Bookmarks: February 2023
Tags: design, webdev, personal
Published: 2023-03-12 17:16:26

---
title: "Bookmarks: February 2023"
description: A collection of online reading I enjoyed in February of 2023
published: true
tags: design, webdev, personal
canonical_url: https://aileenrae.co.uk/blog/bookmarks-february-2023
---

Who cares if it's March when I'm publishing this! Here are some web articles that stuck with me last month.

## Tech and Web

### [Building your colour palette - Refactoring UI](https://www.refactoringui.com/previews/building-your-color-palette)

Building attractive interfaces is a large component of my love for building on the web, but I am not a designer. I have a decent enough eye for seeing what's *wrong* in a web layout and for accurately implementing a design spec. But I trip up when it comes to creating, and one of the biggest hurdles for me is **colour**.

I've tried so many colour palette generators and generated some beautiful colour schemes, but I can never get them to actually *work*. This article on Refactoring UI illustrates exactly why - it's impossible. A web interface colour palette is much more intricate, and much more full of grey than you would expect.

![A colour palette in action](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/a95vjwfa38yr0ecl8cet.png)

Using image examples, it shows you how each colour in your palette needs to have different shades, and how these would be implemented in common UI components. I will be referencing this often for future side projects.

### [Exluding non-binary people by design: How sign-up forms can lead to discrimination - Sarah L. Fossheim](https://fossheim.io/writing/posts/excluding-non-binary-people-by-design/)

An excellent exploration of how designing digital systems has to have inclusiveness baked in from the start.

![A screenshot of Google's input for entering a non-binary gender](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/jfyuuie7vypnl07gxvq4.png)

>This is why data isn’t neutral or objective, but influenced by those who collect it, and later possibly further compromised by the biases of those that use it.

I also highly recommend the follow-up article: [Getting started with trans inclusive design](https://fossheim.io/writing/posts/trans-inclusive-design-tools/).

### [Why I'm not the biggest fan of Single Page Applications - Manuel Matuzovic](https://www.matuzo.at/blog/2023/single-page-applications-criticism/)

In a world where SPA vs MPA has become somewhat of a flame-war, this measured take is a refreshing read.

As someone who started her web development career working with SPA frameworks, I'm ashamed even this surface-level article highlighted holes in my accessibility logic. This very website does not consistently shift focus to the beginning of the DOM on SPA-navigation.

### [Bing: “I will not harm you unless you harm me first” - Simon Willison](https://simonwillison.net/2023/Feb/15/bing/)

A wild ride of a read 😂

![A screenshot from AI-powered Bing](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/3b1pf6f6cbsk8jg7v9jz.png)

## Career

### [The engineer-manager pendulum - Charity.wtf](https://charity.wtf/2017/05/11/the-engineer-manager-pendulum/)

There's this pervasive idea in software engineering that once you reach a certain level of seniority you have to choose: do you want to continue to be an individual contributor (IC) or a manager? Just google "IC vs engineering manager" and be overwhelmed by the sheer number of discussion pieces.

I think a lot of people resist this dichotomy. In my current company, we have a tech lead role which is meant to be a split of engineering manager and IC engineer duties. Our job ad says 25% of a tech lead's time is spent writing code. In reality though, the management responsibilities are always higher priority than any IC work.

The engineer-manager pendulum article has an explanation for this:

>Management is highly interruptive, and great engineering — where you’re learning things — requires blocking out interruptions. You can’t do these two opposite things at once. As a manager, it is your job to be available for your team, to be interrupted. It is your job to _choose_ to hand off the challenging assignments, so that your engineers can get better at engineering.

The alternative? Focus on either IC or management one at a time, but go back and forth between the two: the pendulum. Charity articulates why this works far better than I can so go read it!