tumblr, twitter, AO3, etc.) where people can find you and/or your stories now?

RivkaT very nicely formatted everything and put it up on AO3. What is your favorite of your own fics, X-Files and/or otherwise?

I will always be stupidly proud of how shocked and horrified people were by Iolokus. The truth of the matter is that Iolokus has Greek drama at its core. Scully is Medea, and the entire story is lousy with “blood on the threshing floor” and Dionysian rites. The everyday is subverted into horror, and wives and daughters will tear men limb from limb like the Maenads. Since I was ultimately disappointed with what Chris Carter did with the entire show, that approach seemed appropriate.

At a certain level, all fic is corrective fic.  Like critic Anne Jamison said, “Irritated fans produce fanfic like irritated oysters produce pearls.”  And because fic has fallen so much into women’s sphere, a pure form of correction is not just the death of the author but the MURDER, a new creation springing up from the spilled blood like Cadmus sowing dragon’s teeth.

Okay, that’s a bit much. Maybe I should just take myself back to the isle of Goth Amazons or something. Do you still write fic now? Or other creative work?

I had to write a self-evaluation and a reflection on pedagogy today. If that’s not fiction, I don’t know what the fuck is.

All my creativity is caught up in trying to pretend to be a normal middle-aged white woman so no one knows I am really a lizard.

Is there anything else you'd like to share with fans of X-Files fic?

Keep writing, keep reading, keep fighting the commercialization of narratives. As things grow more and more commodified, all our dreams and desires reduced to tchotchkes made in China, it’s a revolutionary act to separate your work from the marketplace. Be bold, take chances, turn the trope on its ear and kick it in the ass. Take everything the creators have done to make a work palatable to the unwashed masses and set it on fire.

Be subversive.

Be mean.

Have a great fucking time.

(Posted by Lilydale on March 2, 2021)

[gerbiloftriumph]

So you wanna be a king

Or perhaps just cosplay one.

By request, here’s how I, at least, put together my King Graham outfit.

Part 1: Cloak and Cowl

Disclaimer: I’m totally novice at cosplay and only do it for like one event per year if that, so take what you will or throw it all away.

Also I made this like three years ago, so the details get sorta hazy.

Step one: Research. The best part. Take lots of screencaps of Graham from every angle. Hoard the pictures in your phone like a dragon. Stare at them. They’re lovely. He’s lovely. 

Ready to commit to this? It’s mildly expensive and Mostly Time Consuming. But that outfit looks so neat...and I love him...okay. Still good?

Let’s do this.

Let’s start with the cloak and the cowl. The bit that everyone notices first, the dramatic part that snaps behind you when you walk and makes 2015 Graham stand apart from his 1980s days (...other than also not wearing pink anymore).

The best part other than the hat, really.

By the game’s own proof, the cowl and cloak are separate pieces. Which makes your life easier.

I chose a springy red fabric from Joann’s called bengaline. It stretches one way, not both, and it’s delightfully weighted so it snaps and catches the wind in pleasing ways--the effect when walking is almost as bouncy as the video game version. Should you choose the same, know that bengaline is primarily plastic and cannot be ironed (seriously, don’t)--steam it or get it wet and let it air dry to remove wrinkles. Check it out here: https://www.joann.com/sew-classics-bengaline-suiting/xprd757777.html

Bengaline does not feel heavy when you pick it up in the store. It becomes heavy as you wear it. Your shoulders might revolt. Feel free to pick something lighter, cheaper, or whatever is available in the shade of red you love most, but remember that the lighter the fabric weight, the happier you’ll be. Please do not pick velvet. A day at con reveals all truths. Be aware of what you’re putting your shoulders through.

For your reference, according to the receipt I found I apparently bought 6 yards of it (with a half off coupon). This is overkill. You probably don’t need 6 yards. I think I have a ton of it left over and smooshed into deep storage. But then again, it’s red and red is always useful in cosplay, so it doesn’t hurt to have leftovers.

Why reinvent the wheel? I used this tutorial here for the base cloak: https://dangerous-ladies.tumblr.com/post/41564161303/so-you-wanna-wear-a-cape-god-this-new

yes you want a circle cape, not a square cape. circle capes catch the wind better. you’ll be able to tell the difference, i promise.

Side note: you might think you want your cloak to touch your ankles. It looks like Graham’s does. You do not want this. When it scrapes the ground at comic con or renfest, it will get filthy, it will shred, and people (especially you) will step on the back of it. It might even get eaten by an escalator at con. Go up an inch or two--a little goes a long way. It’ll still look great, and you won’t choke.

plus depending on how you stand no one can tell anyway.

Now, for my numbers:

I am 5′6″. I chose 56.5″ (that includes my hem allowance) so that the cloak itself actually ‘swings’ at 55.5″. I copied the tutorial’s neck hole exactly (6″ ‘swing’).

Follow the tutorial’s instructions for the rolled hem. Pin everything. You will hate pins. You may bleed. Doesn’t matter. The cosplay gods are cruel. Keep pinning. If you picked bengaline like I did do not iron it just suffer in silence. Go slowly and carefully, and fight the curve to be as flat as you can.

Time to sew! Put on Game Grump’s King’s Quest 5 LP because it’s the best, and go slowly around your circle at the default sewing machine stitch.

I don’t recommend hand stitching. There is too much fabric and you want to have some sort of life at the end of this. Check with your local public library or that weird relative you forgot about if you don’t have a machine yourself.

Cool, that’s a cloak! Admire it, it’s lovely. I mean, you don’t have a way to wear it yet, but you’re maybe 68% done here so, that’s great!

Cowl time!

I don’t have reference images for what I did three years ago, and there are probably better ways to do this. Feel free to experiment, but here’s how I (probably?) did it:

Measure around your arms and upper chest approximately where the cowl will lay, and make sure you give yourself extra inches so you can still move comfortably. For me, that’s around 48-50″ around. I don’t remember what motivated my number selection for the neck part--it must be wide enough to go around your head, plus room to play with it to make it lie in fun ways like Graham’s. Apparently I picked 28″.

Play with scrap fabric, or if you have lots of extra red feel free to make extra sizes. My cowl looks like this:

That’s 14″ along the neck, 24″ along the body, and a length of 18″--but with a secret 6.5″ tucked inside the cowl itself, so the fabric really is 24.5″ long.

Why would I do that?

To tuck the cowl into the jerkin/undershirt collar and make it look seamless, like a video game character.

Ain’t no sight of tunic around that neck.

Also, the extra fabric gives it more stability and strength, allowing you to play with the collar and get that high edge he has rather than flat fabric. I’d even considered stringing a wire through it in early days, but if you use bengaline the fabric is sturdy enough on its own. Your fabric selection may act differently.

So, I’ve “hidden” 6.5″ worth of fabric in the collar. What would that look like as a pattern? I don’t remember for certain since I didn’t write it down but it probably looked like this:

okay maybe like half an inch seam allowance. an inch is probably overkill. don’t be me.

Since I didn’t want the thickness of a real hem, I did, like, a herringbone stitch (looks like zigzaging triangles) along the part that gets tucked in to the shirt to prevent any fraying, and then I folded it at the dotted line and sewed it in place to get a permanent line.

Unfolded, it looks like this:

In practice, it looks like this:

From the back, it ends up looking a little something like-a this:

Cool, cloak and cowl! You still don’t have a way to wear it, but the pieces are nice. Maybe unfinished and kinda boring, though, since Graham’s King Cloak is Such Luxury.

I mean, it’s fine that way. But it feels unfinished if you’re doing Prologue or Ch2 Graham.

Trimming time~.

I bought one 1″ wide red satin trim roll, and two 2 ¼” red satin trim rolls. Pin the wider trim all along the INNER bottom hem of your cloak (the side with the rolled hem on it), sew slowly. Get your second fresh roll so you don’t run out midway, and do the same on the EXTERIOR. This way, any wonky uneven lines are hidden on the inside and less noticeable.

Nice rule of thumb for cosplay I’ve learned: if you can’t see a mistake from 5 feet away, no one can. Don’t panic.

Do not sew both sides at the same time. It’s tempting, but hard enough to sew around a curve already without trying to keep both sides remotely even. To finish, I folded the long ends over, matched the hem with the cloak, and went for it.

And do the same to the bottom of the cowl with your thinner trim--you only have to do the exterior since no one can see the interior of that piece, so it’s much easier.

Cool! You’re done! You’ve got a cloak and cowl, trimmed and gorgeous.

“But Gerbil,” I hear you complain, “I still can’t wear it! It doesn’t have any attachment to me, even though I have lots of attachment to it since I just dumped like a hundred hours and at least $50 into it.”

Fair enough.

If you used bengaline like me, you’ll discover very quickly that it’s heavy heavy heavy. It’s gorgeous and thick and looks great, but the weight. Sure, it didn’t feel heavy when you bought it, when you sewed with it, when you first put it on. But it’s hour six of wearing it, and your shoulders hate you. If it hangs off your neck like you would assume a cloak should, you will choke. It hurts. The weight must sit on your shoulders.

Luckily, this costume has two separate pieces, and the cowl is going to hide where it hooks to you.

You’re going to buy two snap clips. The big ones. Like, at least an inch. You’re going to pick out an anchor t-shirt from Goodwill. It literally doesn’t matter what it looks like, but it’s going to be one size too small and will go up to your neck. You need it to be totally comfortable to wear (the more breathable the better--this is a hot cosplay), but tight enough that it will not shift under the weight of your cloak movement, thus the smaller size. Sew the snaps to the inside of the cloak and just above your collar bone on the shirt.

(apparently Superman wears it like this too, go figure)

(you might want to wait to sew the snaps on until your jerkin/tunic is finished before you sew the snaps to your anchor shirt, so you can be sure the collars match up--you need to have room for the snaps to sit on the anchor shirt, but still sit under your tunic)

(if you think of a better solution, have at, but please, do not tie it around your neck regardless of the type of material you bought. If anyone steps on the back, yourself included, and it’s attached by your neck, you’re out for the day. Do not.)

(also, one more pitch for the snaps--say your cloak does get caught on something. a wandering dragon, a passing knight’s sword, or ye olde con escalator. if it’s attached by snaps, not ties, it’ll pop right off with enough force, leaving you unharmed, but the snaps are heavy duty enough to stay put all weekend or multiple years without trouble)

And you’re done. That’s a cloak and cowl fine enough for a king, friend. Or at least fine enough for comic con.

A note on the out and about: you’re probably going to feel worn out after a few hours at con. Take frequent sitting breaks. After a few times wearing it you’ll get used to it and can fly around in it all weekend without trouble, but the first few times add unexpected strain to your neck and shoulders so take it a little easier.

Also, high key recommend handwashing the cloak (yes, the whole thing, it smooshes down well in water, I promise, it’s doable, just difficult) in your (clean!) bathroom sink with handwashing detergent, and laying it out to dry on towels. I wouldn’t trust the satin trim to hold up to a machine, but it withstands sink washing just fine.

(Was that useful? Was that atrocious? Do you want more pieces how-to’d? Do you want a full How-To-Graham Tutorial? Let me know, happy to ramble more!)

[myheroaizawashota]

[okay sorry these have taken me SO long to get into the grove of again, but have no fear! Why? Because I AM HERE! Also my tumblr draft box has taken a minor crap on its self and is for some reason coding things in HTML code when I go to write the request, so cute. We love that here! @gal-with-pastels Sorry it took so long but better late then never 😅😅]

Growing up with a quirk like yours was one of the most challenging things in the world. Aside from the fear you held for your own power, there was the constant torment and anguish that came along with your peers words as they taunted you for the villainous nature of you’re quirk. You never understood how a group of children could be so cruel, you never hurt anyone, nor did you plan to use this quirk for ill intent. You feared the power you held just as much as they did, and what people fear and don’t understand they tend to beat and exile. Growing up was hard, you learned a valuable lesson, it was easier to claim you were quirkless than to allow anyone else to ever know the power you held. While you always wanted to be a hero, you never accomplished the goal, who would want a hero like yourself anyway.

By the time you reached adulthood, the memories of your past seemed less familiar. Hardly anyone knew about the quirk you held, which played in your favor tremendously. While you never did become the hero you craved to be, you found other ways to help, and other ways to be close to that world. Taking a more behind the scenes route allowed you to mingle and meet all the hero’s you admired all through your younger years, and as chance had it, the love of your life. Never had you expected to meet such big league heros, though working at the top of the best hero agency in japan certainly helped with that. You could still remember the first time you were lucky enough to meet All Might. He was....everything the world pictured him to be and then some. He was charming and devilishly handsome with words that could make the muscles in your legs turn weak and gelatinous. That ever present smile of his could send your heart pounding a mile a minute whenever he casted it your way, blessing your day with it’s mere existence. It smacked you like a bag of bricks to the face when the number one pro hero admitted his feelings for you later down the road. Eventually the two of you dove head first in love, sharing little secrets and loving moments as your relationship progressed along. You’d even come to know the truth behind the muscles, the polar opposite of the well known symbol of peace. Though, through all the truths the two of you shared, you were never able to bring yourself to tell your lover about the curse that was your quirk. It was the only secret you kept from him, and it ate away at you.

As you walked along the dull lit streets of you’re neighborhood, arms threaded around one of Yagi’s, you couldn’t help but feel an ominous presence near by. Clinging yourself closer to your love, he couldn’t help but tilt his head, the proud smile he paraded around in fading to a look of confusion. “Abnormally clingy tonight darling?” He chuckled, the sound of his laughter spinning your fear into nothing but pleasant emotions.

You couldn’t help the smile that twitched across your lips, your eyes casted down as you tried to fight and ignore it. “I’m sorry Yagi, I’m just a little cold is all.” You couldn’t help the sigh that passed your lips. Truthfully, you were sighing at your own inability to be honest with the man. While he told you nothing but the truth throughout the years, all you ever did was with hold the truth from him and tell an endless series of white lies.

You were pulled from the self scolding lecture you’d been having with yourself in your head when you felt Toshinori’s thick muscular arm slither out from between both of yours. Confused, you watched as the overly inflated man you called you’re significant other began to unzip the jacket that hung tightly around his body, he draping the fabric around your shoulders. Leaning in he pressed a small kiss to the tip of your nose, his hallowesd eyes shining as they met with yours. “Well, were a few blocks from home, so hopefully this will help until we get there.”

You couldn’t help the guilt that riddled its way across your features as your hands tugged the jacket closer around your body. “A-actually it’s not just the chilly air bothering me Toshinori....I...can’t shake the feeling we’re being followed.” You whisper softly, moving closer to his side once more.

The edges of his lips twinged as he struggled to maintain his famous smile. He didn’t want to mention anything and freak you out, but he did as well sense the same dark presence that you did. Often nights he chose to walk the streets with you in his true form, but he was thankful when something inside his body told him to walk you home as All Might tonight. His massive palm moved to wrap around your hand, “everything will be fine, because I am her-“

Before he could finish the sentence however, a pair of unfamiliar arms wrapped tightly around your neck and head. You felt your chest tighten, as the dirt stained hands of the villain clasped over your mouth, his lips right at your ear as his eyes made contact with your lover. “Because what? You are here? Ha don’t make me laugh.” Forcefully, the villain tugged your body back, his eyes menacingly rolling your body over, tightening his hold on your neck as he grinned watching the smile began to fade off the pro hero’s face. “I almost didn’t recognize you walking around with such a pretty pet glued to your arm. I’ve got to admit All Might, i didn’t take you as the romantic type of guy.” The monster of a man laughed, he shaking you in his arms, causing your breathing to hitch for a moment. “Why don’t you and I play a little bit and maybe if you win I’ll let your little play thing go”

Toshinori was furious with how low this man would stoop just to get in some cheap shots as a way to boost his ego. Lips curling in disgust the pro hero agreed to the villains terms. “Let her go, and I will fight you.”

Your eyes shot with fear and panic watching as the horror before you unfolded. No, no! He couldn’t fight this villain, with your blood quirk you could feel the power the man restraining you held. Admittedly he was stronger than yagi was these days. Fighting with this man would certainly end his career if not his life! You frantically squirmed in the mans arms trying to warm the love of your life to disengage, but to your dismay all you got in return was a brave smile.

The man restraining your movements gave a low laugh, he uncovering your mouth to grab st your face, he squeezing your cheeks in on hand as he inspected you. “I think I’ll keep her for myself, nothing sounds better than kicking your ass and taking something away from you.” The villain purred moving to let his hands run over your body.

In defiance you let your leg extend out, meeting with your perpetrators shin, your snorting the snot from the back of your throat to lob into the others face. “Over my dead body!” You snapped back.

Growling the villain let his hands drop to your throat, constricting your air way furiously, his free hand moving to wipe your spit from his eyes. “I can arrange that!”

Struggling to breath you moved to pry his fingers off your throat, gasping as you failed. Your only relief was when Yagis fist collided with the mans face, causing him to drop your body to the pavement. You didn’t remember much else after that. The lack of oxygen to your brain was just enough to render you unconscious for the moment.

When you finally came to you, your brain felt hazy. You would have thought you were dreaming if it hadn’t been for the sight your eyes met with. You struggled to push yourself up on your elbows, eyes burning with tears when you saw your lovers body weakly struggling to hold himself upright. Clouds of smoke and steam began to rise from his shoulders, you knowing that he’d reached his limits. Horrified, you watched as the villain lunged to place the final blow onto yagi’s chin. You tried to scream out to stop the action, but your voice was to horse to scream. Doing the only thing you could do, for the first time in years you activated your quirk.

The pro hero had flinched in preparation to take the mans final blow, his heart pounding in his chest when the assailants body suddenly stopped in front of him. What was this about? The villain stood gasping as his body twisted in pain, he falling to his knees. With shaking hands, you clenched your first, causing the man under your hold to scream out in agony. “S-stop.....” you pushed out, earning the look of the bruised and bloodied hero.

You couldn’t tell if the look he was giving you was one of horror or one of disappointment, but regardless you couldn’t stand to make eye contact with him. Once the authorities arrived and the disaster was handled, you and toshinori continued your walk home in an awkward silence. You knew a lecture would be coming from the other, but you didn’t know when. Unable to hold his form any longer, the two of you made a detour into a nearby alley way. His muscles vanished and his body shriveled, a series of coughs ripples through his body. Those normally bright blue eyes that gazed at you with nothing but admiration suddenly staring back coldly. “I think you have some explaining to do Y/N....”

With a quivering lip, you looked down at the ground, moving to wrap an arm around your significant others torso, supporting his weight effortlessly. “I know....let’s get you home and cleaned up first. Then I promise I’ll tell you the truth. The whole truth....”

[hollowedrpg]

CONGRATULATIONS, EMILY! — You’ve been accepted for the role of Dorcas Meadowes. My favorite part of your application was your description of how Dorcas interacts with customers, because how she interacts with customers at the Three Broomsticks has a direct tie to how she interacts with everyone else. It really provided a nice snapshot of how you saw her personality and how you’d write her in-game, and I have complete faith you’ll do her justice. 

Thank you so much for applying. Please create your account and send in the link, track the right tags, and follow everyone on the follow list. Welcome to Hollowed Souls!

ooc.

name: Emily

age: (seventeen and up only) 28 years old

preferred pronouns: she/her 

timezone: pacific activity: on a scale of 1-10? I’d say probably hovering around a seven. I work full time and am a mother of two, but my job is really flexible, so I float around a lot and I lurk on my dash a TON.

are you applying for more than one character?: just Dorcas—for now. I’m tempted for others, but I’m putting my eggs in a basket, which is nerve wracking. 

how do you feel about your character dying?:  Well, that’s exciting and terrifying and definitely something that I would do myself if I was moderating, so fair question!

anything else?: (questions, concerns, etc.) Honestly, I absolutely love the look of this roleplay (not that you’re surprised by that at all I’m sure, I mean, you gave me little teasers to try and kill me anyways [don’t you dare think that I didn’t read the plotline when you sent me that darn HTML girl]) and I’m so excited to watch this blossom and bloom.

ic details.

full name: Dorcas Evelyn Meadowes

date of birth: canonly, unknown; April 23

former hogwarts house: Hufflepuff

sexuality: bi-sexual

gender/pronouns: (would you like to play this character as non-binary or trans? list it here.) she/her

face claim change: (if you’re requesting to change this character’s fc, list three alternatives in order of preference. all alternatives must be approved by the admin.) I love the face you picked, so I’m game for that.

more.

how do you interpret this character’s personality? how will you play them? include two weaknesses & two strengths.

Personality - Quality over quantity had been ingrained in her since she was young -- certainly because of the fact that sometimes in Quidditch it was better to just let the damn snitch go rather than catching it and letting your team lose. As a result, sometimes she might not be the most efficient barmaid, but she definitely was a favored one because she took the time to chat with the old guy that came in after his granddaughters Quidditch match or the young ones that were probably at the Three Broomsticks for the first time when it came to a drink. She gets along with people and is more than willing to grin and flirt if she needs to but mostly she’s more than willing to have a listening ear to those that want to talk, or that need a little bit of a nudge in the right direction to talk.

Playing - The ideal will be more soft spoken -- she’ll let people talk to her and she’ll open her ear so she’s able to listen to whatever it is that they’re going to talk about on that particular day. Flirting might be a necessity when it comes to being a barmaid, Dorcas certainly isn’t unfamiliar with that and is willing to take the few extra seconds on a patron for the good company and a decent tip, sometimes in more ways than just monetary. In public she certainly doesn’t go through and show a bias one direction or another in this war -- doing such would spell trouble for her in the long run and wouldn’t make people on Voldemort’s side feel as though they could share with her. Still, she doesn’t tend towards loud and boisterous unless the situation calls for it, and that is certainly once every blue moon.

+Driven

+Charismatic

-Spontaneous

-Perfectionistic

how has the war affected this character, emotionally and otherwise?

While it might not have her as hard in the face until recently just how bad this war could go, it wasn’t as though Dorcas could pretend to be oblivious. Between the patrons within the pub and fact that people were willing to spill more information to an open ear than they might to the next individual to approach them? Well, Dorcas had heard her fair share of stories from both sides of this war and neither of them were a pleasant experience for everyone’s man in the apartment next to them. Her life wasn’t necessarily privileged, but it certainly had it’s advantages above some of her former classmates and the worst thing that she had to experience was the fact that her parents had a certain standard that she had to achieve in Quidditch in order to be the right kind of Meadowes.

While the stress of the war didn’t seem real to her until the recent attack, with friends missing and nothing known as to their whereabouts? Well, she couldn’t completely pretend that she wasn’t more than a little afraid of what this would end up bringing in the end, whether it would mean a shift in how the wizarding world ended up moving forward or if it was just a flux. Still, it’d lead to every bit of quiet in the pub and the weeks after the attack the owl post had been eerily quiet while everyone tried to cope. Mostly though? Well -- now she was just frustrated that she wasn’t doing more, that she was back in London while everyone else coped with the losses while she was buried in piles of mail and firewhiskey. Still, if she was caught, she didn’t particularly dwell on what it would mean for her in the future.

Where does this character currently stand? with those who wish to hide in godric’s hollow until the war ends, with those who wish to rebuild the order and continue fighting the war, or on neither side? Why?

While Dorcas understands the break needed to recoup and evaluate what it was that needed to be done moving forward, to say that she’d be okay with using Godric’s Hollow as a hiding place would be a mistake. While she might not be in the direct action, she also wasn’t going to pretend that she was oblivious to the fact that there seemed to be more activity the longer that things continued. Something needed to be done and for what little she might know, she knew that hiding probably shouldn’t be on the list of discussion topics on how to help fight against Voldemort. Remaining still certainly had never done her any good over the years, that was something that she was certain of.

What’s some of the most interesting things Dorcas has learned while working at an owl post office?

Her personal favorite certainly was something accidentally stumbled upon that isn’t even of use to the Order with two high ranking ministry officials apparently having an ongoing affair together. While she’ll certainly never use this one to her advantage? Well, it definitely is amusing now when people mention their names together.

Another one of them was the reality of pieces to a puzzle being put together after the attack on the Order. By far the least productive measure that she had taken, but the most telling in the span of who had known that at least there was something that was going to be happening, Dorcas found that the reality was that there were likely far more people that had been involved with Voldemort than people realized, even if most of them were surface level.

How does she feel about continuing the task of working there and opening mail while most of the order hides in Godric’s Hollow?

Depending on the day, she can be frustrated and also be proud all in the same breath. While it meant that there were pieces of trust in her ability to work without anyone else around her, it certainly also made her feel more than a bit alienated from the rest of the group and occasionally a little bit clueless as to what was going on back in Godric’s Hollow. It certainly hadn’t made the situation easier, but it definitely did make her realize that she couldn’t go through and just pretend that the world was fine when the people that she was around most were trying to figure out the future of their organization.

[awesomelephuoclocblog-blog]

Pixamattic Review: Breakthrough to getting results with zero aptitudes instanly

https://lephuocloc.com/pixamattic-review/

David Vu 4 days back GRAPHICS Leave a

Hi! Did you understand your customers need more … and they required it yesterday? That is the way speedy, they exhaust information. That is the methods by which speedy they have to snap and buy. Likewise, that is the methods by which speedy, YOU need to think, make, disseminate and impart your message so they can snap and buy from you.

Today, the web is about speed. Speed of use to be cautious. Being moderate burns through your time and it may explain why the business you imagined, never come in. In any case, it could all change. With AI and man-made cognizance…

Electronic thinking is ruling and considering current conditions too. It will save you LOTS of time. In case that will be normal. Get this.

Simply 20% is examined content without visuals

90% of all correspondence today is visual

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By and by think about it… Do you really think you have a potential for progress at getting customers? We should find how in my Pixamattic Review underneath!

Pixamattic Review

Substance [hide]

What is Pixamattic?

Pixamattic Review Overview

About Creators

Key Features

Genuine Pixamattic review: Is it worth your money?

How might it work?

Who is it for?

Esteeming

Pixamattic Review Conclusion

What is Pixamattic?

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Quality - 9.5/10

Features - 9.5/10

Sponsorship - 9/10

Easy to use - 9.5/10

Prize - 9/10

9.3/10

Once-over

Experts

Make Spectacular Visually Engaging Content

Automated thinking Algorithm Generates Designs on Autopilot

Particularly snappy, 1-Click Creation, Editing and Posting

Promptly Target 2.4 Billion Social Media Users

Relentless, Hands-FREE Traffic System

Get More Likes, Shares, Clicks and BUYERS

Robotized "Learner Friendly" Traffic, Sales and Profits System

CONS

I have not found any cons related sufficiency of this thing yet.

Pixamattic Review Overview

Survey

Vendor Mo Latif et al

Product Pixamattic

Dispatch Date 2020-May-31

Dispatch Time 10:00 EDT

Front-End Price $27

Bonuses YES, HUGE BONUS

Refund YES, 30 Days Money-Back Guarantee

Thing Type Graphic

Support Effective Response

Official site Click here

Recommended Highly Recommended

Inclination Level Needed All Levels

About Creators

Brett Ingram

Pixamattic was made by Brett Ingram and his accessory Mo Latif. Brett is a veteran online sponsor with more than 10 years long of understanding. He has also collected more than 25 raving success things during his calling, for instance, EngagBot, VideoFXPro, InstaZign, etc.

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Moreover, a ton progressively other tip top features:

A.I. Visual Creator

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Think about how conceivable it is that you could make awesome, ostensibly enrapturing substance to get more likes, sha

https://lephuocloc.com/pixamattic-review/

https://lephuocloc.com/

[t-baba]

How to Build Unique, Beautiful Websites with Tailwind CSS

When thinking about what CSS framework to use for a new project, options like Bootstrap and Foundation readily jump to mind. They’re tempting to use because of their ready-to-use, pre-designed components, which developers can use with ease right away. This approach works well with relatively simple websites with a common look and feel. But as soon as we start building more complex, unique sites with specific needs, a couple of problems arise.

At some point, we need to customize certain components, create new components, and make sure the final codebase is unified and easy to maintain after the changes.

It's hard to satisfy the above needs with frameworks like Bootstrap and Foundation, which give us a bunch of opinionated and, in many cases, unwanted styles. As a result, we have to continuously solve specificity issues while trying to override the default styles. It doesn't sound like a fun job, does it?

Ready-to-use solutions are easy to implement, but inflexible and confined to certain boundaries. On other hand, styling web sites without a CSS framework is powerful and flexible, but isn’t easy to manage and maintain. So, what’s the solution?

The solution, as always, is to follow the golden middle. We need to find and apply the right balance between the concrete and abstract. A low-level CSS framework offers such a balance. There are several frameworks of this kind, and in this tutorial, we'll explore the most popular one, Tailwind CSS.

What Is Tailwind?

Tailwind is more than a CSS framework, it's an engine for creating design systems. — Tailwind website

Tailwind is a collection of low-level utility classes. They can be used like lego bricks to build any kind of components. The collection covers the most important CSS properties, but it can be easily extended in a variety of ways. With Tailwind, customization isn’t pain in the neck anymore. The framework has great documentation, covering every class utility in detail and showing the ways it can be customized. All modern browsers, and IE11+, are supported.

Why Using Utility-first Framework?

A low-level, utility-first CSS framework like Tailwind has a plenty of benefits. Let's explore the most significant of them:

You have greater control over elements' appearance. We can change and fine-tune an element's appearance much more easily with utility classes.

It's easy to manage and maintain in large projects, because you only maintain HTML files, instead of a large CSS codebase.

It's easier to build unique, custom website designs without fighting with unwanted styles.

It's highly customizable and extensible, which gives us unlimited flexibility.

It has a mobile-first approach and easy implementation of responsive design patterns.

There's the ability to extract common, repetitive patterns into custom, reusable components — in most cases without writing a single line of custom CSS.

It has self-explanatory classes. We can imagine how the styled element looks only by reading the classes.

Finally, as Tailwind's creators say:

it's just about impossible to think this is a good idea the first time you see it — you have to actually try it.

So, let's try it!

Getting Started with Tailwind

To demonstrate Tailwind's customization features, we need to install it via npm:

npm install tailwindcss

The next step is to create a styles.css file, where we include the framework styles using the @tailwind directive:

@tailwind base; @tailwind components; @tailwind utilities;

After that, we run the npx tailwind init command, which creates a minimal tailwind.config.js file, where we'll put our customization options during the development. The generated file contains the following:

module.exports = { theme: {}, variants: {}, plugins: [], }

The next step is to build the styles in order to use them:

npx tailwind build styles.css -o output.css

Finally, we link the generated output.css file and Font Awesome in our HTML:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="output.css"> <link rel="stylesheet" href="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/font-awesome/5.9.0/css/all.min.css">

And now, we’re ready to start creating.

Building a One-page Website Template

In the rest of the tutorial, we'll build a one-page website template using the power and flexibility of Tailwind's utility classes.

Here you can see the template in action.

I'm not going to explain every single utility (which would be boring and tiresome) so I suggest you to use the Tailwind cheatsheet as a quick reference. It contains all available utilities with their effect, plus direct links to the documentation.

We'll build the template section by section. They are Header, Services, Projects, Team, and Footer.

We firstly wrap all section in a container:

<div class="container mx-auto"> <!-- Put the sections here --> </div>

Header (Logo, Navigation)

The first section — Header — will contain a logo on the left side and navigation links on the right side. Here’s how it will look:

Now, let's explore the code behind it.

<div class="flex justify-between items-center py-4 bg-blue-900"> <div class="flex-shrink-0 ml-10 cursor-pointer"> <i class="fas fa-drafting-compass fa-2x text-orange-500"></i> <span class="ml-1 text-3xl text-blue-200 font-semibold">WebCraft</span> </div> <i class="fas fa-bars fa-2x visible md:invisible mr-10 md:mr-0 text-blue-200 cursor-pointer"></i> <ul class="hidden md:flex overflow-x-hidden mr-10 font-semibold"> <li class="mr-6 p-1 border-b-2 border-orange-500"> <a class="text-blue-200 cursor-default" href="#">Home</a> </li> <li class="mr-6 p-1"> <a class="text-white hover:text-blue-300" href="#">Services</a> </li> <li class="mr-6 p-1"> <a class="text-white hover:text-blue-300" href="#">Projects</a> </li> <li class="mr-6 p-1"> <a class="text-white hover:text-blue-300" href="#">Team</a> </li> <li class="mr-6 p-1"> <a class="text-white hover:text-blue-300" href="#">About</a> </li> <li class="mr-6 p-1"> <a class="text-white hover:text-blue-300" href="#">Contacts</a> </li> </ul> </div>

As you can see, the classes are pretty self-explanatory as I mentioned above. We'll explore only the highlights.

First, we create a flex container and center its items horizontally and vertically. We also add some top and bottom padding, which Tailwind combines in a single py utility. As you may guess, there’s also a px variant for left and right. We'll see that this type of shorthand is broadly used in many of the other utilities. As a background color, we use the darkest blue (bg-blue-900) from Tailwind's color palette. The palette contains several colors with shades for each color distributed from 100 to 900. For example, blue-100, blue-200, blue-300, etc.

In Tailwind, we apply a color to a property by specifying the property followed by the color and the shade number. For example, text-white, bg-gray-800, border-red-500. Easy peasy.

For the logo on the left side, we use a div element, which we set not to shrink (flex-shrink-0) and move it a bit away from the edge by applying the margin-left property (ml-10). Next we use a Font Awesome icon whose classes perfectly blend with those of Tailwind. We use one of them to make the icon orange. For the textual part of the logo, we use big, light blue, semi-bolded text, with a small offset to the right.

In the middle, we add an icon that will be visible only on mobile. Here we use one of the responsive breakpoint prefixes (md). Tailwind, like Bootstrap and Foundation, follows the mobile-first approach. This means that when we use utilities without prefix (visible), they apply all the way from the smallest to the largest devices. If we want different styling for different devices, we need to use the breakpoint prefixes. So, in our case the icon will be visible on small devices, and invisible (md:invisible) on medium and beyond.

At the right side we put the nav links. We style the Home link differently, showing that it’s the active link. We also move the navigation from the edge and set it to be hidden on overflow (overflow-x-hidden). The navigation will be hidden (hidden) on mobile and set to flex (md:flex) on medium and beyond.

You can read more about responsiveness in the documentation.

Services

Let's now create the next section, Services. Here’s how it will look:

And here’s the code:

<div class="w-full p-6 bg-blue-100"> <div class="w-48 mx-auto pt-6 border-b-2 border-orange-500 text-center text-2xl text-blue-700">OUR SERVICES</div> <div class="p-2 text-center text-lg text-gray-700">We offer the best web development solutions.</div> <div class="flex justify-center flex-wrap p-10"> <div class="relative w-48 h-64 m-5 bg-white shadow-lg"> <div class="flex items-center w-48 h-20 bg-orange-500"> <i class="fas fa-bezier-curve fa-3x mx-auto text-white"></i> </div> <p class="mx-2 py-2 border-b-2 text-center text-gray-700 font-semibold uppercase">UI Design</p> <p class="p-2 text-sm text-gray-700">Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Aenean ac est massa.</p> <div class="absolute right-0 bottom-0 w-8 h-8 bg-gray-300 hover:bg-orange-300 text-center cursor-pointer"> <i class="fas fa-chevron-right mt-2 text-orange-500"></i> </div> </div> ... </div> </div>

We create a section with light blue background. Then we add an underlined title and a subtitle.

Next, we use a flex container for the services items. We use flex-wrap so the items will wrap on resize. We set the dimensions for each card and add some space and a drop shadow. Each card has a colored section with a topic icon, a title, and a description. And we also put a button with an icon in the bottom-right corner.

Here we use one of the pseudo-class variants (hover, focus, etc.). They’re used in the same way as responsive breakpoints. We use the pseudo-class prefix, followed by a colon and the property name (hover:bg-orange-300).

You can learn more about pseudo-class variants in the documentation.

For brevity, I show the code only for the first card. The other ones are similar. You have to change only the colors, icons, and titles. See the final HTML file on GitHub repo for a reference.

The post How to Build Unique, Beautiful Websites with Tailwind CSS appeared first on SitePoint.

by Ivaylo Gerchev via SitePoint https://ift.tt/2ZX36wp

[marlaluster]

emptying clipboard w items numbered

1. 5:09 · HD LOL, Chris Hemsworth Can't Understand His Wife When She Scolds T… 1.1M views POPSUGAR · 3 months … 2. https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=chris+hemsworth+spanish+&docid=608042065968300472&mid=DB0FF4F541FFDB01DED2DB0FF4F541FFDB01DED2&view=detail&FORM=VIRE&PC=SMSM 3. 0:30 Chris Hemsworth’s Kids Speak Spanish and it Drives Him Nuts 12 views Yahoo · 3 months ago 4. https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/chris-hemsworth-kids-speak-spanish-190114829.html 5. Chris Hemsworth’s Kids Speak Spanish and it Drives Him Nuts In an appearance on the Ellen Degeneres show during the press tour for Avengers: Infinity War, actor Chris Hemsworth, best known for his role as Thor in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (also, freakishly gigantic arms), lamented the fact that all three of his kids and his wife are bilingual while he himself only speaks English. Hemsworth explained that this situation leads to him being confused a lot and feeling kind of out of the loop. Is Elsa Pataky, the actor’s wife, trying to teach him? Sure, but it doesn’t sound like it’s going well. ADVERTISEMENT “My wife will be telling them [their kids] off and I’ll be standing there like, ‘That’s right!’ ” he told Degeneres before explaining that afterword he’s usually asking his wife “‘What does that mean?’” According to the actor, when Pataky isn’t giving the kids a hard time in Spanish, her efforts are focused on telling him off in her mother tongue.  “When I hear the Spanish directed at me, it’s usually unfortunate, controversial, aggressive situations,” he said. “So I’m just thinking, ‘What is she saying right now?’ and ‘What’s my comeback to this?’ When we’re fighting, basically—which is never! If she gets angry enough she’ll drop the English façade.” Must Reads Featured Video Loading Video Content Hemsworth definitely isn’t alone. The number of bilingual children in the US has been on the rise for some time. In 2016, the number of American kids who spoke more than one language was roughly 22 percent. That means that more than 12 million kids are now speaking more than one language at home. Related Articles: The post Chris Hemsworth’s Kids Speak Spanish and it Drives Him Nutsappeared first on Fatherly. 6. https://www.brit.co/chris-hemsworth-elsa-pataky-bilingual-fights/ 7. Chris Hemsworth Knows He’s in Trouble When Elsa Pataky Starts Arguing in Spanish Teaching your child a second languagecan have all kinds of benefits, such as introducing them to different cultures and making it easier for them to learn other languages in the future. But as Chris Hemsworth has learned, it can also get you into some sticky situations if you don’t speak that language, too. In an interview on The Ellen DeGeneres Show on Thursday, the Australian star opened up about his home life with his wife, actress Elsa Pataky, who is from Spain and can converse in either English or Spanish. When the host asked if the couple is raising their three children — daughter India Rose, who turns six next month, and four-year-old twin sons Tristan and Sasha — to be bilingual, Hemsworth confirmed that they are, and that all three are fluent in both languages. As wonderful as that is, the Thor actor admitted that it sometimes presents a bit of a problem for him, because when his wife is scolding their kids in Spanish, he often has no clue what’s going on and has to fake it. “My wife will be telling them off and I’ll be standing there like, ‘That’s right!'” he joked, adding that when his wife is done talking, he usually has to ask, “‘What does that mean?'” Hemsworth also said that his wife’s ability to switch languages can be a signal to him that he’s in trouble. “When I hear the Spanish directed at me, it’s usually in unfortunate, controversial, aggressive situations,” he confessed. “So I’m just thinking, ‘What is she saying right now?’ and ‘What’s my comeback to this?’ When we’re fighting, basically — which is never! If she gets angry enough, she’ll drop the English façade.” Are you, your spouse, or your children bilingual? Let us know @BritandCo (photo via Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images) 8. https://www.bing.com/images/search?view=detailV2&ccid=EjLYrRpG&id=56516B2B745D5AFFAABFEDFD2DA42BB62B04FA54&thid=OIP.EjLYrRpGGfuMwJWmYmsTIAHaFj&q=chris+hemsworth+spanish&simid=607995585830521044&selectedIndex=0&PC=SMSM&ajaxhist=0 9. https://www.bing.com/images/search?view=detailV2&ccid=VM80%2fWpU&id=56516B2B745D5AFFAABFA539F3ABFA0BB4B48EE7&thid=OIP.VM80_WpUsHDj5K5y_iYTBAHaFU&q=chris+hemsworth+spanish&simid=608030065817813432&selectedIndex=14 10. https://www.bing.com/images/search?view=detailV2&ccid=lWTt3P10&id=56516B2B745D5AFFAABFD463729AFFF6414F02E3&thid=OIP.lWTt3P10AiDf1Gne6u5d3wHaF4&q=chris+hemsworth+spanish&simid=608041331517886100&selectedIndex=13 11. https://www.bing.com/images/search?view=detailV2&ccid=feInNxq0&id=56516B2B745D5AFFAABFFFCF5A966CF016A009D4&thid=OIP.feInNxq0ziASI_kVD1gKxgHaMa&q=chris+hemsworth+spanish&simid=608039239892273849&selectedIndex=71&ajaxhist=0 12. http://media.gettyimages.com/photos/actor-chris-hemsworth-and-his-wife-the-spanish-actress-elsa-pataky-picture-id130420575 13. Chris Hemsworth: I can’t understand my Spanish wife … https://canoe.com/entertainment/celebrity/chris-hemsworth Mobile · Chris Hemsworth regrets not mastering Spanish when he was younger because he can’t understand his wife when she’s mad at him.The Avengers: Infinity War star is married to Spanish mo 14. https://canoe.com/entertainment/celebrity/chris-hemsworth-i-cant-understand-my-spanish-wife-when-shes-angry 15. https://www.instagram.com/p/BmpElO-gQdo/ 16. 658 likes thesamanthahemsworthHappy birthday 🎈 Rā whānau hari��@taikawaititi #newzealandforever aprilmunLove this! kittyallinHappy Birthday ✨ @taikawaititi 🙌🏽 ummy.graceThe best! Hope you both had an awesome birthday xxx spoonful_of_sarah❤️❤️❤️❤️😍❤️❤️❤️❤️ markchazSo good sergio.pereraYeeeehhhh boi kittyallinAnd happy birthday to you too@thesamanthahemsworth 💕💕 juliemcgauranToo 😎, I love it! tracey4341This is cool 🥃🍹🥂 melcarrero_Turbo babe alert 🚨🚨🚨 gtongiI love Tiki!! norawalkerU are 🔥🔥🔥 nikipekolaI wish you a very happy birthday@taikawaititi and @thesamanthahemsworth! 🎉🎈😊 _zane.kahukuranui_Chur mrjamesnunnAmazing 13 HOURS AGO Instagram Log in|Sign up ABOUT USSUPPORTPRESSAPIJOBSPRIVACY 17. http://wikinetworth.com/celebrities/samantha-hemsworth-wiki-age-height-family-net-worth-luke-hemsworth.html 18. Samantha Hemsworth became the scuttlebutt in the tabloid when she tied the knot with one of three Hemsworth brother, Luke Hemsworth. Well, Samantha, who often walks on the red carpet with her Westworld star husband Luke, has given media tons of gossips to write about. In October 2017, she suffered a wardrobe malfunction but handled it like a pro. Samantha's Married Life Samantha married Westworld actor Luke Hemsworth in December 2017. The couple, who are now married for more than ten years, often flaunt their chemistry in social media. The pair also accompanies each other in public events and movie premiere. Following the romantic married life, Samantha bestowed the first baby daughter named Holly two year after the marriage with her husband in 2009. The couple then welcomed the second baby daughter named Ella the next year in 2010. Samantha gave birth to more children, Harper Rose (in 2012) and Alexandre (in 2013). Samantha has apparently been a loving mother of four kids and caring wife, which reflects on her Instagram posts. She loves spending a vacation with her adorable children. Samantha shared the picture of her beautiful daughters on Instagram on 21 July 2017 traveling to San Diego. Samantha with her daughters traveling to San Diego on 21 July 2017 (Photo: Instagram) Samantha with her husband Luke celebrated their 10th anniversary of marriage on 16 of December 2017 and posted a picture of them with a caption saying, "You are my everything and a whole lot more." Samantha and Luke celebrated wedding anniversary on 16 December 2017 (Photo Instagram) How Much Is Samantha's Net Worth? Samantha came to limelight as being the wife of Australian actor Luke Hemsworth. Information about her job and career is yet to surface in the media. However, she is a full-time mother and a supportive wife. Unlike Samantha's professional background, her husband is an Australian actor with a big name in Hollywood industry. Luke enjoys a net worth of $3 million which he earns from the entertainment industry. Luke accumulated his fortunes through his appearance in the Neighbours,Westworld and few other television series such as The Saddle Club, Blue Heelers, andSatisfaction.  The couple owns some of the lavish properties in Australia and USA. Samantha and Luke often post pictures of their luxurious Malibu house which features beautiful 40-foot doors and a theatre room. Short Bio Born in 1980, Samantha Hemsworth celebrates her birthday on 14 August every year. Samantha, age 37 celebrates her birthday with a bash, and on her 36th birthday in 2016, celebrities like Wayne Coyne, Kelly Slater, and Miley Cyrus attended the party. As per wiki, Samantha whose hometown is Australia holds Australian nationality while her ethnicity remains a mystery. She is currently living with her husband and children but, the details about her parents and family are still unknown. Though her height is unknown, she stands at a tall figure and complements her husband's height of 1.76 m (5' 9 ½'') 19. https://www.instagram.com/p/BenoBZDl3Gt/ 20. 2,245 likes hemsworthlukeMy first attempt at graffiti. I used chalk so that the cleaner at the school doesn’t have to work too hard. sheylamoonspellBad boy 😂 nizam.ahmedNice moco.moco.2614😩 jadealbanyBahahah at the school 😂 therealleohowardRebel mammothfilmfestivalIf at first you don’t succeed, try again. 😉 uknwmnameHehehehehee @10minforsen 10minforsen@uknwmname ur soulm8 cindyalejofriscia😂 merkin69Maybe don’t quit your day job 🤔 somri@hemsworthluke 😂😂😂😂😂😂 aunu12Bwahahaha. daniiellealexisLOLLLLLL @hemsworthluke imshahyanRebel 👌 maryettaarmsteadFunny ellegrrraceWild 😂 markchazYou always were my fav artist, can you do my tattoo 😉 marcusmakcantfindausernameYou’re heading to the big streets now luke coueyterriWell its cute. And so are you.❤ frostystuntsThe flies buzzing the poop, now that’s realistic!!;) claire_vaughan18That's good of you@hemsworthluke colldoll65Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha😂 omjeeeanThat’s very thoughtful of you shiro_mierYou’re mental! 😂 batesy81Oh so it was you doing that amazing graffiti at good ol Heathmont?! misstermojorising@hemsworthluke it's@yesthatmaria birthday. Could you please give her a shout out green.eyed.ga.girlVery nice of you to label the flies and the poop...in case someone got confused of the 2 😂😂 JANUARY 31 Instagram Log in|Sign up ABOUT USSUPPORTPRESSAPIJOBSPRIVACYTERMS

[douglassmiith]

Smashing Podcast Episode 18 With Mina Markham: How Can I Learn React?

In this episode of the Smashing Podcast, we’re talking about learning React. What’s React like to work with, and how can experienced developers get started? Drew McLellan chats to Mina Markham to find out.

In this episode of the Smashing Podcast, we’re talking about learning React. What’s React like to work with, and how can experienced developers get started? I spoke to Mina Markham to find out.

Show Notes

Weekly Update

Transcript

Drew McLellan: She is a front-end architect, conference speaker and organizer, and lover of design systems. Her work on the Pantsuit patent library for Hillary Clinton’s Hillary for America presidential campaign marked a watershed for design systems within the industry and was featured on publications, such as Wired, Fast Company, and Communication Arts. Like many of us, she writes code for a living, currently as a senior engineer at Slack. So we know she’s a talented and forward thinking developer, but did you know she was once mistaken for Patrick Swayze? My smashing friends, please welcome Mina Markham. Hi Mina. How are you?

Mina Markham: I’m smashing.

Drew: Good to hear. Now, sometimes on the Smashing Podcast, we talk to people about the subject that they’re best known for. And sometimes it’s fun just to talk about something a bit tangential. Now, I could chat to you all day about pattern libraries, design systems, the amazing work you’ve done in that particular area, and I could talk to you about subjects that you’ve perhaps spoken about, events, such as the Event Apart, things like art direction. And we could obviously talk about CSS until the cows come home. But you tweeted a few days ago, and I realized that we’re actually both in the same boat in that we’re both experienced front-end engineers and we’re both recently started working with React. So before we get onto React itself, where were you coming to up to this point? Had you been working with other libraries and frameworks for JavaScript development?

Mina: No, actually I’ve been doing mostly vanilla JavaScript for a while. And before that, of course I got into JavaScript. Let me rephrase that. I started working with Java script using jQuery because it made the most sense to me. It was something that was very easily for me to parse to figure out what was happening. And then from there I backtracked to doing just vanilla, plain JavaScript, ESX, and I hadn’t really gotten too much into the framework wars. I had no, like I had no favorite. I had no dog in the fight. I was like, “For you, React, whatever. I don’t really care.” But times change.

Drew: And in this sort of way of working with vanilla JavaScript, because I’ve done a lot of that myself as well. I’ve worked with various frameworks. I’ve done a lot with jQuery back in the day. I worked with YUI, Yahoo User Interface Library. Had you felt many of the pain points that something like React’s architecture tries to address?

Mina: I don’t think I ever had. I spent most of my career making websites versus web apps and things like that. So everything I did was pretty static up to a certain extent. So I never really had to deal with state management, things like that. So the pain points that React attempts to solve I had never really applied to the kind of work that I did.

Drew: Generally speaking, what’s the sort of nature of the projects that you’ve with React so far?

Mina: It was actually only been the one project, which I’m currently working on and I can’t give away too many details because public company and all that good stuff.

Drew: Of course.

Mina: But essentially what I’m trying to do is I’m trying to use React to, it’s a very interactive sort of product where I need people to be able to enter in and save data at a certain state and then manipulate it and generate something else with said data. And that’s just something that it’s not simple DOM manipulation at that point. It really is a lot of more complex, front-end manage of data and managing the state of said data. So there really was no other alternative but to use some kind of library that attempts to solve that problem. I knew I wouldn’t be able to get past with just plain JavaScript. I contemplated maybe handling somethings on the server side, but again, due to the very interactive nature of what I’m working with, it need to be in the client. And so we already use React at Slack for various other things. And so I was like, “Okay, well we just should go ahead and adopt the same thing that the rest of the parent the companies are using and go from there.”

Drew: One of the things that I’m always seems to be a pain point with people picking up React is getting to grips with the tool chain that’s needed to get things working, Webpack being an obvious elephant in the room. Have you had to do much configuration of the tool chain or like me if you had the lUXury of teammates doing it for you?

Mina: Oh, I love the infrastructure team at Slack the data. The front-end infrastructure team at Slack, they handled all of that. I didn’t have to think about it. It was great. Because I tried to learn React before in the past. Usually the way I learn best is by actually working and implementing on things. And we use React to build a lot of hillaryclinton.com back in 2016. So it’s not like I’ve never worked with people who use it. It’s just my work never directly needed me to get involved. But that code base was very complex and very sophisticated, and there was so much happening that there’s such a barrier to entry to try to learn anything in there if you didn’t already know how React and RedUX and all of that works, which I didn’t. So I wasn’t really effective in learning in that environment.

Mina: Luckily, here I do have people to like take away a little bit more of the complex bits of it. I don’t have to worry about the Webpack config at all. That’s been set up. That’s been tried and tested and ready to go. I am in a similar boat where we also use RedUX in addition to React, which I didn’t realize were two different things. I didn’t know which part handled which. Dropping into a code base like that, it was a little disorienting because I didn’t realize that they were all the same thing. I had people who were seasoned React developers telling me, “Oh, we also are using RedUX, which makes it a little bit harder for you to really learn what React all can do if you’re starting from scratch.” And I never quite knew what they meant by that because I didn’t know what they were talking about.

Mina: To answer your original question, I am still having a little bit more of a little bit barrier to entry, because it’s not just learning React. I’m having to learn React and also how to use the RedUX store. So those two things at the same time can be a little much.

Drew: Yeah, I’ve found exactly the same thing coming into an existing code base as my first React project that uses RedUX. And I think as is the nature of any of these sort of technologies when they’re young, they iterate really quickly, and what’s best practice at one point, 6 months later has moved on and there’s a different way of doing things. And when you have a code base that spans many years, you can sometimes have different styles of implementing things in there. It doesn’t always keep sync. And of course, if you’re following a tutorial or whatever to learn, you’re reading books, you’re using resources, they will be in the most modern version of how to do things. And that doesn’t necessarily nit to what you see when you look at an existing, mature product. Is that something you’d experienced at all, or have you managed to keep your code base really up to date?

Mina: I think that is something that I definitely have been experiencing. When I tried to learn how to do React on my own, I looked at various tutorials and things like that. And I noticed, or at least people have told me who have worked who have been working with me that some of the things that we do or kind of anti-pattern or not quite how things work now, because this code base is slightly, well mature us relative, but it’s a few years old. And so there are some ways that I guess are easier to do things than the way we’re doing them currently because this was written years ago. So it’s a little bit of a treadmill trying to keep up with current times and make sure I want to do things the best way, but also I don’t want to break an established code base because I want to play around with stuff.

Drew: Obviously, one of the things with React that people like you and I are coming to it, it can feel a bit jarring as this whole thing with JSX. Are you using JSX in your project?

Mina: We are. I am using JSX.

Drew: Have you made peace with that?

Mina: I fell like a little small piece of me dies every time I open one of those files. It still feels sacrilege to put my HTML in the JavaScript file. I know that’s kind of revolutionary and the whole point, but it just feels off to me that I’m writing my markup in a JavaScript file. I’ve made peace with it, but every time I do it, I’m just like, “…” Separation concerns, it is a thing. I’d like it back, please.

Drew: It’s a valid point, isn’t it? My background when I was starting to work more seriously with JavaScript, and this was probably when I was back at Yahoo, things were very much on the model of server rendered HTML pages and then taking a progressive enhancement approach, layering JavaScript on top to enhance the interface. And if the state of something in the interface needed to change, your code had to know about all the parts of the interface that it needed to update, which obviously leads you to a tightly coupled approach with these big monolithic views where the code you write needs to know about all the other code around it. And I guess that doesn’t really lend itself to a componentized approach which you would take when working with a pattern library or a design system, which is more to your area of particular expertise. I guess, React lends itself more to that approach, does it?

Mina: I think it does, especially with the being able to couple the very specific CSS to one JSX or one React component. And so that way it makes it much easier to separate or only take what you need for the library and leave the rest, whereas a pattern library or design system that attempts to do something more monolithic with just one big style CSS file or something like that, it does make it a lot difficult. You kind of have to take it all or nothing. So I do appreciate that React allows us to do more individualized, more componentized way of development, even if I still wish there was a way for me to do truly separate my presentation layer and my content layer from my interactivity layer. But maybe that’s just me being a little bit old school in that sense.

Drew: I definitely feel the pain there. The idea is that, come and correct me if I’m wrong, my understanding is that rather than separating the technologies, the CSS, and the JavaScript, and the HTML, it’s separating the functionality. So everything that is one component all exist together-

Mina: Yeah.

Drew: … which I guess is useful if that component then is no longer needed. You can just delete it, and it’s gone, and it doesn’t leave a footprint around your app. That’s not always the case with CSS though. How are you working with CSS with React? Have You looked at things like styled-components or anything like that?

Mina: No, we haven’t. I’ve heard of styled-components, but I’ve never quite really investigated them very fully to be perfectly honest. So the way that we’re working with CSS with React is we write Less, and we just have a Less file attached to each individual component that gets imported into that component. And then it gets bonded up via Webpack and served to the client.

Drew: Are you using a system like BEM or something to turn namespace?

Mina: Yeah. We’re using BEM for namespacing, although the adherence to it is kind of varied depending on who’s writing what. But we try to use a BEM namespacing pattern to make it a little bit clearer what the purpose of each individual class and component is.

Drew: And does that seem to be working successfully for you?

Mina: I think so. Occasionally it kind of has the same old problem of I sometimes don’t know how to name something. After a while daily things has always and will always be a difficult thing for master. So that’s the only issue I have with is I occasionally I have no idea what I should call a particular component.

Drew: Definitely. That’s a constant battle, isn’t it, how to out the name things?

Mina: Yeah.

Drew: I always end up when working on a new feature or something like that, you give a component and all the classes and everything the name that the feature has got at the moment. And then by the time you come to launch, it’s been renamed something else. So you have references to the old name in the code and the interface has the new name. And …

Mina: I try to always name things based on the function or the purpose of it versus things that are a little bit more ephemeral, because it’s less likely that the actual purpose of this component will change. I forgot to mention, but in addition to using BEM, I guess we use BEMITs if you’re familiar with that. It’s basically the ITCSS plus BEM, both of which were created by Harry Roberts. So I use Hungarian notation to denote whether or not something is a component, versus a layout object, versus like a larger pattern comprised of multiple components. And then from there we use the BEM convention to signify like the block element and all that.

Drew: And have you had to do much refactoring and deleting of components and things in your code base and had to deal with the issue of CSS getting left behind?

Mina: Yeah. So the non-React part of my job, of maintaining slack.com is that’s all just a bunch of Less files that are being compiled for CSS. And I guarantee you, there’s a lot of zombie code in there, because we definitely iterate above things a lot in the time I’ve been there. And we don’t always have time to go back and do the cleanup versus when we redesign a page or something. So it’s overdue for an audit, I’ll say that.

Drew: This is something that we’ve just been looking at in our React project, looking at how we approach CSS. At the moment, we have a few big, global CSS files for the whole of the app, and we do get this situation where our bundle size is just growing, and growing, and growing and never gets any smaller, even though things do get removed. So we’ve been looking at things like styled-components, Tailwind as well is another option that we’re really seriously considering. Have you looked at tailwind much?

Mina: I haven’t looked at it a lot. I’ve been curious about it, but again, I’ve never really had time to dig in to actually see if it’s something that I want to try to bring into our code base.

Drew: I was actually quite surprised, because like you, I’m a bit old school with how to do these things. I like nice separation of concerns. And I like to write my CSS in CSS, and of course the approach with Tailwind is you have all these class names, which feel a bit like inline styles that you’re applying. And if it feels dirty.

Mina: Yeah.

Drew: And I volunteered within the team, we each which took a technology to investigate if they’d be a good fit for our problems, and I volunteered to look at Tailwind because I was absolutely certain I was going to hate it.

Mina: No, no.

Drew: But it turns out I actually think it solves a lot of problems. I was quite impressed.

Mina: Yeah. I’ve sort of come around to a similar way of thinking, because I in the past would much prefer to have one class comprise all of the styles I needed for a particular component and not do a class per property, as I believe Tailwind does or languages like it do. For the similar reasons, it felt very much like, “Well, I’m just running inline CSS at this point. Why would I do this?” But as I’ve been developing more and more, inside of our Slack design system, I created a bunch of what I call utility classes that do things like add a bit of margin with a pattern. I’ve noticed that more and more, I’m using those classes in addition to the component classes. So I’m like, “Okay, well maybe I should revisit this whole to doing a CSS as a one declaration at a time.” I don’t know if I’d go that far, but it’s definitely worth considering.

Drew: Computing seems to flip flop in terms of trends between thin clients and fat clients solutions. We started with mainframes with terminals, and then the PC era with windows and office and all these sort of big applications. And they were all getting really slow, and than the web came along, and that was just a browser, and all the work was being done on the server. And it was all fast and snappy again. And now we’ve gone back to putting all that work back in the browser with everything being done with JavaScript, things like React and the JAMstack approach where we’re back to a sort of fat client. I sometimes worry that we’re asking too much of the browser. Is this a mistake? Are we asking too much of the browser trying to do all this stuff in React?

Mina: I want to say yes with the caveat of, again, my experience is very much contained to mostly static websites. I don’t do a lot of product development. So maybe in that realm, this makes more sense. But from my perspective, I feel like we’re a lot of the times using a hatchet when we just need a butter knife. I don’t know why we need put all this in the browser, put so much work and so much pressure on the client. I feel like we could do this much simpler. One of the things that always made me a little hesitant to use React, or I say hesitant, but what I mean when it made me viscerally angry and I actively opposed, was when I would go to a website and literally nothing would render because there was one error or something, Like, “Really? The entire page is broken because one function broke down?”

Mina: It just kind of annoyed me that a lot of times it was an all or nothing approach. One of the talks that I gave at AEA in the past and other places in the past was talking about how to include progressive enhancement and not just your development, but also of art direction and design of sites. And I would point out specifically examples of websites that didn’t do progressive enhancement or any kind of graceful degradation. It was like either you have the JavaScript running in the browser or you get absolutely nothing. And it would be like just a simple site that represent information about the history of web design, which was one of the sites actually talked about, the history of web design from like 1990 until now. It was a beautiful website with lots of timelines, animation of things. But it also could have been rendered statically with just a list. There were steps in between showing nothing and showing that beautifully enhanced experience that I think got lost because of the way we’ve been approaching modern web development now.

Drew: So would you say there are absolutely some categories of projects that suit a solution like React and some where it really shouldn’t be used and you should be using more traditional methods?

Mina: I think that if your site particularly is mostly static, it was just serving up information, I guess I don’t understand why you need a project like React to render something that doesn’t have a lot of interaction beyond just DOM manipulation. I guess I don’t see what benefit you get from that. Again, I may not be working on the appropriate projects. I may not just have seen or found that use case, but I’m having a hard time seeing if it’s just mostly static site, presenting content, not a lot interaction, not a lot of interaction beyond manipulated DOM and doing animations. I don’t see how having a React library helps you accomplish that goal.

Drew: It’s interesting because I’m not bad talking it because I haven’t actually used it, but I see a lot of Gatsby projects and Gatsby being a static site generator that uses a React front-end in it. And I see all the examples of the themes and things they have available are all content based sites, or blogs, and a recipe site, and a portfolio, and these sort of things. And there’s something I think actually that this isn’t necessarily the right fit for something like React. Why isn’t this being statically rendered and then progressively enhance?

Mina: Yeah.

Drew: It’s not software.

Mina: Yeah. I haven’t actually used Gatsby either. I’ve heard plenty of great things about it, but that’s probably one of the examples I would think of where I’m like, “Okay, I guess I’m just not seeing why that tool is necessary to do that particular job.” Again, I don’t know. Maybe it’s just because more people are comfortable writing in React when they are writing new something else, and it’s just providing a tool that meets people where they are. I’ve heard great things about static site generators that use React for people who have used them and love them, but it’s not a use case that I would have immediately been like, “Oh, that makes sense.”

Drew: It seems like there’s always been this battle between what we would call a website and what you might call a web app. And the chasm between the two seems to be getting wider, and wider, and wider, whereas a progressive enhancement approach tries to bridge the gap by taking something static and adding JavaScript and adding interactivity. It seems that things like React are ideally suited for software that you’re running in the browser. Would you agree with that?

Mina: I would definitely agree with that because it feels like it’s was built for that type of environment; it was built for running software. It was built by Facebook for Facebook. So it was built for a product. It was built for running whatever you call a web app in the browser and not necessarily for the type of work that, as I mentioned, I’m used to doing. So I think in those scenarios, it definitely makes a lot of sense to use it if you’re building a more complex, more sophisticated piece of software that’s meant to run inside of a browser. But if you’re building a marketing agency site or whatever, I guess I would still struggle to see why it will be necessary there.

Drew: So are we giving people permission to still build decent, statically rendered websites?

Mina: I would love to see more of that happen. I feel like that’s kind of gotten lost and it’s sort of lost its, if it ever was cool or whatever. I feel like we’ve lost that part of web development. It’s so funny: you and I both said that we’re kind of old school, and I laugh at that because I’ve actually been doing web development for, what, six years now? How am I old school? It hasn’t been that long for me. And yet somehow I’m part of the old guard who doesn’t like new and shiny things. I don’t get it.

Drew: So in fact React has actually existed for the whole time that you’ve been a web developer.

Mina: Maybe I just have an old soul. I don’t know.

Drew: I think that’s probably the case. I’ve not looked personally at, there are service side rendered approaches you can take with React apps. Have you experienced any of those?

Mina: I haven’t experienced any them. I briefly looked into them for the project I’m currently working on, because I feel like there’s parts of the operation that would work better on a server versus in the clients. But I think because of my limited knowledge and the fact that the code base is a little more complicated than I can understand, I wasn’t quite able to figure out how to make that part work. I would love to figure it out eventually, but I spent a day digging into it. I was like, “You know what? I’m not grokking this away I need to be. So I’m just going to back up and take a different route.”

Drew: Yeah. I think we’ve all been there.

Mina: Yeah. I went down a path. I was like, “Oh, this is dark and scary. Let’s reverse. Let’s reverse.”

Drew: Step away from the code.

Mina: Yes.

Drew: So you’ve been very diplomatic and polite about React so far. I sense that there’s some tension bubbling under the surface a bit. Come on. Tell us what you really feel.

Mina: I have been polite and diplomatic, mostly because the Reacts fan base can be a little mean sometimes, and I would rather not have them come for me. So please, React is great. It’s wonderful. Use it for what you want to use it for. I kid, but even that tweet that you mentioned at the beginning of this podcast where I think what you said is that I don’t hate it. I don’t love it, but I don’t hate it. Even that statement, I got people, there was no vitriol, but it was more they where ready to leap to the defense and say, “Well, I love it because X, Y, Z.” I’m like, “I didn’t say it was bad. I just said that I’m meh about the whole thing.” But apparently being meh is not okay. I have to love it.

Mina: So that’s why I probably have been a bit more diplomatic than I would ordinarily be, just because I don’t want people to think that I’m bad mouthing it, because I’m not. It has a place in more web development. It serves a function. It does its job well. People love it. It’s just not a tool that I’ve ever had or wanted to use until now.

Drew: Yeah. Things can get very tribal, can’t they, with people feeling like they have to take one side or another, and you’re either absolutely for something or absolutely against something? And I’m not sure it serves a good purpose, and I don’t think it really moves us forward as an industry and as a community to do that.

Mina: Yeah. It’s really odd. It’s fascinating to watch from just a sociological standpoint, but it’s often just really like weird to observe. It’s like I’m not allowed to just be, like I said, neutral about certain things. I have to have a strong opinion, which is I don’t think healthy. What’s the term, “Strong opinions, loosely held?” That’s kind of the way I go about things. I feel strongly about certain things, but it’s not like you can’t change my mind. Where I feel like some people, their identity gets wrapped up into certain aspects of it ,that if you are not for whatever they’ve chosen to identify with, it’s a personal slight versus just, I don’t care about this particular topic, or tool, or whatever.

Drew: Yes. I don’t know if it’s made worse by the fact that we all are sort of tending to specialize a lot more in particular parts of the stack. And I know there are people who are React developers. They would call themselves a React developer because that’s what they work in. And they wouldn’t necessarily write any vanilla Java script or wouldn’t use Vue or whatever. React is their world. So I guess it almost feels like an attack on their entire career to say, “I don’t like React.” Well, they’re really invested in making you like React or whatever the technology may be.

Mina: I will admit to being one of those people in the past. Actually, probably it was mostly about SASS, I believe. I was very much on the team of doing SASS as a preprocessor and all other preprocessors are trash. I don’t want to talk about them. I don’t want to deal with them. And I realized that was a very narrow way to look at things. Use the appropriate tool for the job. Whatever makes you more productive, that’s the right tool. It doesn’t really matter what it is.

Drew: Are there any technologies that we work with that don’t have that sort of tribal feel? Is there anything that people are just happy to use or not use? I can’t think of anything.

Mina: Wow. No one has opinions about markup, actually.

Drew: No.

Mina: I feel like no one has opinions about like actual HTML and just markup, just like, “It’s there.” They use it. But people have strong opinions about CSS and how it’s either terrible or wonderful, and the preprocessor wars that don’t really happen all that much anymore, and then of course, all of the tribalism within the various JavaScript libraries.

Drew: So you would say your journey so far with React is still just, “It’s a tool. It does its job?”

Mina: It went from a curiosity to active and visceral dislike because of how prevalent it was and how I unnecessary I thought that that prevalence was to meh. I’m now with meh, which again does not mean I hate it. It just means …

Drew: I think that’s a good place to be. I think we’re probably all sort of stronger as technologists if we understand the value of a particular technology for its purpose. We can evaluate what is good for what circumstance and pick the right tool for the job.

Mina: Yeah. And that’s kind of where I’ve arrived at this point in my career where I don’t get really invested in any particular language, or technology, or whatever, because it’s like, “Just whatever tool is most appropriate for what you’re trying to do, then use that.” I’ve learned that there’s a place for everything; there’s a time and a place to do everything. And up until recently, there was no real time or place for me to use this React librarian, and now there is.

Drew: I think that’s a good place to be. So I’ve been learning all about React lately as you have in the day job. Is there anything else that you’ve been learning about lately?

Mina: I’ve actually learned ironically, which is I think another language that has originated at Facebook, I’ve been doing a lot of Hack development, mostly because that’s what I use at Slack, at my day job. Learning Hack paved the way for me to get more comfortable using React because they follow very similar patterns, except one is server side and one’s not. So that, along with just in general, I’ve been learning more about the back-end and how that works for various different reasons. And I’ve been stretching myself for the past couple years and getting more and more outside of my comfortable zone. Design systems, libraries, that’s very much my world, and I feel very good and comfortable in that world. But I’m stepping outside of it and doing a lot more server side logic, and API development, and data modeling, and all of that. I’ve been doing a lot on that for the past year as well.

Drew: I find that the more I understand about the whole stack about back-end stuff in front-end stuff, each one helps my knowledge of the other. I find I write better front-end code by having written back-end code and understanding-

Mina: Yeah. I think I feel the same way. Now that I have a better idea of, like we said, the whole stack of how we get from the data to the end client. I find that I’m thinking about the entire pipeline no matter what part I’m actually working in. I’m thinking about what’s the best way to structure this API so that when I get to the template, I don’t have to do so much manipulating of the data that I receive on that end of it. It’s definitely made me overall a better engineer, I feel like it

Drew: If you, dear listener, would like to hear more from Mina, you can follow her on Twitter where she’s @MinaMarkham and find her personal site at mina.codes. Thanks for joining us today, Mina. Do you have any parting words?

Mina: Have a smashing night?

Drew: Great.

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Smashing Podcast Episode 18 With Mina Markham: How Can I Learn React?

In this episode of the Smashing Podcast, we’re talking about learning React. What’s React like to work with, and how can experienced developers get started? Drew McLellan chats to Mina Markham to find out.

In this episode of the Smashing Podcast, we’re talking about learning React. What’s React like to work with, and how can experienced developers get started? I spoke to Mina Markham to find out.

Show Notes

Weekly Update

Transcript

Drew McLellan: She is a front-end architect, conference speaker and organizer, and lover of design systems. Her work on the Pantsuit patent library for Hillary Clinton’s Hillary for America presidential campaign marked a watershed for design systems within the industry and was featured on publications, such as Wired, Fast Company, and Communication Arts. Like many of us, she writes code for a living, currently as a senior engineer at Slack. So we know she’s a talented and forward thinking developer, but did you know she was once mistaken for Patrick Swayze? My smashing friends, please welcome Mina Markham. Hi Mina. How are you?

Mina Markham: I’m smashing.

Drew: Good to hear. Now, sometimes on the Smashing Podcast, we talk to people about the subject that they’re best known for. And sometimes it’s fun just to talk about something a bit tangential. Now, I could chat to you all day about pattern libraries, design systems, the amazing work you’ve done in that particular area, and I could talk to you about subjects that you’ve perhaps spoken about, events, such as the Event Apart, things like art direction. And we could obviously talk about CSS until the cows come home. But you tweeted a few days ago, and I realized that we’re actually both in the same boat in that we’re both experienced front-end engineers and we’re both recently started working with React. So before we get onto React itself, where were you coming to up to this point? Had you been working with other libraries and frameworks for JavaScript development?

Mina: No, actually I’ve been doing mostly vanilla JavaScript for a while. And before that, of course I got into JavaScript. Let me rephrase that. I started working with Java script using jQuery because it made the most sense to me. It was something that was very easily for me to parse to figure out what was happening. And then from there I backtracked to doing just vanilla, plain JavaScript, ESX, and I hadn’t really gotten too much into the framework wars. I had no, like I had no favorite. I had no dog in the fight. I was like, “For you, React, whatever. I don’t really care.” But times change.

Drew: And in this sort of way of working with vanilla JavaScript, because I’ve done a lot of that myself as well. I’ve worked with various frameworks. I’ve done a lot with jQuery back in the day. I worked with YUI, Yahoo User Interface Library. Had you felt many of the pain points that something like React’s architecture tries to address?

Mina: I don’t think I ever had. I spent most of my career making websites versus web apps and things like that. So everything I did was pretty static up to a certain extent. So I never really had to deal with state management, things like that. So the pain points that React attempts to solve I had never really applied to the kind of work that I did.

Drew: Generally speaking, what’s the sort of nature of the projects that you’ve with React so far?

Mina: It was actually only been the one project, which I’m currently working on and I can’t give away too many details because public company and all that good stuff.

Drew: Of course.

Mina: But essentially what I’m trying to do is I’m trying to use React to, it’s a very interactive sort of product where I need people to be able to enter in and save data at a certain state and then manipulate it and generate something else with said data. And that’s just something that it’s not simple DOM manipulation at that point. It really is a lot of more complex, front-end manage of data and managing the state of said data. So there really was no other alternative but to use some kind of library that attempts to solve that problem. I knew I wouldn’t be able to get past with just plain JavaScript. I contemplated maybe handling somethings on the server side, but again, due to the very interactive nature of what I’m working with, it need to be in the client. And so we already use React at Slack for various other things. And so I was like, “Okay, well we just should go ahead and adopt the same thing that the rest of the parent the companies are using and go from there.”

Drew: One of the things that I’m always seems to be a pain point with people picking up React is getting to grips with the tool chain that’s needed to get things working, Webpack being an obvious elephant in the room. Have you had to do much configuration of the tool chain or like me if you had the lUXury of teammates doing it for you?

Mina: Oh, I love the infrastructure team at Slack the data. The front-end infrastructure team at Slack, they handled all of that. I didn’t have to think about it. It was great. Because I tried to learn React before in the past. Usually the way I learn best is by actually working and implementing on things. And we use React to build a lot of hillaryclinton.com back in 2016. So it’s not like I’ve never worked with people who use it. It’s just my work never directly needed me to get involved. But that code base was very complex and very sophisticated, and there was so much happening that there’s such a barrier to entry to try to learn anything in there if you didn’t already know how React and RedUX and all of that works, which I didn’t. So I wasn’t really effective in learning in that environment.

Mina: Luckily, here I do have people to like take away a little bit more of the complex bits of it. I don’t have to worry about the Webpack config at all. That’s been set up. That’s been tried and tested and ready to go. I am in a similar boat where we also use RedUX in addition to React, which I didn’t realize were two different things. I didn’t know which part handled which. Dropping into a code base like that, it was a little disorienting because I didn’t realize that they were all the same thing. I had people who were seasoned React developers telling me, “Oh, we also are using RedUX, which makes it a little bit harder for you to really learn what React all can do if you’re starting from scratch.” And I never quite knew what they meant by that because I didn’t know what they were talking about.

Mina: To answer your original question, I am still having a little bit more of a little bit barrier to entry, because it’s not just learning React. I’m having to learn React and also how to use the RedUX store. So those two things at the same time can be a little much.

Drew: Yeah, I’ve found exactly the same thing coming into an existing code base as my first React project that uses RedUX. And I think as is the nature of any of these sort of technologies when they’re young, they iterate really quickly, and what’s best practice at one point, 6 months later has moved on and there’s a different way of doing things. And when you have a code base that spans many years, you can sometimes have different styles of implementing things in there. It doesn’t always keep sync. And of course, if you’re following a tutorial or whatever to learn, you’re reading books, you’re using resources, they will be in the most modern version of how to do things. And that doesn’t necessarily nit to what you see when you look at an existing, mature product. Is that something you’d experienced at all, or have you managed to keep your code base really up to date?

Mina: I think that is something that I definitely have been experiencing. When I tried to learn how to do React on my own, I looked at various tutorials and things like that. And I noticed, or at least people have told me who have worked who have been working with me that some of the things that we do or kind of anti-pattern or not quite how things work now, because this code base is slightly, well mature us relative, but it’s a few years old. And so there are some ways that I guess are easier to do things than the way we’re doing them currently because this was written years ago. So it’s a little bit of a treadmill trying to keep up with current times and make sure I want to do things the best way, but also I don’t want to break an established code base because I want to play around with stuff.

Drew: Obviously, one of the things with React that people like you and I are coming to it, it can feel a bit jarring as this whole thing with JSX. Are you using JSX in your project?

Mina: We are. I am using JSX.

Drew: Have you made peace with that?

Mina: I fell like a little small piece of me dies every time I open one of those files. It still feels sacrilege to put my HTML in the JavaScript file. I know that’s kind of revolutionary and the whole point, but it just feels off to me that I’m writing my markup in a JavaScript file. I’ve made peace with it, but every time I do it, I’m just like, “…” Separation concerns, it is a thing. I’d like it back, please.

Drew: It’s a valid point, isn’t it? My background when I was starting to work more seriously with JavaScript, and this was probably when I was back at Yahoo, things were very much on the model of server rendered HTML pages and then taking a progressive enhancement approach, layering JavaScript on top to enhance the interface. And if the state of something in the interface needed to change, your code had to know about all the parts of the interface that it needed to update, which obviously leads you to a tightly coupled approach with these big monolithic views where the code you write needs to know about all the other code around it. And I guess that doesn’t really lend itself to a componentized approach which you would take when working with a pattern library or a design system, which is more to your area of particular expertise. I guess, React lends itself more to that approach, does it?

Mina: I think it does, especially with the being able to couple the very specific CSS to one JSX or one React component. And so that way it makes it much easier to separate or only take what you need for the library and leave the rest, whereas a pattern library or design system that attempts to do something more monolithic with just one big style CSS file or something like that, it does make it a lot difficult. You kind of have to take it all or nothing. So I do appreciate that React allows us to do more individualized, more componentized way of development, even if I still wish there was a way for me to do truly separate my presentation layer and my content layer from my interactivity layer. But maybe that’s just me being a little bit old school in that sense.

Drew: I definitely feel the pain there. The idea is that, come and correct me if I’m wrong, my understanding is that rather than separating the technologies, the CSS, and the JavaScript, and the HTML, it’s separating the functionality. So everything that is one component all exist together-

Mina: Yeah.

Drew: … which I guess is useful if that component then is no longer needed. You can just delete it, and it’s gone, and it doesn’t leave a footprint around your app. That’s not always the case with CSS though. How are you working with CSS with React? Have You looked at things like styled-components or anything like that?

Mina: No, we haven’t. I’ve heard of styled-components, but I’ve never quite really investigated them very fully to be perfectly honest. So the way that we’re working with CSS with React is we write Less, and we just have a Less file attached to each individual component that gets imported into that component. And then it gets bonded up via Webpack and served to the client.

Drew: Are you using a system like BEM or something to turn namespace?

Mina: Yeah. We’re using BEM for namespacing, although the adherence to it is kind of varied depending on who’s writing what. But we try to use a BEM namespacing pattern to make it a little bit clearer what the purpose of each individual class and component is.

Drew: And does that seem to be working successfully for you?

Mina: I think so. Occasionally it kind of has the same old problem of I sometimes don’t know how to name something. After a while daily things has always and will always be a difficult thing for master. So that’s the only issue I have with is I occasionally I have no idea what I should call a particular component.

Drew: Definitely. That’s a constant battle, isn’t it, how to out the name things?

Mina: Yeah.

Drew: I always end up when working on a new feature or something like that, you give a component and all the classes and everything the name that the feature has got at the moment. And then by the time you come to launch, it’s been renamed something else. So you have references to the old name in the code and the interface has the new name. And …

Mina: I try to always name things based on the function or the purpose of it versus things that are a little bit more ephemeral, because it’s less likely that the actual purpose of this component will change. I forgot to mention, but in addition to using BEM, I guess we use BEMITs if you’re familiar with that. It’s basically the ITCSS plus BEM, both of which were created by Harry Roberts. So I use Hungarian notation to denote whether or not something is a component, versus a layout object, versus like a larger pattern comprised of multiple components. And then from there we use the BEM convention to signify like the block element and all that.

Drew: And have you had to do much refactoring and deleting of components and things in your code base and had to deal with the issue of CSS getting left behind?

Mina: Yeah. So the non-React part of my job, of maintaining slack.com is that’s all just a bunch of Less files that are being compiled for CSS. And I guarantee you, there’s a lot of zombie code in there, because we definitely iterate above things a lot in the time I’ve been there. And we don’t always have time to go back and do the cleanup versus when we redesign a page or something. So it’s overdue for an audit, I’ll say that.

Drew: This is something that we’ve just been looking at in our React project, looking at how we approach CSS. At the moment, we have a few big, global CSS files for the whole of the app, and we do get this situation where our bundle size is just growing, and growing, and growing and never gets any smaller, even though things do get removed. So we’ve been looking at things like styled-components, Tailwind as well is another option that we’re really seriously considering. Have you looked at tailwind much?

Mina: I haven’t looked at it a lot. I’ve been curious about it, but again, I’ve never really had time to dig in to actually see if it’s something that I want to try to bring into our code base.

Drew: I was actually quite surprised, because like you, I’m a bit old school with how to do these things. I like nice separation of concerns. And I like to write my CSS in CSS, and of course the approach with Tailwind is you have all these class names, which feel a bit like inline styles that you’re applying. And if it feels dirty.

Mina: Yeah.

Drew: And I volunteered within the team, we each which took a technology to investigate if they’d be a good fit for our problems, and I volunteered to look at Tailwind because I was absolutely certain I was going to hate it.

Mina: No, no.

Drew: But it turns out I actually think it solves a lot of problems. I was quite impressed.

Mina: Yeah. I’ve sort of come around to a similar way of thinking, because I in the past would much prefer to have one class comprise all of the styles I needed for a particular component and not do a class per property, as I believe Tailwind does or languages like it do. For the similar reasons, it felt very much like, “Well, I’m just running inline CSS at this point. Why would I do this?” But as I’ve been developing more and more, inside of our Slack design system, I created a bunch of what I call utility classes that do things like add a bit of margin with a pattern. I’ve noticed that more and more, I’m using those classes in addition to the component classes. So I’m like, “Okay, well maybe I should revisit this whole to doing a CSS as a one declaration at a time.” I don’t know if I’d go that far, but it’s definitely worth considering.

Drew: Computing seems to flip flop in terms of trends between thin clients and fat clients solutions. We started with mainframes with terminals, and then the PC era with windows and office and all these sort of big applications. And they were all getting really slow, and than the web came along, and that was just a browser, and all the work was being done on the server. And it was all fast and snappy again. And now we’ve gone back to putting all that work back in the browser with everything being done with JavaScript, things like React and the JAMstack approach where we’re back to a sort of fat client. I sometimes worry that we’re asking too much of the browser. Is this a mistake? Are we asking too much of the browser trying to do all this stuff in React?

Mina: I want to say yes with the caveat of, again, my experience is very much contained to mostly static websites. I don’t do a lot of product development. So maybe in that realm, this makes more sense. But from my perspective, I feel like we’re a lot of the times using a hatchet when we just need a butter knife. I don’t know why we need put all this in the browser, put so much work and so much pressure on the client. I feel like we could do this much simpler. One of the things that always made me a little hesitant to use React, or I say hesitant, but what I mean when it made me viscerally angry and I actively opposed, was when I would go to a website and literally nothing would render because there was one error or something, Like, “Really? The entire page is broken because one function broke down?”

Mina: It just kind of annoyed me that a lot of times it was an all or nothing approach. One of the talks that I gave at AEA in the past and other places in the past was talking about how to include progressive enhancement and not just your development, but also of art direction and design of sites. And I would point out specifically examples of websites that didn’t do progressive enhancement or any kind of graceful degradation. It was like either you have the JavaScript running in the browser or you get absolutely nothing. And it would be like just a simple site that represent information about the history of web design, which was one of the sites actually talked about, the history of web design from like 1990 until now. It was a beautiful website with lots of timelines, animation of things. But it also could have been rendered statically with just a list. There were steps in between showing nothing and showing that beautifully enhanced experience that I think got lost because of the way we’ve been approaching modern web development now.

Drew: So would you say there are absolutely some categories of projects that suit a solution like React and some where it really shouldn’t be used and you should be using more traditional methods?

Mina: I think that if your site particularly is mostly static, it was just serving up information, I guess I don’t understand why you need a project like React to render something that doesn’t have a lot of interaction beyond just DOM manipulation. I guess I don’t see what benefit you get from that. Again, I may not be working on the appropriate projects. I may not just have seen or found that use case, but I’m having a hard time seeing if it’s just mostly static site, presenting content, not a lot interaction, not a lot of interaction beyond manipulated DOM and doing animations. I don’t see how having a React library helps you accomplish that goal.

Drew: It’s interesting because I’m not bad talking it because I haven’t actually used it, but I see a lot of Gatsby projects and Gatsby being a static site generator that uses a React front-end in it. And I see all the examples of the themes and things they have available are all content based sites, or blogs, and a recipe site, and a portfolio, and these sort of things. And there’s something I think actually that this isn’t necessarily the right fit for something like React. Why isn’t this being statically rendered and then progressively enhance?

Mina: Yeah.

Drew: It’s not software.

Mina: Yeah. I haven’t actually used Gatsby either. I’ve heard plenty of great things about it, but that’s probably one of the examples I would think of where I’m like, “Okay, I guess I’m just not seeing why that tool is necessary to do that particular job.” Again, I don’t know. Maybe it’s just because more people are comfortable writing in React when they are writing new something else, and it’s just providing a tool that meets people where they are. I’ve heard great things about static site generators that use React for people who have used them and love them, but it’s not a use case that I would have immediately been like, “Oh, that makes sense.”

Drew: It seems like there’s always been this battle between what we would call a website and what you might call a web app. And the chasm between the two seems to be getting wider, and wider, and wider, whereas a progressive enhancement approach tries to bridge the gap by taking something static and adding JavaScript and adding interactivity. It seems that things like React are ideally suited for software that you’re running in the browser. Would you agree with that?

Mina: I would definitely agree with that because it feels like it’s was built for that type of environment; it was built for running software. It was built by Facebook for Facebook. So it was built for a product. It was built for running whatever you call a web app in the browser and not necessarily for the type of work that, as I mentioned, I’m used to doing. So I think in those scenarios, it definitely makes a lot of sense to use it if you’re building a more complex, more sophisticated piece of software that’s meant to run inside of a browser. But if you’re building a marketing agency site or whatever, I guess I would still struggle to see why it will be necessary there.

Drew: So are we giving people permission to still build decent, statically rendered websites?

Mina: I would love to see more of that happen. I feel like that’s kind of gotten lost and it’s sort of lost its, if it ever was cool or whatever. I feel like we’ve lost that part of web development. It’s so funny: you and I both said that we’re kind of old school, and I laugh at that because I’ve actually been doing web development for, what, six years now? How am I old school? It hasn’t been that long for me. And yet somehow I’m part of the old guard who doesn’t like new and shiny things. I don’t get it.

Drew: So in fact React has actually existed for the whole time that you’ve been a web developer.

Mina: Maybe I just have an old soul. I don’t know.

Drew: I think that’s probably the case. I’ve not looked personally at, there are service side rendered approaches you can take with React apps. Have you experienced any of those?

Mina: I haven’t experienced any them. I briefly looked into them for the project I’m currently working on, because I feel like there’s parts of the operation that would work better on a server versus in the clients. But I think because of my limited knowledge and the fact that the code base is a little more complicated than I can understand, I wasn’t quite able to figure out how to make that part work. I would love to figure it out eventually, but I spent a day digging into it. I was like, “You know what? I’m not grokking this away I need to be. So I’m just going to back up and take a different route.”

Drew: Yeah. I think we’ve all been there.

Mina: Yeah. I went down a path. I was like, “Oh, this is dark and scary. Let’s reverse. Let’s reverse.”

Drew: Step away from the code.

Mina: Yes.

Drew: So you’ve been very diplomatic and polite about React so far. I sense that there’s some tension bubbling under the surface a bit. Come on. Tell us what you really feel.

Mina: I have been polite and diplomatic, mostly because the Reacts fan base can be a little mean sometimes, and I would rather not have them come for me. So please, React is great. It’s wonderful. Use it for what you want to use it for. I kid, but even that tweet that you mentioned at the beginning of this podcast where I think what you said is that I don’t hate it. I don’t love it, but I don’t hate it. Even that statement, I got people, there was no vitriol, but it was more they where ready to leap to the defense and say, “Well, I love it because X, Y, Z.” I’m like, “I didn’t say it was bad. I just said that I’m meh about the whole thing.” But apparently being meh is not okay. I have to love it.

Mina: So that’s why I probably have been a bit more diplomatic than I would ordinarily be, just because I don’t want people to think that I’m bad mouthing it, because I’m not. It has a place in more web development. It serves a function. It does its job well. People love it. It’s just not a tool that I’ve ever had or wanted to use until now.

Drew: Yeah. Things can get very tribal, can’t they, with people feeling like they have to take one side or another, and you’re either absolutely for something or absolutely against something? And I’m not sure it serves a good purpose, and I don’t think it really moves us forward as an industry and as a community to do that.

Mina: Yeah. It’s really odd. It’s fascinating to watch from just a sociological standpoint, but it’s often just really like weird to observe. It’s like I’m not allowed to just be, like I said, neutral about certain things. I have to have a strong opinion, which is I don’t think healthy. What’s the term, “Strong opinions, loosely held?” That’s kind of the way I go about things. I feel strongly about certain things, but it’s not like you can’t change my mind. Where I feel like some people, their identity gets wrapped up into certain aspects of it ,that if you are not for whatever they’ve chosen to identify with, it’s a personal slight versus just, I don’t care about this particular topic, or tool, or whatever.

Drew: Yes. I don’t know if it’s made worse by the fact that we all are sort of tending to specialize a lot more in particular parts of the stack. And I know there are people who are React developers. They would call themselves a React developer because that’s what they work in. And they wouldn’t necessarily write any vanilla Java script or wouldn’t use Vue or whatever. React is their world. So I guess it almost feels like an attack on their entire career to say, “I don’t like React.” Well, they’re really invested in making you like React or whatever the technology may be.

Mina: I will admit to being one of those people in the past. Actually, probably it was mostly about SASS, I believe. I was very much on the team of doing SASS as a preprocessor and all other preprocessors are trash. I don’t want to talk about them. I don’t want to deal with them. And I realized that was a very narrow way to look at things. Use the appropriate tool for the job. Whatever makes you more productive, that’s the right tool. It doesn’t really matter what it is.

Drew: Are there any technologies that we work with that don’t have that sort of tribal feel? Is there anything that people are just happy to use or not use? I can’t think of anything.

Mina: Wow. No one has opinions about markup, actually.

Drew: No.

Mina: I feel like no one has opinions about like actual HTML and just markup, just like, “It’s there.” They use it. But people have strong opinions about CSS and how it’s either terrible or wonderful, and the preprocessor wars that don’t really happen all that much anymore, and then of course, all of the tribalism within the various JavaScript libraries.

Drew: So you would say your journey so far with React is still just, “It’s a tool. It does its job?”

Mina: It went from a curiosity to active and visceral dislike because of how prevalent it was and how I unnecessary I thought that that prevalence was to meh. I’m now with meh, which again does not mean I hate it. It just means …

Drew: I think that’s a good place to be. I think we’re probably all sort of stronger as technologists if we understand the value of a particular technology for its purpose. We can evaluate what is good for what circumstance and pick the right tool for the job.

Mina: Yeah. And that’s kind of where I’ve arrived at this point in my career where I don’t get really invested in any particular language, or technology, or whatever, because it’s like, “Just whatever tool is most appropriate for what you’re trying to do, then use that.” I’ve learned that there’s a place for everything; there’s a time and a place to do everything. And up until recently, there was no real time or place for me to use this React librarian, and now there is.

Drew: I think that’s a good place to be. So I’ve been learning all about React lately as you have in the day job. Is there anything else that you’ve been learning about lately?

Mina: I’ve actually learned ironically, which is I think another language that has originated at Facebook, I’ve been doing a lot of Hack development, mostly because that’s what I use at Slack, at my day job. Learning Hack paved the way for me to get more comfortable using React because they follow very similar patterns, except one is server side and one’s not. So that, along with just in general, I’ve been learning more about the back-end and how that works for various different reasons. And I’ve been stretching myself for the past couple years and getting more and more outside of my comfortable zone. Design systems, libraries, that’s very much my world, and I feel very good and comfortable in that world. But I’m stepping outside of it and doing a lot more server side logic, and API development, and data modeling, and all of that. I’ve been doing a lot on that for the past year as well.

Drew: I find that the more I understand about the whole stack about back-end stuff in front-end stuff, each one helps my knowledge of the other. I find I write better front-end code by having written back-end code and understanding-

Mina: Yeah. I think I feel the same way. Now that I have a better idea of, like we said, the whole stack of how we get from the data to the end client. I find that I’m thinking about the entire pipeline no matter what part I’m actually working in. I’m thinking about what’s the best way to structure this API so that when I get to the template, I don’t have to do so much manipulating of the data that I receive on that end of it. It’s definitely made me overall a better engineer, I feel like it

Drew: If you, dear listener, would like to hear more from Mina, you can follow her on Twitter where she’s @MinaMarkham and find her personal site at mina.codes. Thanks for joining us today, Mina. Do you have any parting words?

Mina: Have a smashing night?

Drew: Great.

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Smashing Podcast Episode 18 With Mina Markham: How Can I Learn React?

In this episode of the Smashing Podcast, we’re talking about learning React. What’s React like to work with, and how can experienced developers get started? Drew McLellan chats to Mina Markham to find out.

In this episode of the Smashing Podcast, we’re talking about learning React. What’s React like to work with, and how can experienced developers get started? I spoke to Mina Markham to find out.

Show Notes

Weekly Update

Transcript

Drew McLellan: She is a front-end architect, conference speaker and organizer, and lover of design systems. Her work on the Pantsuit patent library for Hillary Clinton’s Hillary for America presidential campaign marked a watershed for design systems within the industry and was featured on publications, such as Wired, Fast Company, and Communication Arts. Like many of us, she writes code for a living, currently as a senior engineer at Slack. So we know she’s a talented and forward thinking developer, but did you know she was once mistaken for Patrick Swayze? My smashing friends, please welcome Mina Markham. Hi Mina. How are you?

Mina Markham: I’m smashing.

Drew: Good to hear. Now, sometimes on the Smashing Podcast, we talk to people about the subject that they’re best known for. And sometimes it’s fun just to talk about something a bit tangential. Now, I could chat to you all day about pattern libraries, design systems, the amazing work you’ve done in that particular area, and I could talk to you about subjects that you’ve perhaps spoken about, events, such as the Event Apart, things like art direction. And we could obviously talk about CSS until the cows come home. But you tweeted a few days ago, and I realized that we’re actually both in the same boat in that we’re both experienced front-end engineers and we’re both recently started working with React. So before we get onto React itself, where were you coming to up to this point? Had you been working with other libraries and frameworks for JavaScript development?

Mina: No, actually I’ve been doing mostly vanilla JavaScript for a while. And before that, of course I got into JavaScript. Let me rephrase that. I started working with Java script using jQuery because it made the most sense to me. It was something that was very easily for me to parse to figure out what was happening. And then from there I backtracked to doing just vanilla, plain JavaScript, ESX, and I hadn’t really gotten too much into the framework wars. I had no, like I had no favorite. I had no dog in the fight. I was like, “For you, React, whatever. I don’t really care.” But times change.

Drew: And in this sort of way of working with vanilla JavaScript, because I’ve done a lot of that myself as well. I’ve worked with various frameworks. I’ve done a lot with jQuery back in the day. I worked with YUI, Yahoo User Interface Library. Had you felt many of the pain points that something like React’s architecture tries to address?

Mina: I don’t think I ever had. I spent most of my career making websites versus web apps and things like that. So everything I did was pretty static up to a certain extent. So I never really had to deal with state management, things like that. So the pain points that React attempts to solve I had never really applied to the kind of work that I did.

Drew: Generally speaking, what’s the sort of nature of the projects that you’ve with React so far?

Mina: It was actually only been the one project, which I’m currently working on and I can’t give away too many details because public company and all that good stuff.

Drew: Of course.

Mina: But essentially what I’m trying to do is I’m trying to use React to, it’s a very interactive sort of product where I need people to be able to enter in and save data at a certain state and then manipulate it and generate something else with said data. And that’s just something that it’s not simple DOM manipulation at that point. It really is a lot of more complex, front-end manage of data and managing the state of said data. So there really was no other alternative but to use some kind of library that attempts to solve that problem. I knew I wouldn’t be able to get past with just plain JavaScript. I contemplated maybe handling somethings on the server side, but again, due to the very interactive nature of what I’m working with, it need to be in the client. And so we already use React at Slack for various other things. And so I was like, “Okay, well we just should go ahead and adopt the same thing that the rest of the parent the companies are using and go from there.”

Drew: One of the things that I’m always seems to be a pain point with people picking up React is getting to grips with the tool chain that’s needed to get things working, Webpack being an obvious elephant in the room. Have you had to do much configuration of the tool chain or like me if you had the lUXury of teammates doing it for you?

Mina: Oh, I love the infrastructure team at Slack the data. The front-end infrastructure team at Slack, they handled all of that. I didn’t have to think about it. It was great. Because I tried to learn React before in the past. Usually the way I learn best is by actually working and implementing on things. And we use React to build a lot of hillaryclinton.com back in 2016. So it’s not like I’ve never worked with people who use it. It’s just my work never directly needed me to get involved. But that code base was very complex and very sophisticated, and there was so much happening that there’s such a barrier to entry to try to learn anything in there if you didn’t already know how React and RedUX and all of that works, which I didn’t. So I wasn’t really effective in learning in that environment.

Mina: Luckily, here I do have people to like take away a little bit more of the complex bits of it. I don’t have to worry about the Webpack config at all. That’s been set up. That’s been tried and tested and ready to go. I am in a similar boat where we also use RedUX in addition to React, which I didn’t realize were two different things. I didn’t know which part handled which. Dropping into a code base like that, it was a little disorienting because I didn’t realize that they were all the same thing. I had people who were seasoned React developers telling me, “Oh, we also are using RedUX, which makes it a little bit harder for you to really learn what React all can do if you’re starting from scratch.” And I never quite knew what they meant by that because I didn’t know what they were talking about.

Mina: To answer your original question, I am still having a little bit more of a little bit barrier to entry, because it’s not just learning React. I’m having to learn React and also how to use the RedUX store. So those two things at the same time can be a little much.

Drew: Yeah, I’ve found exactly the same thing coming into an existing code base as my first React project that uses RedUX. And I think as is the nature of any of these sort of technologies when they’re young, they iterate really quickly, and what’s best practice at one point, 6 months later has moved on and there’s a different way of doing things. And when you have a code base that spans many years, you can sometimes have different styles of implementing things in there. It doesn’t always keep sync. And of course, if you’re following a tutorial or whatever to learn, you’re reading books, you’re using resources, they will be in the most modern version of how to do things. And that doesn’t necessarily nit to what you see when you look at an existing, mature product. Is that something you’d experienced at all, or have you managed to keep your code base really up to date?

Mina: I think that is something that I definitely have been experiencing. When I tried to learn how to do React on my own, I looked at various tutorials and things like that. And I noticed, or at least people have told me who have worked who have been working with me that some of the things that we do or kind of anti-pattern or not quite how things work now, because this code base is slightly, well mature us relative, but it’s a few years old. And so there are some ways that I guess are easier to do things than the way we’re doing them currently because this was written years ago. So it’s a little bit of a treadmill trying to keep up with current times and make sure I want to do things the best way, but also I don’t want to break an established code base because I want to play around with stuff.

Drew: Obviously, one of the things with React that people like you and I are coming to it, it can feel a bit jarring as this whole thing with JSX. Are you using JSX in your project?

Mina: We are. I am using JSX.

Drew: Have you made peace with that?

Mina: I fell like a little small piece of me dies every time I open one of those files. It still feels sacrilege to put my HTML in the JavaScript file. I know that’s kind of revolutionary and the whole point, but it just feels off to me that I’m writing my markup in a JavaScript file. I’ve made peace with it, but every time I do it, I’m just like, “…” Separation concerns, it is a thing. I’d like it back, please.

Drew: It’s a valid point, isn’t it? My background when I was starting to work more seriously with JavaScript, and this was probably when I was back at Yahoo, things were very much on the model of server rendered HTML pages and then taking a progressive enhancement approach, layering JavaScript on top to enhance the interface. And if the state of something in the interface needed to change, your code had to know about all the parts of the interface that it needed to update, which obviously leads you to a tightly coupled approach with these big monolithic views where the code you write needs to know about all the other code around it. And I guess that doesn’t really lend itself to a componentized approach which you would take when working with a pattern library or a design system, which is more to your area of particular expertise. I guess, React lends itself more to that approach, does it?

Mina: I think it does, especially with the being able to couple the very specific CSS to one JSX or one React component. And so that way it makes it much easier to separate or only take what you need for the library and leave the rest, whereas a pattern library or design system that attempts to do something more monolithic with just one big style CSS file or something like that, it does make it a lot difficult. You kind of have to take it all or nothing. So I do appreciate that React allows us to do more individualized, more componentized way of development, even if I still wish there was a way for me to do truly separate my presentation layer and my content layer from my interactivity layer. But maybe that’s just me being a little bit old school in that sense.

Drew: I definitely feel the pain there. The idea is that, come and correct me if I’m wrong, my understanding is that rather than separating the technologies, the CSS, and the JavaScript, and the HTML, it’s separating the functionality. So everything that is one component all exist together-

Mina: Yeah.

Drew: … which I guess is useful if that component then is no longer needed. You can just delete it, and it’s gone, and it doesn’t leave a footprint around your app. That’s not always the case with CSS though. How are you working with CSS with React? Have You looked at things like styled-components or anything like that?

Mina: No, we haven’t. I’ve heard of styled-components, but I’ve never quite really investigated them very fully to be perfectly honest. So the way that we’re working with CSS with React is we write Less, and we just have a Less file attached to each individual component that gets imported into that component. And then it gets bonded up via Webpack and served to the client.

Drew: Are you using a system like BEM or something to turn namespace?

Mina: Yeah. We’re using BEM for namespacing, although the adherence to it is kind of varied depending on who’s writing what. But we try to use a BEM namespacing pattern to make it a little bit clearer what the purpose of each individual class and component is.

Drew: And does that seem to be working successfully for you?

Mina: I think so. Occasionally it kind of has the same old problem of I sometimes don’t know how to name something. After a while daily things has always and will always be a difficult thing for master. So that’s the only issue I have with is I occasionally I have no idea what I should call a particular component.

Drew: Definitely. That’s a constant battle, isn’t it, how to out the name things?

Mina: Yeah.

Drew: I always end up when working on a new feature or something like that, you give a component and all the classes and everything the name that the feature has got at the moment. And then by the time you come to launch, it’s been renamed something else. So you have references to the old name in the code and the interface has the new name. And …

Mina: I try to always name things based on the function or the purpose of it versus things that are a little bit more ephemeral, because it’s less likely that the actual purpose of this component will change. I forgot to mention, but in addition to using BEM, I guess we use BEMITs if you’re familiar with that. It’s basically the ITCSS plus BEM, both of which were created by Harry Roberts. So I use Hungarian notation to denote whether or not something is a component, versus a layout object, versus like a larger pattern comprised of multiple components. And then from there we use the BEM convention to signify like the block element and all that.

Drew: And have you had to do much refactoring and deleting of components and things in your code base and had to deal with the issue of CSS getting left behind?

Mina: Yeah. So the non-React part of my job, of maintaining slack.com is that’s all just a bunch of Less files that are being compiled for CSS. And I guarantee you, there’s a lot of zombie code in there, because we definitely iterate above things a lot in the time I’ve been there. And we don’t always have time to go back and do the cleanup versus when we redesign a page or something. So it’s overdue for an audit, I’ll say that.

Drew: This is something that we’ve just been looking at in our React project, looking at how we approach CSS. At the moment, we have a few big, global CSS files for the whole of the app, and we do get this situation where our bundle size is just growing, and growing, and growing and never gets any smaller, even though things do get removed. So we’ve been looking at things like styled-components, Tailwind as well is another option that we’re really seriously considering. Have you looked at tailwind much?

Mina: I haven’t looked at it a lot. I’ve been curious about it, but again, I’ve never really had time to dig in to actually see if it’s something that I want to try to bring into our code base.

Drew: I was actually quite surprised, because like you, I’m a bit old school with how to do these things. I like nice separation of concerns. And I like to write my CSS in CSS, and of course the approach with Tailwind is you have all these class names, which feel a bit like inline styles that you’re applying. And if it feels dirty.

Mina: Yeah.

Drew: And I volunteered within the team, we each which took a technology to investigate if they’d be a good fit for our problems, and I volunteered to look at Tailwind because I was absolutely certain I was going to hate it.

Mina: No, no.

Drew: But it turns out I actually think it solves a lot of problems. I was quite impressed.

Mina: Yeah. I’ve sort of come around to a similar way of thinking, because I in the past would much prefer to have one class comprise all of the styles I needed for a particular component and not do a class per property, as I believe Tailwind does or languages like it do. For the similar reasons, it felt very much like, “Well, I’m just running inline CSS at this point. Why would I do this?” But as I’ve been developing more and more, inside of our Slack design system, I created a bunch of what I call utility classes that do things like add a bit of margin with a pattern. I’ve noticed that more and more, I’m using those classes in addition to the component classes. So I’m like, “Okay, well maybe I should revisit this whole to doing a CSS as a one declaration at a time.” I don’t know if I’d go that far, but it’s definitely worth considering.

Drew: Computing seems to flip flop in terms of trends between thin clients and fat clients solutions. We started with mainframes with terminals, and then the PC era with windows and office and all these sort of big applications. And they were all getting really slow, and than the web came along, and that was just a browser, and all the work was being done on the server. And it was all fast and snappy again. And now we’ve gone back to putting all that work back in the browser with everything being done with JavaScript, things like React and the JAMstack approach where we’re back to a sort of fat client. I sometimes worry that we’re asking too much of the browser. Is this a mistake? Are we asking too much of the browser trying to do all this stuff in React?

Mina: I want to say yes with the caveat of, again, my experience is very much contained to mostly static websites. I don’t do a lot of product development. So maybe in that realm, this makes more sense. But from my perspective, I feel like we’re a lot of the times using a hatchet when we just need a butter knife. I don’t know why we need put all this in the browser, put so much work and so much pressure on the client. I feel like we could do this much simpler. One of the things that always made me a little hesitant to use React, or I say hesitant, but what I mean when it made me viscerally angry and I actively opposed, was when I would go to a website and literally nothing would render because there was one error or something, Like, “Really? The entire page is broken because one function broke down?”

Mina: It just kind of annoyed me that a lot of times it was an all or nothing approach. One of the talks that I gave at AEA in the past and other places in the past was talking about how to include progressive enhancement and not just your development, but also of art direction and design of sites. And I would point out specifically examples of websites that didn’t do progressive enhancement or any kind of graceful degradation. It was like either you have the JavaScript running in the browser or you get absolutely nothing. And it would be like just a simple site that represent information about the history of web design, which was one of the sites actually talked about, the history of web design from like 1990 until now. It was a beautiful website with lots of timelines, animation of things. But it also could have been rendered statically with just a list. There were steps in between showing nothing and showing that beautifully enhanced experience that I think got lost because of the way we’ve been approaching modern web development now.

Drew: So would you say there are absolutely some categories of projects that suit a solution like React and some where it really shouldn’t be used and you should be using more traditional methods?

Mina: I think that if your site particularly is mostly static, it was just serving up information, I guess I don’t understand why you need a project like React to render something that doesn’t have a lot of interaction beyond just DOM manipulation. I guess I don’t see what benefit you get from that. Again, I may not be working on the appropriate projects. I may not just have seen or found that use case, but I’m having a hard time seeing if it’s just mostly static site, presenting content, not a lot interaction, not a lot of interaction beyond manipulated DOM and doing animations. I don’t see how having a React library helps you accomplish that goal.

Drew: It’s interesting because I’m not bad talking it because I haven’t actually used it, but I see a lot of Gatsby projects and Gatsby being a static site generator that uses a React front-end in it. And I see all the examples of the themes and things they have available are all content based sites, or blogs, and a recipe site, and a portfolio, and these sort of things. And there’s something I think actually that this isn’t necessarily the right fit for something like React. Why isn’t this being statically rendered and then progressively enhance?

Mina: Yeah.

Drew: It’s not software.

Mina: Yeah. I haven’t actually used Gatsby either. I’ve heard plenty of great things about it, but that’s probably one of the examples I would think of where I’m like, “Okay, I guess I’m just not seeing why that tool is necessary to do that particular job.” Again, I don’t know. Maybe it’s just because more people are comfortable writing in React when they are writing new something else, and it’s just providing a tool that meets people where they are. I’ve heard great things about static site generators that use React for people who have used them and love them, but it’s not a use case that I would have immediately been like, “Oh, that makes sense.”

Drew: It seems like there’s always been this battle between what we would call a website and what you might call a web app. And the chasm between the two seems to be getting wider, and wider, and wider, whereas a progressive enhancement approach tries to bridge the gap by taking something static and adding JavaScript and adding interactivity. It seems that things like React are ideally suited for software that you’re running in the browser. Would you agree with that?

Mina: I would definitely agree with that because it feels like it’s was built for that type of environment; it was built for running software. It was built by Facebook for Facebook. So it was built for a product. It was built for running whatever you call a web app in the browser and not necessarily for the type of work that, as I mentioned, I’m used to doing. So I think in those scenarios, it definitely makes a lot of sense to use it if you’re building a more complex, more sophisticated piece of software that’s meant to run inside of a browser. But if you’re building a marketing agency site or whatever, I guess I would still struggle to see why it will be necessary there.

Drew: So are we giving people permission to still build decent, statically rendered websites?

Mina: I would love to see more of that happen. I feel like that’s kind of gotten lost and it’s sort of lost its, if it ever was cool or whatever. I feel like we’ve lost that part of web development. It’s so funny: you and I both said that we’re kind of old school, and I laugh at that because I’ve actually been doing web development for, what, six years now? How am I old school? It hasn’t been that long for me. And yet somehow I’m part of the old guard who doesn’t like new and shiny things. I don’t get it.

Drew: So in fact React has actually existed for the whole time that you’ve been a web developer.

Mina: Maybe I just have an old soul. I don’t know.

Drew: I think that’s probably the case. I’ve not looked personally at, there are service side rendered approaches you can take with React apps. Have you experienced any of those?

Mina: I haven’t experienced any them. I briefly looked into them for the project I’m currently working on, because I feel like there’s parts of the operation that would work better on a server versus in the clients. But I think because of my limited knowledge and the fact that the code base is a little more complicated than I can understand, I wasn’t quite able to figure out how to make that part work. I would love to figure it out eventually, but I spent a day digging into it. I was like, “You know what? I’m not grokking this away I need to be. So I’m just going to back up and take a different route.”

Drew: Yeah. I think we’ve all been there.

Mina: Yeah. I went down a path. I was like, “Oh, this is dark and scary. Let’s reverse. Let’s reverse.”

Drew: Step away from the code.

Mina: Yes.

Drew: So you’ve been very diplomatic and polite about React so far. I sense that there’s some tension bubbling under the surface a bit. Come on. Tell us what you really feel.

Mina: I have been polite and diplomatic, mostly because the Reacts fan base can be a little mean sometimes, and I would rather not have them come for me. So please, React is great. It’s wonderful. Use it for what you want to use it for. I kid, but even that tweet that you mentioned at the beginning of this podcast where I think what you said is that I don’t hate it. I don’t love it, but I don’t hate it. Even that statement, I got people, there was no vitriol, but it was more they where ready to leap to the defense and say, “Well, I love it because X, Y, Z.” I’m like, “I didn’t say it was bad. I just said that I’m meh about the whole thing.” But apparently being meh is not okay. I have to love it.

Mina: So that’s why I probably have been a bit more diplomatic than I would ordinarily be, just because I don’t want people to think that I’m bad mouthing it, because I’m not. It has a place in more web development. It serves a function. It does its job well. People love it. It’s just not a tool that I’ve ever had or wanted to use until now.

Drew: Yeah. Things can get very tribal, can’t they, with people feeling like they have to take one side or another, and you’re either absolutely for something or absolutely against something? And I’m not sure it serves a good purpose, and I don’t think it really moves us forward as an industry and as a community to do that.

Mina: Yeah. It’s really odd. It’s fascinating to watch from just a sociological standpoint, but it’s often just really like weird to observe. It’s like I’m not allowed to just be, like I said, neutral about certain things. I have to have a strong opinion, which is I don’t think healthy. What’s the term, “Strong opinions, loosely held?” That’s kind of the way I go about things. I feel strongly about certain things, but it’s not like you can’t change my mind. Where I feel like some people, their identity gets wrapped up into certain aspects of it ,that if you are not for whatever they’ve chosen to identify with, it’s a personal slight versus just, I don’t care about this particular topic, or tool, or whatever.

Drew: Yes. I don’t know if it’s made worse by the fact that we all are sort of tending to specialize a lot more in particular parts of the stack. And I know there are people who are React developers. They would call themselves a React developer because that’s what they work in. And they wouldn’t necessarily write any vanilla Java script or wouldn’t use Vue or whatever. React is their world. So I guess it almost feels like an attack on their entire career to say, “I don’t like React.” Well, they’re really invested in making you like React or whatever the technology may be.

Mina: I will admit to being one of those people in the past. Actually, probably it was mostly about SASS, I believe. I was very much on the team of doing SASS as a preprocessor and all other preprocessors are trash. I don’t want to talk about them. I don’t want to deal with them. And I realized that was a very narrow way to look at things. Use the appropriate tool for the job. Whatever makes you more productive, that’s the right tool. It doesn’t really matter what it is.

Drew: Are there any technologies that we work with that don’t have that sort of tribal feel? Is there anything that people are just happy to use or not use? I can’t think of anything.

Mina: Wow. No one has opinions about markup, actually.

Drew: No.

Mina: I feel like no one has opinions about like actual HTML and just markup, just like, “It’s there.” They use it. But people have strong opinions about CSS and how it’s either terrible or wonderful, and the preprocessor wars that don’t really happen all that much anymore, and then of course, all of the tribalism within the various JavaScript libraries.

Drew: So you would say your journey so far with React is still just, “It’s a tool. It does its job?”

Mina: It went from a curiosity to active and visceral dislike because of how prevalent it was and how I unnecessary I thought that that prevalence was to meh. I’m now with meh, which again does not mean I hate it. It just means …

Drew: I think that’s a good place to be. I think we’re probably all sort of stronger as technologists if we understand the value of a particular technology for its purpose. We can evaluate what is good for what circumstance and pick the right tool for the job.

Mina: Yeah. And that’s kind of where I’ve arrived at this point in my career where I don’t get really invested in any particular language, or technology, or whatever, because it’s like, “Just whatever tool is most appropriate for what you’re trying to do, then use that.” I’ve learned that there’s a place for everything; there’s a time and a place to do everything. And up until recently, there was no real time or place for me to use this React librarian, and now there is.

Drew: I think that’s a good place to be. So I’ve been learning all about React lately as you have in the day job. Is there anything else that you’ve been learning about lately?

Mina: I’ve actually learned ironically, which is I think another language that has originated at Facebook, I’ve been doing a lot of Hack development, mostly because that’s what I use at Slack, at my day job. Learning Hack paved the way for me to get more comfortable using React because they follow very similar patterns, except one is server side and one’s not. So that, along with just in general, I’ve been learning more about the back-end and how that works for various different reasons. And I’ve been stretching myself for the past couple years and getting more and more outside of my comfortable zone. Design systems, libraries, that’s very much my world, and I feel very good and comfortable in that world. But I’m stepping outside of it and doing a lot more server side logic, and API development, and data modeling, and all of that. I’ve been doing a lot on that for the past year as well.

Drew: I find that the more I understand about the whole stack about back-end stuff in front-end stuff, each one helps my knowledge of the other. I find I write better front-end code by having written back-end code and understanding-

Mina: Yeah. I think I feel the same way. Now that I have a better idea of, like we said, the whole stack of how we get from the data to the end client. I find that I’m thinking about the entire pipeline no matter what part I’m actually working in. I’m thinking about what’s the best way to structure this API so that when I get to the template, I don’t have to do so much manipulating of the data that I receive on that end of it. It’s definitely made me overall a better engineer, I feel like it

Drew: If you, dear listener, would like to hear more from Mina, you can follow her on Twitter where she’s @MinaMarkham and find her personal site at mina.codes. Thanks for joining us today, Mina. Do you have any parting words?

Mina: Have a smashing night?

Drew: Great.

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Smashing Podcast Episode 18 With Mina Markham: How Can I Learn React?

In this episode of the Smashing Podcast, we’re talking about learning React. What’s React like to work with, and how can experienced developers get started? Drew McLellan chats to Mina Markham to find out.

In this episode of the Smashing Podcast, we’re talking about learning React. What’s React like to work with, and how can experienced developers get started? I spoke to Mina Markham to find out.

Show Notes

Weekly Update

Transcript

Drew McLellan: She is a front-end architect, conference speaker and organizer, and lover of design systems. Her work on the Pantsuit patent library for Hillary Clinton’s Hillary for America presidential campaign marked a watershed for design systems within the industry and was featured on publications, such as Wired, Fast Company, and Communication Arts. Like many of us, she writes code for a living, currently as a senior engineer at Slack. So we know she’s a talented and forward thinking developer, but did you know she was once mistaken for Patrick Swayze? My smashing friends, please welcome Mina Markham. Hi Mina. How are you?

Mina Markham: I’m smashing.

Drew: Good to hear. Now, sometimes on the Smashing Podcast, we talk to people about the subject that they’re best known for. And sometimes it’s fun just to talk about something a bit tangential. Now, I could chat to you all day about pattern libraries, design systems, the amazing work you’ve done in that particular area, and I could talk to you about subjects that you’ve perhaps spoken about, events, such as the Event Apart, things like art direction. And we could obviously talk about CSS until the cows come home. But you tweeted a few days ago, and I realized that we’re actually both in the same boat in that we’re both experienced front-end engineers and we’re both recently started working with React. So before we get onto React itself, where were you coming to up to this point? Had you been working with other libraries and frameworks for JavaScript development?

Mina: No, actually I’ve been doing mostly vanilla JavaScript for a while. And before that, of course I got into JavaScript. Let me rephrase that. I started working with Java script using jQuery because it made the most sense to me. It was something that was very easily for me to parse to figure out what was happening. And then from there I backtracked to doing just vanilla, plain JavaScript, ESX, and I hadn’t really gotten too much into the framework wars. I had no, like I had no favorite. I had no dog in the fight. I was like, “For you, React, whatever. I don’t really care.” But times change.

Drew: And in this sort of way of working with vanilla JavaScript, because I’ve done a lot of that myself as well. I’ve worked with various frameworks. I’ve done a lot with jQuery back in the day. I worked with YUI, Yahoo User Interface Library. Had you felt many of the pain points that something like React’s architecture tries to address?

Mina: I don’t think I ever had. I spent most of my career making websites versus web apps and things like that. So everything I did was pretty static up to a certain extent. So I never really had to deal with state management, things like that. So the pain points that React attempts to solve I had never really applied to the kind of work that I did.

Drew: Generally speaking, what’s the sort of nature of the projects that you’ve with React so far?

Mina: It was actually only been the one project, which I’m currently working on and I can’t give away too many details because public company and all that good stuff.

Drew: Of course.

Mina: But essentially what I’m trying to do is I’m trying to use React to, it’s a very interactive sort of product where I need people to be able to enter in and save data at a certain state and then manipulate it and generate something else with said data. And that’s just something that it’s not simple DOM manipulation at that point. It really is a lot of more complex, front-end manage of data and managing the state of said data. So there really was no other alternative but to use some kind of library that attempts to solve that problem. I knew I wouldn’t be able to get past with just plain JavaScript. I contemplated maybe handling somethings on the server side, but again, due to the very interactive nature of what I’m working with, it need to be in the client. And so we already use React at Slack for various other things. And so I was like, “Okay, well we just should go ahead and adopt the same thing that the rest of the parent the companies are using and go from there.”

Drew: One of the things that I’m always seems to be a pain point with people picking up React is getting to grips with the tool chain that’s needed to get things working, Webpack being an obvious elephant in the room. Have you had to do much configuration of the tool chain or like me if you had the lUXury of teammates doing it for you?

Mina: Oh, I love the infrastructure team at Slack the data. The front-end infrastructure team at Slack, they handled all of that. I didn’t have to think about it. It was great. Because I tried to learn React before in the past. Usually the way I learn best is by actually working and implementing on things. And we use React to build a lot of hillaryclinton.com back in 2016. So it’s not like I’ve never worked with people who use it. It’s just my work never directly needed me to get involved. But that code base was very complex and very sophisticated, and there was so much happening that there’s such a barrier to entry to try to learn anything in there if you didn’t already know how React and RedUX and all of that works, which I didn’t. So I wasn’t really effective in learning in that environment.

Mina: Luckily, here I do have people to like take away a little bit more of the complex bits of it. I don’t have to worry about the Webpack config at all. That’s been set up. That’s been tried and tested and ready to go. I am in a similar boat where we also use RedUX in addition to React, which I didn’t realize were two different things. I didn’t know which part handled which. Dropping into a code base like that, it was a little disorienting because I didn’t realize that they were all the same thing. I had people who were seasoned React developers telling me, “Oh, we also are using RedUX, which makes it a little bit harder for you to really learn what React all can do if you’re starting from scratch.” And I never quite knew what they meant by that because I didn’t know what they were talking about.

Mina: To answer your original question, I am still having a little bit more of a little bit barrier to entry, because it’s not just learning React. I’m having to learn React and also how to use the RedUX store. So those two things at the same time can be a little much.

Drew: Yeah, I’ve found exactly the same thing coming into an existing code base as my first React project that uses RedUX. And I think as is the nature of any of these sort of technologies when they’re young, they iterate really quickly, and what’s best practice at one point, 6 months later has moved on and there’s a different way of doing things. And when you have a code base that spans many years, you can sometimes have different styles of implementing things in there. It doesn’t always keep sync. And of course, if you’re following a tutorial or whatever to learn, you’re reading books, you’re using resources, they will be in the most modern version of how to do things. And that doesn’t necessarily nit to what you see when you look at an existing, mature product. Is that something you’d experienced at all, or have you managed to keep your code base really up to date?

Mina: I think that is something that I definitely have been experiencing. When I tried to learn how to do React on my own, I looked at various tutorials and things like that. And I noticed, or at least people have told me who have worked who have been working with me that some of the things that we do or kind of anti-pattern or not quite how things work now, because this code base is slightly, well mature us relative, but it’s a few years old. And so there are some ways that I guess are easier to do things than the way we’re doing them currently because this was written years ago. So it’s a little bit of a treadmill trying to keep up with current times and make sure I want to do things the best way, but also I don’t want to break an established code base because I want to play around with stuff.

Drew: Obviously, one of the things with React that people like you and I are coming to it, it can feel a bit jarring as this whole thing with JSX. Are you using JSX in your project?

Mina: We are. I am using JSX.

Drew: Have you made peace with that?

Mina: I fell like a little small piece of me dies every time I open one of those files. It still feels sacrilege to put my HTML in the JavaScript file. I know that’s kind of revolutionary and the whole point, but it just feels off to me that I’m writing my markup in a JavaScript file. I’ve made peace with it, but every time I do it, I’m just like, “…” Separation concerns, it is a thing. I’d like it back, please.

Drew: It’s a valid point, isn’t it? My background when I was starting to work more seriously with JavaScript, and this was probably when I was back at Yahoo, things were very much on the model of server rendered HTML pages and then taking a progressive enhancement approach, layering JavaScript on top to enhance the interface. And if the state of something in the interface needed to change, your code had to know about all the parts of the interface that it needed to update, which obviously leads you to a tightly coupled approach with these big monolithic views where the code you write needs to know about all the other code around it. And I guess that doesn’t really lend itself to a componentized approach which you would take when working with a pattern library or a design system, which is more to your area of particular expertise. I guess, React lends itself more to that approach, does it?

Mina: I think it does, especially with the being able to couple the very specific CSS to one JSX or one React component. And so that way it makes it much easier to separate or only take what you need for the library and leave the rest, whereas a pattern library or design system that attempts to do something more monolithic with just one big style CSS file or something like that, it does make it a lot difficult. You kind of have to take it all or nothing. So I do appreciate that React allows us to do more individualized, more componentized way of development, even if I still wish there was a way for me to do truly separate my presentation layer and my content layer from my interactivity layer. But maybe that’s just me being a little bit old school in that sense.

Drew: I definitely feel the pain there. The idea is that, come and correct me if I’m wrong, my understanding is that rather than separating the technologies, the CSS, and the JavaScript, and the HTML, it’s separating the functionality. So everything that is one component all exist together-

Mina: Yeah.

Drew: … which I guess is useful if that component then is no longer needed. You can just delete it, and it’s gone, and it doesn’t leave a footprint around your app. That’s not always the case with CSS though. How are you working with CSS with React? Have You looked at things like styled-components or anything like that?

Mina: No, we haven’t. I’ve heard of styled-components, but I’ve never quite really investigated them very fully to be perfectly honest. So the way that we’re working with CSS with React is we write Less, and we just have a Less file attached to each individual component that gets imported into that component. And then it gets bonded up via Webpack and served to the client.

Drew: Are you using a system like BEM or something to turn namespace?

Mina: Yeah. We’re using BEM for namespacing, although the adherence to it is kind of varied depending on who’s writing what. But we try to use a BEM namespacing pattern to make it a little bit clearer what the purpose of each individual class and component is.

Drew: And does that seem to be working successfully for you?

Mina: I think so. Occasionally it kind of has the same old problem of I sometimes don’t know how to name something. After a while daily things has always and will always be a difficult thing for master. So that’s the only issue I have with is I occasionally I have no idea what I should call a particular component.

Drew: Definitely. That’s a constant battle, isn’t it, how to out the name things?

Mina: Yeah.

Drew: I always end up when working on a new feature or something like that, you give a component and all the classes and everything the name that the feature has got at the moment. And then by the time you come to launch, it’s been renamed something else. So you have references to the old name in the code and the interface has the new name. And …

Mina: I try to always name things based on the function or the purpose of it versus things that are a little bit more ephemeral, because it’s less likely that the actual purpose of this component will change. I forgot to mention, but in addition to using BEM, I guess we use BEMITs if you’re familiar with that. It’s basically the ITCSS plus BEM, both of which were created by Harry Roberts. So I use Hungarian notation to denote whether or not something is a component, versus a layout object, versus like a larger pattern comprised of multiple components. And then from there we use the BEM convention to signify like the block element and all that.

Drew: And have you had to do much refactoring and deleting of components and things in your code base and had to deal with the issue of CSS getting left behind?

Mina: Yeah. So the non-React part of my job, of maintaining slack.com is that’s all just a bunch of Less files that are being compiled for CSS. And I guarantee you, there’s a lot of zombie code in there, because we definitely iterate above things a lot in the time I’ve been there. And we don’t always have time to go back and do the cleanup versus when we redesign a page or something. So it’s overdue for an audit, I’ll say that.

Drew: This is something that we’ve just been looking at in our React project, looking at how we approach CSS. At the moment, we have a few big, global CSS files for the whole of the app, and we do get this situation where our bundle size is just growing, and growing, and growing and never gets any smaller, even though things do get removed. So we’ve been looking at things like styled-components, Tailwind as well is another option that we’re really seriously considering. Have you looked at tailwind much?

Mina: I haven’t looked at it a lot. I’ve been curious about it, but again, I’ve never really had time to dig in to actually see if it’s something that I want to try to bring into our code base.

Drew: I was actually quite surprised, because like you, I’m a bit old school with how to do these things. I like nice separation of concerns. And I like to write my CSS in CSS, and of course the approach with Tailwind is you have all these class names, which feel a bit like inline styles that you’re applying. And if it feels dirty.

Mina: Yeah.

Drew: And I volunteered within the team, we each which took a technology to investigate if they’d be a good fit for our problems, and I volunteered to look at Tailwind because I was absolutely certain I was going to hate it.

Mina: No, no.

Drew: But it turns out I actually think it solves a lot of problems. I was quite impressed.

Mina: Yeah. I’ve sort of come around to a similar way of thinking, because I in the past would much prefer to have one class comprise all of the styles I needed for a particular component and not do a class per property, as I believe Tailwind does or languages like it do. For the similar reasons, it felt very much like, “Well, I’m just running inline CSS at this point. Why would I do this?” But as I’ve been developing more and more, inside of our Slack design system, I created a bunch of what I call utility classes that do things like add a bit of margin with a pattern. I’ve noticed that more and more, I’m using those classes in addition to the component classes. So I’m like, “Okay, well maybe I should revisit this whole to doing a CSS as a one declaration at a time.” I don’t know if I’d go that far, but it’s definitely worth considering.

Drew: Computing seems to flip flop in terms of trends between thin clients and fat clients solutions. We started with mainframes with terminals, and then the PC era with windows and office and all these sort of big applications. And they were all getting really slow, and than the web came along, and that was just a browser, and all the work was being done on the server. And it was all fast and snappy again. And now we’ve gone back to putting all that work back in the browser with everything being done with JavaScript, things like React and the JAMstack approach where we’re back to a sort of fat client. I sometimes worry that we’re asking too much of the browser. Is this a mistake? Are we asking too much of the browser trying to do all this stuff in React?

Mina: I want to say yes with the caveat of, again, my experience is very much contained to mostly static websites. I don’t do a lot of product development. So maybe in that realm, this makes more sense. But from my perspective, I feel like we’re a lot of the times using a hatchet when we just need a butter knife. I don’t know why we need put all this in the browser, put so much work and so much pressure on the client. I feel like we could do this much simpler. One of the things that always made me a little hesitant to use React, or I say hesitant, but what I mean when it made me viscerally angry and I actively opposed, was when I would go to a website and literally nothing would render because there was one error or something, Like, “Really? The entire page is broken because one function broke down?”

Mina: It just kind of annoyed me that a lot of times it was an all or nothing approach. One of the talks that I gave at AEA in the past and other places in the past was talking about how to include progressive enhancement and not just your development, but also of art direction and design of sites. And I would point out specifically examples of websites that didn’t do progressive enhancement or any kind of graceful degradation. It was like either you have the JavaScript running in the browser or you get absolutely nothing. And it would be like just a simple site that represent information about the history of web design, which was one of the sites actually talked about, the history of web design from like 1990 until now. It was a beautiful website with lots of timelines, animation of things. But it also could have been rendered statically with just a list. There were steps in between showing nothing and showing that beautifully enhanced experience that I think got lost because of the way we’ve been approaching modern web development now.

Drew: So would you say there are absolutely some categories of projects that suit a solution like React and some where it really shouldn’t be used and you should be using more traditional methods?

Mina: I think that if your site particularly is mostly static, it was just serving up information, I guess I don’t understand why you need a project like React to render something that doesn’t have a lot of interaction beyond just DOM manipulation. I guess I don’t see what benefit you get from that. Again, I may not be working on the appropriate projects. I may not just have seen or found that use case, but I’m having a hard time seeing if it’s just mostly static site, presenting content, not a lot interaction, not a lot of interaction beyond manipulated DOM and doing animations. I don’t see how having a React library helps you accomplish that goal.

Drew: It’s interesting because I’m not bad talking it because I haven’t actually used it, but I see a lot of Gatsby projects and Gatsby being a static site generator that uses a React front-end in it. And I see all the examples of the themes and things they have available are all content based sites, or blogs, and a recipe site, and a portfolio, and these sort of things. And there’s something I think actually that this isn’t necessarily the right fit for something like React. Why isn’t this being statically rendered and then progressively enhance?

Mina: Yeah.

Drew: It’s not software.

Mina: Yeah. I haven’t actually used Gatsby either. I’ve heard plenty of great things about it, but that’s probably one of the examples I would think of where I’m like, “Okay, I guess I’m just not seeing why that tool is necessary to do that particular job.” Again, I don’t know. Maybe it’s just because more people are comfortable writing in React when they are writing new something else, and it’s just providing a tool that meets people where they are. I’ve heard great things about static site generators that use React for people who have used them and love them, but it’s not a use case that I would have immediately been like, “Oh, that makes sense.”

Drew: It seems like there’s always been this battle between what we would call a website and what you might call a web app. And the chasm between the two seems to be getting wider, and wider, and wider, whereas a progressive enhancement approach tries to bridge the gap by taking something static and adding JavaScript and adding interactivity. It seems that things like React are ideally suited for software that you’re running in the browser. Would you agree with that?

Mina: I would definitely agree with that because it feels like it’s was built for that type of environment; it was built for running software. It was built by Facebook for Facebook. So it was built for a product. It was built for running whatever you call a web app in the browser and not necessarily for the type of work that, as I mentioned, I’m used to doing. So I think in those scenarios, it definitely makes a lot of sense to use it if you’re building a more complex, more sophisticated piece of software that’s meant to run inside of a browser. But if you’re building a marketing agency site or whatever, I guess I would still struggle to see why it will be necessary there.

Drew: So are we giving people permission to still build decent, statically rendered websites?

Mina: I would love to see more of that happen. I feel like that’s kind of gotten lost and it’s sort of lost its, if it ever was cool or whatever. I feel like we’ve lost that part of web development. It’s so funny: you and I both said that we’re kind of old school, and I laugh at that because I’ve actually been doing web development for, what, six years now? How am I old school? It hasn’t been that long for me. And yet somehow I’m part of the old guard who doesn’t like new and shiny things. I don’t get it.

Drew: So in fact React has actually existed for the whole time that you’ve been a web developer.

Mina: Maybe I just have an old soul. I don’t know.

Drew: I think that’s probably the case. I’ve not looked personally at, there are service side rendered approaches you can take with React apps. Have you experienced any of those?

Mina: I haven’t experienced any them. I briefly looked into them for the project I’m currently working on, because I feel like there’s parts of the operation that would work better on a server versus in the clients. But I think because of my limited knowledge and the fact that the code base is a little more complicated than I can understand, I wasn’t quite able to figure out how to make that part work. I would love to figure it out eventually, but I spent a day digging into it. I was like, “You know what? I’m not grokking this away I need to be. So I’m just going to back up and take a different route.”

Drew: Yeah. I think we’ve all been there.

Mina: Yeah. I went down a path. I was like, “Oh, this is dark and scary. Let’s reverse. Let’s reverse.”

Drew: Step away from the code.

Mina: Yes.

Drew: So you’ve been very diplomatic and polite about React so far. I sense that there’s some tension bubbling under the surface a bit. Come on. Tell us what you really feel.

Mina: I have been polite and diplomatic, mostly because the Reacts fan base can be a little mean sometimes, and I would rather not have them come for me. So please, React is great. It’s wonderful. Use it for what you want to use it for. I kid, but even that tweet that you mentioned at the beginning of this podcast where I think what you said is that I don’t hate it. I don’t love it, but I don’t hate it. Even that statement, I got people, there was no vitriol, but it was more they where ready to leap to the defense and say, “Well, I love it because X, Y, Z.” I’m like, “I didn’t say it was bad. I just said that I’m meh about the whole thing.” But apparently being meh is not okay. I have to love it.

Mina: So that’s why I probably have been a bit more diplomatic than I would ordinarily be, just because I don’t want people to think that I’m bad mouthing it, because I’m not. It has a place in more web development. It serves a function. It does its job well. People love it. It’s just not a tool that I’ve ever had or wanted to use until now.

Drew: Yeah. Things can get very tribal, can’t they, with people feeling like they have to take one side or another, and you’re either absolutely for something or absolutely against something? And I’m not sure it serves a good purpose, and I don’t think it really moves us forward as an industry and as a community to do that.

Mina: Yeah. It’s really odd. It’s fascinating to watch from just a sociological standpoint, but it’s often just really like weird to observe. It’s like I’m not allowed to just be, like I said, neutral about certain things. I have to have a strong opinion, which is I don’t think healthy. What’s the term, “Strong opinions, loosely held?” That’s kind of the way I go about things. I feel strongly about certain things, but it’s not like you can’t change my mind. Where I feel like some people, their identity gets wrapped up into certain aspects of it ,that if you are not for whatever they’ve chosen to identify with, it’s a personal slight versus just, I don’t care about this particular topic, or tool, or whatever.

Drew: Yes. I don’t know if it’s made worse by the fact that we all are sort of tending to specialize a lot more in particular parts of the stack. And I know there are people who are React developers. They would call themselves a React developer because that’s what they work in. And they wouldn’t necessarily write any vanilla Java script or wouldn’t use Vue or whatever. React is their world. So I guess it almost feels like an attack on their entire career to say, “I don’t like React.” Well, they’re really invested in making you like React or whatever the technology may be.

Mina: I will admit to being one of those people in the past. Actually, probably it was mostly about SASS, I believe. I was very much on the team of doing SASS as a preprocessor and all other preprocessors are trash. I don’t want to talk about them. I don’t want to deal with them. And I realized that was a very narrow way to look at things. Use the appropriate tool for the job. Whatever makes you more productive, that’s the right tool. It doesn’t really matter what it is.

Drew: Are there any technologies that we work with that don’t have that sort of tribal feel? Is there anything that people are just happy to use or not use? I can’t think of anything.

Mina: Wow. No one has opinions about markup, actually.

Drew: No.

Mina: I feel like no one has opinions about like actual HTML and just markup, just like, “It’s there.” They use it. But people have strong opinions about CSS and how it’s either terrible or wonderful, and the preprocessor wars that don’t really happen all that much anymore, and then of course, all of the tribalism within the various JavaScript libraries.

Drew: So you would say your journey so far with React is still just, “It’s a tool. It does its job?”

Mina: It went from a curiosity to active and visceral dislike because of how prevalent it was and how I unnecessary I thought that that prevalence was to meh. I’m now with meh, which again does not mean I hate it. It just means …

Drew: I think that’s a good place to be. I think we’re probably all sort of stronger as technologists if we understand the value of a particular technology for its purpose. We can evaluate what is good for what circumstance and pick the right tool for the job.

Mina: Yeah. And that’s kind of where I’ve arrived at this point in my career where I don’t get really invested in any particular language, or technology, or whatever, because it’s like, “Just whatever tool is most appropriate for what you’re trying to do, then use that.” I’ve learned that there’s a place for everything; there’s a time and a place to do everything. And up until recently, there was no real time or place for me to use this React librarian, and now there is.

Drew: I think that’s a good place to be. So I’ve been learning all about React lately as you have in the day job. Is there anything else that you’ve been learning about lately?

Mina: I’ve actually learned ironically, which is I think another language that has originated at Facebook, I’ve been doing a lot of Hack development, mostly because that’s what I use at Slack, at my day job. Learning Hack paved the way for me to get more comfortable using React because they follow very similar patterns, except one is server side and one’s not. So that, along with just in general, I’ve been learning more about the back-end and how that works for various different reasons. And I’ve been stretching myself for the past couple years and getting more and more outside of my comfortable zone. Design systems, libraries, that’s very much my world, and I feel very good and comfortable in that world. But I’m stepping outside of it and doing a lot more server side logic, and API development, and data modeling, and all of that. I’ve been doing a lot on that for the past year as well.

Drew: I find that the more I understand about the whole stack about back-end stuff in front-end stuff, each one helps my knowledge of the other. I find I write better front-end code by having written back-end code and understanding-

Mina: Yeah. I think I feel the same way. Now that I have a better idea of, like we said, the whole stack of how we get from the data to the end client. I find that I’m thinking about the entire pipeline no matter what part I’m actually working in. I’m thinking about what’s the best way to structure this API so that when I get to the template, I don’t have to do so much manipulating of the data that I receive on that end of it. It’s definitely made me overall a better engineer, I feel like it

Drew: If you, dear listener, would like to hear more from Mina, you can follow her on Twitter where she’s @MinaMarkham and find her personal site at mina.codes. Thanks for joining us today, Mina. Do you have any parting words?

Mina: Have a smashing night?

Drew: Great.

(il)

Website Design & SEO Delray Beach by DBL07.co

Delray Beach SEO

source http://www.scpie.org/smashing-podcast-episode-18-with-mina-markham-how-can-i-learn-react/

[meghanhalpin]

Content Design

Content is anything you create/consume/interact with.

What do users/people actually need from my portfolio? In order for me to present myself/get a job.

WANT V NEED; If someone is in debt, they are going to want a quick, simple solution. But what they need is a series of simple, manageable steps to help get them out of debt. This is what they need but not what they want.

Content can be anything. A combination of many forms could be what users need.

About me page in portfolio; could it be a video? A gif?

BOOK RECOMMENDATION; Content Design By Sarah Richards. Sarah worked on the .GOV website which is amazing looking now but when she started it had 30,000+ pages. So she printed all the pages out, laid them all out and the team walked about deciding what pages were essential and what weren’t. She paid a lot of attention not only to the content itself but also the way people talk about the content. Eg; people tend to use the word doctor as opposed to GP. Intuitive content design in action.

It’s important to put hours into the development of the content of your website. Content needs to be easy to find/use/consume.

Gazillions of webpages on the internet. Unless you’re incredibly specialised ie a government website, there are going to be competitors. You need to develop smart content. Design entrepreneur vs designer? Innovator or disruptor? We don’t want more content, we need smarter content.

Push vs pull content

Trust

Ease of use

PUSH CONTENT; look at this new iPhone, buy it! Ie bus stops, it’s THERE PULL CONTENT; This cool new phone makes your life easier and puts the entire world in your pocket, and it’s only £500. Pull content is you pulling it towards yourself ie searching things or following links etc.

Turning push content into pull content is an important skill. Your content needs to standout. Any push content can be turned into pull content, all you need to know is what your audience wants to see.

Why are we creating portfolios? MONEY. Good work will get you more work! Kyle ranks this as the most important thing. Portfolios should illustrate your work, your skills and how to contact you!! A bit about who you are is very good also.

People will pay more to use a good product. If a website is easier to use people are more likely to use it, even if the service is more expensive than a more difficult to use website. You need to make sure your website works and they can find your content. Your website has to be really good because employers KNOW what they’re looking for and they know what you’re talking about.

BRIEF; Portfolio Site and Content Strategy Example; Garry’s website. 3 portfolio items minimum.

Each portfolio piece should have its own page and case study; pics and exploration of the brief and process etc. Link blog through case studies? Words and images; prototype, video! It’s up to you!! App prototypes in invasion etc

CONTENT AUDIT; If you’re working on any kind of redesign project you’ll have to do a content audit Compiling all the content into a big list. Full content inventory

What are they used for? The list of content will come in handy at various stages of the project. If you’re redoing the information architecture you’ll come back to it again and again. It will give you a better idea of the content that you already have. Pre-courser to content analysis.

What to include Nav title Page name URL Comments Content hierarch

Content type Basic description of content; brief reminder. Topics, tags or categories; meta data Attached files; how many and type Related; links, related links Availability desktop, mobile, app? Numbering system; index

http://tinyurl.com/ContentAudit1234

Page is whole number Items within page are decimals

Site map Desc/comments

Tobias Van Schneider An incredible beard; the moustache work is a thing of beauty. First page is who is and what he does. Semplice, GOOGLE THIS Latest instagrams in the html not a link, a showcase. He doesn’t demonstrate much work because he’s working for other companies but his website is still slick.

Lefft (Paddy Donnelly) Illustrator, blogs are individual to the project he creates. Newsletter, styles his articles very well, about him page, links used. Colour changes of text to highlight. Paddy exhibits his work straightaway. Cloud whale is amazing.

Both he and Tobias have their own newsletters, Tobias also has a podcast. CONTENT EVERYWHERE. A newsletter could even be things you’ve found on the internet this week, or facts you learned or new words you heard etc.

Wenizhou Simple grid but exhibits her work immediately, and it’s lit. Little animations that are easy to do. When you click on each piece of work it talks about the project, this is what we need to. Her process is amazing.

Shantell Martin Unreal, I love her. Her website and the way she’s used photography is amazing. Detailed discussion of each piece within the page and how she arrived at the end product. Lots of photos. Website is fluid as heck. Worked with Kendrick.

John Hicks Big headers and pieces that take up the whole screen. Lots of content without over crowding. Then case studies which are very important. You can talk about what was easy and also what obstacles you encountered as well. Downloadables? Goodies.

Brian Holf Home page is one portfolio item but it changes the odd time, keeps the site fresh, not the same viewpoint every time. You can then go into the case study from the piece, takes you to an individual page. Contact deeds at the bottom along with an “All Work” button.

Case studies are so important! Four case studies looks far better than four finished pieces.

Xavier Cusso, Toy Fight, Cédric Pierra <- research in own time.

HAMBURGER MENUS ARE FOR MOBILE

SITEMAP YOUR OWN SITE

A sitemap is a planning tool, structure, navigation, page hierarchy, plan logical presentation to users, visualise user paths.

Marking algorithm has changed; 2nd year worth 30% and final year is 70%. Both new and existing algorithms are going to be used and we will receive whichever gives the best outcome. If you want to do a masters you need a 2:2 or a first. Grades count, don’t faff about!

Fathom talk, they’re offering placements. In next Thursday afternoon. Russell in the following Thursday. recruit.ulster.ac.uk lists all placement opps.

Apply for jobs even if you’re not sure!! Check linkedin about that Disney placement. Santander SME.

CONTENT DISCOVERY AND RESEARCH Discovery is an important process! Not just dribbble. Prototyping, attempting to build so you can see what works and what makes sense. Problem solving. Not all looking at computers, a lot of it is discussion. Understand the problem. Understanding comes from discussion. Discovery helps you discover your audience, what you think you want, what you need, when you should publish that and the channels in which to do that. Using discovery to bring people with you. Sometimes you have to sell things to people. Content discovery as a team is a great way for everyone to be involved at an early stage and dissolve confrontations etc. Everyone has a chance to share. Everyone can see the same data or idea. Helps build a collective understanding and appreciation.

Figure out who your audience really are, what they want from you and how to speak with them. You need to know all this before you write a single word.

What can you do for them? What is your skillset? What have you done and how did you do it? Understand beforehand. Your audience are human beings as well. Writing good content with real human language is what gets you ranked on search engines etc. You’re writing good content for humans.

Sometimes the audience you think you want isn’t the audience you’re actually creating content for. Finding your audiences vocabulary. What vocabulary are you using? What words are your audience using? Search data = the words people use. Google trends for example.

Web designer is OUT. App design is IN. Content strategist is solidly known. UX design is on the rise.

Using web analytics and metrics. Login to your gmail and it starts working, telling you how long people spend on your site etc etc More vocabulary, what your readers want to know most, their mental models. Unique visits. Bounce rate. How long people spend on your page; time spend there.

Digital language and spoken language. Absence of body language. You don’t put search terms into google the way you’d ask a friend. Language patterns, common usage.

Narrow it down; what do you do? Can you do it? How can I contact you?

Doing discovery and research means you’re better informed and better equipped to start tackling the content design problem.

Write the content for your portfolio in plain html - no styles. Focus on the content. Write it in markdown.

Include images, pages and links as well if you wanna. Case studies. Home page and one case study as a minimum.

Content Audit

Look at what heroes are doing

Research and Discovery; google trends

Site map - in illustrator

Start to write your content for your website in HTML

STATIC AND DYNAMIC CONTENT What is a static sitE? Fixed content written in html Each page written separately as it is o the web Every web page saved separately Any changes need to go into the separate files

Advantages Easy to develop Cheap to develop Cheap to host

Disadvantages IDK KYLE MOVED THE SLIDE

Dynamic side Construction is controlled by an application server processed by server side scripts

Webpages not coded and saved separately Point 2 Point 3

Main difference is that the layout can be changed quite quickly.

Advantages Much more functional Easy to update Easier to add new content Good for large websites

Disadvantages More difficult to develop Requires you to understand databases

What is a Cms Content Managed System Bro. What is it? Allows users to manage content Separate content from structure Versioning of post content Manage media Manage content grouping Easy to use Manage any time/type of content.

FLAT FILE SITES A hybrid of both? Jekyll is a ruby based parsing engine that generates sites based on what is put into it. It’s main components are yams, liquid and markdown. YAML Aint Markup language. Liquid is ruby based?

Jekyll gives you a lot of freedom as a designer because you can build whatever you want. But it is also angry emoji, huff puff emoji. sO INSTEAD.

Kirby, file based CMS east to setup, easy to use, flexible as an Olympic gymnast. You gotta build a website with Kirby. getkirby dot com. You can use it for free until it comes to hosting. We are gonna use it for either portfolio or elements!

[syrgocia-blog]

Data Recovery: 10 Most Effective Computer Backup Tools

duenna GunterData Recovery: 10 better Effective Computer Backup ToolsComputers Articles | February 26, 2009How execute you advance to production when your computer animation down? assuming that you have a backup computer hates synchronized to your initial computer, it becomes much easier to move forward. However, if you refusal and have to motel a state-of-the-art or imitated computer at the same time yours is being repaired, here are 10 adding machine backup engine to advice you pull back jump and working quickly: absorb (c) 2009 OnlineBizU.comDespite my best efforts, this previous week I lost the couple my dominant and unimportant computer systems. After losing my initial desktop certain years ago, I affirm I would never authorize myself be caught outdoors an managing PC. in the process of they say, "the lane to h*ll is surface with great intentions," and I already again was caught with my current pants sinking without an operating clone when my desktop, which had do exhibiting a few problem trace in the last month, died swiftly and would not curve on.I suddenly went to my laptop, which I had well been weary about keeping updated, and turned it on. free movie streaming the bay window update development started, and asked me install office Pack 3 for Windows XP. enjoy done that successfully on my desktop, I wasn't too concerned about either installation trouble on the laptop. However, upon do the installation, the blue-green screen of death appeared, which is NEVER a good light with a Windows-based system.After trying for about an hour beyond success to revive my laptop (which is only 8 generation old and still bottom warranty), I knew that I was in stress and outset looking for alternatives. Fortunately, my husband keeps a laptop on hand that he practice for game when we travel, and he handsomely offered to let me install my programs and files on it to I put up repair one of my computers.After permanently acknowledging that there was no form I bottle have predictable this situation, I determined that I needed to s*ck it up, receive over, and move on. So, i.e making move with a partially customized laptop that will complete until one or the other of my PCs is returned.Despite having moved through comparable situations previously, I hushed learned a few modern things forth the fashion about picture recovery and computer backup. Here are the 10 most efficient tools that saved my bacon during my latter computer meltdown.1. Automatic backup software. give been proving 2 linked backups, Carbonite and Syncplicity. I have had to restore from Carbonite previously, and I found the process to be long and rather confusing. So, several second ago I began working Syncplicity over it overture online access to all backed rise files as well as the ability to synchronize an unrestrained number of computers. However, it include taken a week to restore 20 GB of data with Syncplicity, and some of the dossier was wasn't really restored, despite what Syncplicity told me in my account. However, I can freely download this missing info to my computer from the linked vault. sole process that makes this backup system easier is that I store all of my data dossier in My Docs so I embargo have to hunt them down in Program Files, or everywhere they are typically stored.2. Email patron software. I still handling the dinosaur Eudora for my electronic mail client. tired habits perish hard, I suppose. However, somehow I missed marking some primary Eudora folders to posterior up, and so I was initially using my webmail entry providing by my hosting company to access e-mail because of this overlook with Eudora. I do to dispirit of that quickly, as I had no style to devise additional folders in the above-mentioned systems, so I later decided to manually configure Eudora and open folders and emails as I need them in the program. This experience has made me very charmed to shift all of my coming in and communicative email servers on all domains to Gmail aloof to have access to everything online, come hurricane, flood, tornado, or brain crash.3. Bookmark service. p m an avid researcher and resource collector, so receive access to my bookmarks, or pick file, is vital to my day-to-day operations. I had breathe using Spurl, but being of persistent periodic outages of their service, dive changed to Foxmarks. I like that this duty offers me the capability to entrance all of these online, as great as have them at my fingertips any generation I demand them from my Bookmarks menu as well as easily synchronize them to any computer.4. Contact management. Even yet I injunction use direction for email, I end use it for calendar and meeting management. I had prevail using Plaxo as an online backup for my contacts, but it doesn't permit me to store my summary about each contact. ie been using Airset instantly for considerable months, and it routinely syncs my contacts (with notes) and my diary to their online service. I launch this enough more available than upsetting to strengthen a backup PST case to viewpoint and again repeating that again when my primary computer is returned. Instead, I equitable make adjustment to influence and my calendar on Airset, and I'll aloof sync that to direction on my desktop.5. Passwords. I've prevail using Roboform for agedness to help me run my passwords. I've land my Roboform data in My Docs, so it was a breeze to reinstall Roboform and photograph the dossier folder to the different computer and permit me to entrance all of the station requiring a password and username. Finally, something that worked seamlessly!6. Project Management. Smartsheet enjoy been my project administration service for the uttermost few months. I tenderness that it has the ability to create an item and allow you to affix a certificate and conference to that item. fairly than acquire to hunting down word about a project, all I had to do was piece into my Smartsheet story and there it was.7. Software licenses. Roughly 99% of the new spreadsheet I institute is downloaded and I don't win a natural copy on CD. Therefore, I form sure that I have the downloaded version in a My Downloads folder that's a part of My Docs file, which is helped up regularly. And, I make a PDF photocopy of the software charter that I get by email and store in a groupware folder, too in My Docs. Lastly, I pick up a bare inexpensive program, Registration Vault, that certify me store all of my spreadsheet license and purchase info and go-ahead me to back ascend my evidence to My Docs. As I had to reinstall software on a new computer, it was clear to repair the Registration Vault files, get my software exemption number, and have a fully working piece of software interior minutes.8. Accounting. I service Quickbooks for my calculating needs, and while they do offer an connected version, I haven't earlier moved to that. Instead, I behind up Quickbooks after without exception use in the My Docs folder. When I needed to invoice consulting clients at the opening of this month, all I had to do was reinstall Quickbooks and restore my latest backup. I instantly had lot I vital again at my fingertips.9. Alternate handout services. a bit software I use, related CuteFTP and TraxTime, don't permit picture backups. So, I absolutely do have to outset all over with my FTP info and my time apprehend info when my artificial intelligence dies. comparatively than installing these bill on the new computer, I blameless used a few free recourse to win me through. FireFTP, a Firefox add-on, has fashioned quite great for me as my FTP client, and MyHours.com has settle in fairly well for TraxTime, still it miss a scanty more tread for deal than TraxTime.10. Email marketing. While not a tool, I spotted that one and the other text and HTML variant of voice mail broadcasts matter in electronic mail marketing. I wasn't initially able to get my normal chat message client raise and running, so I was knowledge my electronic mail from my webmail systems. I've win 2 hosting accounts, and the state-of-the-art one has a reasonably sophisticated webmail system and let me read homily emails with no problem. The other, however, doesn't permit hiemal viewing. So, those emails sent apart in hetman were all that I was unfit to read. If you're wise and your email marketing program permits you to send emails out in twain plain text and HTML, do it, even nonetheless it control seem comparable a gratuitous pain. You just nevermore know after what precedent members of your poll might be forced to ready your emails.As you might gather, I've perceived that accessible services have provided me with the greatest backup to help me over this computer crisis. My lesson? Duplicate as enough as you can in online systems. In this way, yule have entrance to your data albeit you travel, when you have a computer crash, or during you're fight with a natural disaster. Article Tags: Data Recovery, Most Effective, Computer Backup, Email Client, Software License, Email Marketing Internet Marketing Strategist & Boomer Biz Coach done Gunter use baby boomers create productive online evacuation businesses that they emotion by demystifying the tools & strategies needed to market and grow their businesses online. To suit your FR*EE gift, TurboCharge Your accessible Marketing Toolkit, visit her site at OnlineBizU.com. demand Donna an Internet Marketing question at AskDonnaGunter.com

[bulletinedsolitude]

You’re just right at my skull. Great!

A Huge Trouble

A huge trouble, I reckon Walking with a doubt upon Looking from the cowls, the masks the rocks, the so deadly mocks

So kid, daring and dreamer Walk, reason than chin taller For the assertive you lend, and for the terrors, do bend

For as the time calls for you, you may not hustle for clues of where the compass points to Just gaze at your stars, and you

Shall highly know what to do.

More or less an hour before that piece existed, I had a painful blank page in front of me. That is a story of my trouble trying to start working on how to introduce myself “creatively.” It is a way of convincing and finding my momentum of writing genuinely, because that’s how I naturally like it—my pen must always spit out raw thoughts, like the ones running in my head in a state of solitude, otherwise the things that come out of my mind will sound foreign to myself, and someone told me non-genuine literature is trash.

Speaking of solitude, to officially start introducing myself, I will explain why I went with the name of my blog, “Bulletined Solitude.”

The Story behind Bulletined Solitude (that sounds like a so sad, so lonely feature story :()

First thought when I heard about making a blog, I wanted everything to be real, because it’s easier to write that way, and from there, the words would come out of me naturally. Writing is one of the things that I have resorted to when I felt something, because I’m not the kind of person who’s easy to get comfortable speaking about things that are very personal about me, so I would end up channeling all the emotions through my pen and paper. But for that to happen, my environment must have the sense of peace and loneliness.

So, I thought having a blog that features my honest insights, would be like bringing my solitude into publication, and bulletined solitude means something like that to me, so I chose it. And you thought it was deep.

So, yes, genuine yada yada, tell us about yourself then!!!

One thing that comes with writing, is reading. So that means I read, apparently. I started reading (literary-wise) when I was 13. I remember it was Bob Ong’s Kapitan Sino that I ever read first. And that basically influenced what I have read after that, and what I will be reading in the future probably. It is a fine chop of fantasy, dystopia, and heroic fiction. And we’re not snubbing the little touch of romance there, of course. Up to this date, my favorite books so far are Victoria Aveyard’s Red Queen Series, Veronica Roth’s Divergent Series, and The Eye of Minds by James Dashner.

While I think reading have shaped my mind better, I don’t take it seriously, so maybe it only does happen subconsciously. I jump into a book only with the aim to escape and be entertained, anything that comes with it is a subconscious blessing.

I really want to talk about my favorite book characters as well, because I’m an introvert learning only from book characters instead of going out and learning by myself. Kidding (jokes are half meant). But here they are:

Beatrice “Tris” Prior from Divergent. I love her basically because she’s brave and witty at the same time. I know the movies made her two-dimensional by portraying her as a stiff girl turned fighter and then she’s just that. But that’s expected for mainstream movie adaptations, always fails at shaping a character. In the book though, she was more than just that. Every choice she made meant so much more because her thoughts justified it, including the part where she sacrificed herself to stop the spread of serum that makes everybody lose their memories, which was sadly not featured in the adaptation. The movie series lost me there; I don’t deny that the first installment is still okay though.

Anika Dragomir from Anatomy of a Misfit. This girl gave me good laughs, but more than anything, I related to her because of her flaws—from her thoughts and her deeds. She’s a character who tried to be shallow by being one of the clich�� high school perfectionists, but always knew she wasn’t. She made wrong choices and did regret, which makes the whole story much more close to heart. Also, #NoToGuns.

Logan McDonough from Anatomy of a Misfit. He is an adorable, loving, selfless person. He’s one of those few characters that you think were so easy and predictable, but at the end of the story, an act he did is revealed, so full of impact and so inspiring that it makes all your past impressions of him fade away immediately. His family is basically abused by his father who is a gun owner/enthusiast (he has a collection, if I remember correctly) and Logan’s the person who has been protecting his siblings from his father’s violence until that night when it all had to end with the loss of life.

Tiberias Calore “Cal” VII from Red Queen. He is not gonna be the last character I will list here from the same story so I’ll have to explain a little bit. Basically, their world is the Kingdom of Norta, a dystopian country divided by classes of two: Silver and Red bloods (except in the later installments, there will be Newbloods), with the former being the powerful ones for having supernatural abilities and the red bloods who are ordinary people. I listed him here for his bravery of breaking boundaries by connecting to a red blooded person, which is supposed to be forbidden as a silver blood, that may be easy-sounding, believe me, in his case, it takes a lot of guts. He is also just enough of confident and self-assured, which is deserved because he’s the first prince. And he embodies that strong and fearless but bending warrior. And he bears the ability of manipulating fire, so what’s not to like?

“I am your rightful king, Silver-born for centuries. The only reason you're still breathing is because I can't burn the oxygen from this room.” — Cal

Killed. It.

Mare Barrow from Red Queen. She made everybody’s jaw drop to the ground when she, a red blood girl, turned out to have the ability to create/control electricity. But her character is more important and she is here because of three things: she’s a fighter, she’s strong, and she’s a dreamer.

“I have lived that life already, in the mud, in the shadows, in a cell, in a silk dress. I will never submit again. I will never stop fighting.” — Mare

I am gagged.

Maven Calore from Red Queen. Spoilers first: her mother turned him an evil. But I will never forget how true he was at the beginning and how dreamy he was as a character. He was so good and so kind, I wanted to be his friend. And for him to be caged in his mother’s influence, I am weeping inside.

“The truth is what I make it. I could set this world on fire and call it rain.”

I have not lost hope for him. But…

(c) to owner

#MareCal since the beginning.

If it’s not enough evidence, I am obsessed with Red Queen; I need May 15th to happen because the fourth and final installment is released that day. War Storm, wait for me.

Moving on.

When it comes to television, I’m not denying my Super Inggo obsession back in the day. I craved so hard for a kwek-kwek every day. But recently, I’ve come to love English and Korean series/dramas also, most of them being anything fantasy or medical. Favorites are probably D-Day, Grey’s Anatomy, The Flash, Westworld and Stranger Things.

Power Rangers is on another level. It’s an interest I share with my brother (probably the only one). Now, I did not watch so much of it as a kid, I think I only watched two/three seasons, but lately I have been watching more because of him. And the 2017 movie deserves 5 stars, it was fantastic, it made me nostalgic.

I AM THE BLUE RANGER. Do not steal it.

I was a website layout enthusiast once; I don’t know how currently rusty I am at it because I’ve never tried it since Grade 10. My teacher made me attend this competition, Technolympics and I won it (surprisingly) when I was in Grade 8, but that was just a simple static HTML website, if I may be honest it’s the neat layout that made me win it, but it’s nothing special with the coding.

I was also a campus journalist; I jumped quite from different roles every time though: broadcasting team technician, to reporter, to paper layout artist, to news editor. It’s all over the place, so I really never got to develop one skill.

When it comes to my behavior, I am slightly that kid who stutters at first meeting, hard to open up, and just straight up awkward. I am very wary of what I say at first meeting, I kind of have trouble forming the perfect topic to throw out there to a person I just met. Even to people I’ve been with long enough, I always find a way to make up something funny just so we won’t go to the serious side. I also get crazy though, like laugh to the end of Earth kind of crazy.

And…I watch ASMR (a term for Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) videos in YouTube. They are used to trigger a static/tingling sensation which you may feel from the top of your head down your spine. I do it to enhance my napping though. Try some:

Category is: Slam book Realness

I never had a slam book, neither did my classmates (because we’re all boring; okay maybe at least one did or it’s just me who didn’t have). But I’ll be trying to be cool once in my life so here is me trying to answer slam book template questions:

PERSONAL INFO Real Name: Judd Vander Rondares Birth Month: May Zodiac Sign: Gemini Gender: M Age: 17 Romantic Status: Single (since birth and not ever regretting hehe)

FAVORITES Color: Blue Song: I Don’t Know My Name by Grace Vanderwaal Singer: Grace Vanderwaal Movies: Love You to the Stars and Back and Big Hero 6 Actors/Actresses: Winona Ryder, Joshua Garcia, Katherine Langford, Eddie Redmayne, Models: Kris Grikaite, Kit Butler, Jordan Barrett, Jhona Burjack, Julian Schneyder, Mayowa Nicholas

OTHERS Motto: Outdo yourself. What is Love (this can’t be not done): God is love. :D

ANSWER THE FOLLOWING

Where do I see myself 10 years from now? Was my learning in SPUP vital to where I’m leading to? I see myself a fully realized professional, independent, responsible, self-sustaining, and helpful citizen of the Philippines. hehe Back in Grade 10, there was a career planning program, and for the activities, I would always not know what to write for my future plans because there were not a lot of people who gave me inspiration of what insights I should have for my future aside from my parents, and one of the things that I liked about going in SPUP is that I was surrounded by people whose aspirations boosted what I already had in mind, but not very sure of. But aside from that, of course SPUP was a good school to go for SHS, and to be honest, any school would have been okay, because I’m going for a four-year college anyway and I didn’t need a school that would make me ready for literal work/job already, I just needed something to give me background for my future course, and SPUP did okay in that department, I believe.

Was STEM the best choice after all? Yes, because now that I know the path that I’m taking (will be further discussed in the next question), it is very apparent that STEM was the best choice for me.

What course will you take in college and why? My answer to this is like a continuation for my answer in the previous question. I recently just decided to take Medical Technology, and it was after a few talks with my mother, I didn’t know it was what I needed to make up my mind. I don’t mean that I was persuaded to take the course, I just didn’t have the confidence to take it, doubting that I may not be that passionate about it so I wanted some advice. I’ve long decided that I will not take a course that I’m not passionate about, I didn’t have to hear it from anybody—I just knew it. So, when I learned that she does think my plan is worth investing and especially knowing my cousin has graduated from it, made me motivated to truly pursue it.

What topic would you like to learn more in this subject? I already have taken Microsoft Office lessons and some HTML, so naturally, I would like something that I have never taken before. Since we already took Photoshop (I wouldn’t be mad for more though), maybe Illustrator, or anything for video editing. It would be also nice to revisit HTML since I’ve forgotten lots of tags already, or JavaScript.

Ask Me Anything.  Sir, masyado bang maikli tong introduction ko? Sorry po sa grammatical errors, ang dami kasi, mahirap mag-spot. Haha

Along your way, you’ll see the deepest secrets of my brain, never be terrified.

[symbianosgames]

Chicago's own NetherRealm Studios is best known for its work on the long-running fighting game series Mortal Kombat, but in the space between Kombat outings the studio has also tried its hand at other projects.

One of those ventures, the 2013 DC Comics tie-in fighting game Injustice: Gods Among Us,  seems to have done well enough for the studio that it's now poised to release a sequel next year. But Injustice 2 is interesting from a game developer's perspective because it takes an established fighting game chassis (based upon the Mortal Kombat games) and bolts on an item system that players can use to change the way their characters work.

In brief, players basically get loot drops at the end of every match that they can then choose to equip on characters in their roster (everyone from Aquaman to Wonder Woman), changing those characters' stats. It's not totally unheard for a fighting game to include items that change characters' stats (see Street Fighter x Tekken's "Gems" system) but it is rare, and notoriously tricky to pull off without upsetting the game's balance.

NetherRealm's Adam Urbano served as lead producer on the original Injustice, and he's reprising his role for the sequel. At E3 this week, Urbano chatted with Gamasutra a bit about why, exactly, NetherRealm is making another Injustice game and what he's learned about how to build a balanced, tournament-grade fighting game.

Why are you making Injustice 2? What shortcomings did you see in the first game?

Urbano: One of the things is, we wanted the game to be accessible. We wanted Injustice to be something casual people could jump in and play. Thats why you saw the environments and the interactions and a lot of the one-button things you could do that just looked powerful. Unfortunately, it's extra difficult in just the short amount of time in the [training] mode in Injustice to really get good at things. So the gear system is a fundamental redesign to address things like that.

The goal is that you start out with a much more accessible easier-to-play character, and then you're going to grow with that character, over weeks and weeks and weeks if you choose, giving you a chance to customize it and make it play the way you want it. Actually getting to learn how to play, as well. Instead of just presenting you with 26 or so completed characters from the start, this is 26 sort of...character templates, for players to take and turn into what they want.

That sounds incredibly tricky to balance.

You correctly identified the core issue: we've been working on it for years. Throughout development of Injustice 1, really, because that's when we started thinking about how to do this. So this has been in development for a long time. You can expect a sort of arena system, like you'd see in something like a MOBA, that will give players a chance to use the gear but still keep everything balanced.

So balancing really involves the modes, the gear itself, and then making sure the changes players can do with gear and acquiring specials and all that are balanced. To do that, we have a dedicated little team that focuses on the tournament crowd. Because we love them; it's part of our studio culture at this point. And it's really hard, it's our great challenge.

Wait, how did studying MOBA design influence this game's development?

I think MOBAs, RPGs, this is a game where we've looked at all the genres we love to play and tried to integrate the elements in a way that makes sense for a fighting game, for the first time.

How do you adapt those elements to a fighting game?

So, itemization. It became something that....we had to hire experts, and it's really a core piece of the game and a whole new skillset.

Let's circle back to the tournament crowd for a minute. What is it, do you think, that defines a tournament-grade fighting game?

I think it has to be easy to learn and take a lifetime to master. I know that's kind of a platitude, but for the most part it's...can I get in there, can I learn my specials, can I beat up on somebody, if I I'm new to the genre. And then as I go, can I learn some of the enhanced moves, things like footsies, and other advanced elements of the game that probably mean nothing to most people.

One of our goals is to get people to learn and understand that throughout their play experience, so that they can do those sorts of things. Because there are a ton of people that play our games that don't know it's there, and we spend years designing all these intricate details that are so fun once you get them. But we have to start teaching people that they're there. We have to give people progression.

How do you ease players into the deeper intricacies of your fighting game, as a developer?

So...it's time. Time is the variable we've never had before. We've tried training modes, as many have; we've tried many different things, as many other developers have. But we tend to be asking people to go into a separate mode, that's typically a short experience, to learn to play, and then we say "okay now here's the actual game."

So with Injustice 2 we'ev taken that time variable away and we're designing it so that people can play characters for weeks, through all sorts of different single-player and multiplayer experiences, and you'll progress. You'll be able to try out different things. You'll be able to spend the time that other genres give you to train, finally, in the fighting genre. Without the time, it's a very hard problem to bring players up speed on a decade of evolution in the fighting game genre.

Fair enough. What's one key piece of advice you'd give to fellow developers looking to build a great fighting game?

My generic answer is risk. One of the things that developers tend to do, as time passes, is assume things are the ways they need to be and never go back and rethink them. A good example of that is like, holding back to block in the first Injustice. It was unthinkable for us at the time; it seemed so weird for us!

Yeah, if you're coming from Mortal Kombat you're supposed to have a block button.

Right! And so that was a decision where we said okay we've done this forever, let's change it up. And that worked out, so on Injustice 2 we were like okay, anyone who makes assumptions on this team, you have to go take a time out and come back. Because everything is up for debate. So we started talking about things like back to block, that came up again, but also things like the new tech roll, how and why we wanted characters to evolve. Every single thing in a fighting game, we went back and said...do we have to have blocking? Do we have to have running? What do we have to have? And then we rebuilt from there.

That sounds like it could turn into a self-destructive loop at some point. Like, you have to eventually ask yourself what you're even making.

Yeah. Well, it is Injustice, to begin with. So we wanted to have similar gameplay: transitions, super moves, all those core elements. Because those are the things people loved, when we went back and looked at it.

But to be a fighting game, competitively, really what you need are: the basic attacks, two people one on one, with semi-equal health bars. And we did experiments from there. And at the end of the day we still loved how Injustice played, but we wanted to incorporate an entire new overarching system that kind of tweaks and pokes and changes all that basic stuff.

So if there really were no sacred cows during development, you must have been trying to distill the core elements of a fighting game. Why add in a whole new overarching system of gear?

The item system is essentially choice. In a fighting game, people always ask "what's the roster?" It's a valid question, but in this particular instance it's way more than that. There's the roster, but it's more than that: it's your roster. Batman could play a million different ways -- with some balance built into the overall equation -- so if you love Batman, you could just play Batman a million different ways, forever. Characters have completely different gear, different styles, different classes.

Seems like a handful of god-tier builds would bubble to the top. How do you keep players from clustering around a small number of optimal builds?

We have a balance team for that. We're also going to have a live team in place, and their job is to sit there throughout the lifespan of the game and do nothing but work with pro players, listen to the community, and make adjustments on the fly.

So we've actually increased the frequency with which we can update, even from what we could do with Mortal Kombat X, so we can make changes to these thousands and thousands of pieces of gear, the special abilities, and so forth. 

We're at a point now where microtransactions and post-launch DLC are an expected part of big-budget game design. How do you balance a gear-based fighting game, knowing you might add additional paid gear options down the road?

The idea is the game is going to have thousands, tens of thousands, of pieces of gear on disc at launch. The thing we've always done is try and get as much content as humanly possible, up until the last second we have to submit. So at this point, we're not even thinking about that sort of microtransaction DLC stuff. There's going to be enough content. There's stuff to level up, change your character, customize your build, for weeks and weeks and weeks.