This online course from Sara looks superb!
I know how overwhelming and even frustrating accessibility may feel at first. But I promise you, accessibility isn’t always as hard as it seems (especially if you know where and when to start!). And my goal with this course is to make it friendlier and more approachable.
Best of all, there’s $100 off if you sign up now—that’s a 25% saving.
I endorse this statement.
I want to live in a future where Artificial Intelligences can relieve humans of the drudgery of labour. But I don’t want to live in a future which is built by ripping-off people against their will.
- Be skeptical of PR hype
- Question the training data
- Evaluate the model
- Consider downstream harms
There’s a general consensus that large language models are going to get better and better. But what if this as good as it gets …before the snake eats its own tail?
The tails of the original content distribution disappear. Within a few generations, text becomes garbage, as Gaussian distributions converge and may even become delta functions. We call this effect model collapse.
Just as we’ve strewn the oceans with plastic trash and filled the atmosphere with carbon dioxide, so we’re about to fill the Internet with blah. This will make it harder to train newer models by scraping the web, giving an advantage to firms which already did that, or which control access to human interfaces at scale.
Season three of the Clearleft podcast is here!
The first episode is a nice gentle one to ease into things. It’s about coaching …and training …and mentorship. Basically I wanted to find out what the differences are between those three things.
But I must confess, there’s a commercial reason why this episode is coming out now. There’s a somewhat salesy promotion of an upcoming coaching programme with Julia Whitney. This is definitely the most overt marketing I’ve done on the Clearleft podcast, but if you listen to the episode, I think you’ll agree that it fits well with the theme.
Fear not, future episodes will not feature this level of cross-promotion. Far from it. You can expect some very revealing podcast episodes that pull no punches in getting under the skin of design at Clearleft.
The stars of this episode are my colleagues Rebecca and Chris, who were an absolute joy to interview.
Have a listen and hear for yourself.
The cosmonaut counterparts of the Mercury women astronauts: Zhanna Yorkina, Irina Solovyova, Tatyana Kuznetsova, Valentina Ponomareva, and Valentina Tereshkova.
Ponomareva recalled there being no envy between the women in the squad. According to her, it was a healthy spirit of competition. Everyone did their best to be number one, but also supported each other’s efforts.
One of those cosmonauts went to space: none of the women training for the Mercury missions did. There would be a shockingly gap of twenty years between the launch of Valentina Tereshkova and the launch of Sally Ride.
This JavaScript training course looks like it’s really well planned to take you from zero to hero—there’s a whole module on progressive enhancement.
I frequently see web developers struggling to become better, but without a path or any indication of clear direction. This repository is an attempt to sharing my experiences, and any contributions, that can help provide such a direction.
It’s broken down into four parts:
I don’t necessarily agree with everything here (and I really don’t like the “rockstar” labelling), but that’s okay:
Anything written here is open to debate and challenges are encouraged.
A write-up of the BrightSparks programme that Clearleft is taking part in.
Each company agreed to help support one local child from a low-income family, on free school meals or with a yearly household income of under £25k.
An online training course that will banish all fear of the command line, expertly delivered by the one and only Remy Sharp.
For designers, new developers, UX, UI, product owners and anyone who’s been asked to “just open the terminal”.
Take advantage of the special launch price—there are some serious price reductions there.
I really enjoyed teaching in Porto last week. It was like having a week-long series of CodeBar sessions.
Whenever I’m teaching at CodeBar, I like to be paired up with people who are just starting out. There’s something about explaining the web and HTML from first principles that I really like. And people often have lots and lots of questions that I enjoy answering (if I can). At CodeBar—and at The New Digital School—I found myself saying “Great question!” multiple times. The really great questions are the ones that I respond to with “I don’t know …let’s find out!”
CodeBar is always a very rewarding experience for me. It has given me the opportunity to try teaching. And having tried it, I can now safely say that I like it. It’s also a great chance to meet people from all walks of life. It gets me out of my bubble.
I can’t remember when I was first paired up with Amber at CodeBar. It must have been sometime last year. I do remember that she had lots of great questions—at some point I found myself explaining how hexadecimal colours work.
I was impressed with Amber’s eagerness to learn. I also liked that she was making her own website. I told her about Homebrew Website Club and she started coming along to that (along with other CodeBar people like Cassie and Alice).
I’ve mentioned to multiple CodeBar students that there’s pretty much an open-door policy at Clearleft when it comes to shadowing: feel free to come along and sit with a front-end developer while they’re working on client projects. A few people have taken up the offer and enjoyed observing myself or Charlotte at work. Amber was one of those people. Again, I was very impressed with her drive. She’s got a full-time job (with sometimes-crazy hours) but she’s so determined to get into the world of web design and development that she’s willing to spend her free time visiting Clearleft to soak up the atmosphere of a design studio.
We’ve decided to turn this into something more structured. Amber and I will get together for a couple of hours once a week. She’s given me a list of some of the areas she wants to explore, and I think it’s a fine-looking list:
- I want to gather base, structural knowledge about the web and all related aspects. Things seem to float around in a big cloud at the moment.
- I want to adhere to best practices.
- I want to learn more about what direction I want to go in, find a niche.
- I’d love to opportunity to chat with the brilliant people who work at Clearleft and gain a broad range of knowledge from them.
My plan right now is to take a two-track approach: one track about the theory, and another track about the practicalities. The practicalities will be HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and related technologies. The theory will be about understanding the history of the web and its strengths and weaknesses as a medium. And I want to make sure there’s plenty of UX, research, information architecture and content strategy covered too.
Seeing as we’ll only have a couple of hours every week, this won’t be quite like the masterclass I just finished up in Porto. Instead I imagine I’ll be laying some groundwork and then pointing to topics to research. I guess it’s a kind of homework. For example, after we talked today, I set Amber this little bit of research for the next time we meet: “What is the difference between the internet and the World Wide Web?”
I’m excited to see where this will lead. I find Amber’s drive and enthusiasm very inspiring. I also feel a certain weight of responsibility—I don’t want to enter into this lightly.
I’m not really sure what to call this though. Is it mentorship? Or is it coaching? Or training? All of the above?
Whatever it is, I’m looking forward to documenting the journey. Amber will be writing about it too. She is already demonstrating a way with words.
Story of my life:
I have to confess I had no idea what a technical leader really does. I figured it out, eventually.
Seriously, this resonates a lot with what I find myself doing at Clearleft these days.
I’m going to be attending Seb’s CreativeJS and HTML5 course in Brighton on September 13th and 14th …and I strongly suspect that it’s going to be great.
Malarkey has launched his latest project: For A Beautiful Web is a series of web design master class training workshops covering topics including visual design for the web, best-practice XHTML mark-up and CSS, Microformats and practical web access…
Want to learn CSS kung-fu? Get thee to Maidenhead on October 29th and you can learn from the best: Rachel Andrew and Drew McLellan.
Watch the adventures of Derek and Kathryn Featherstone in the run up to IronMan Lake Placid 2007. Check out the route maps: very slick.
One of the services we offer at Clearleft is on-site training… a bit of this, a bit of that. It’s something that I really enjoy. Not only do I get to spend a day talking incessantly about the technologies that tickle my fancy, I also get to travel and meet web developers who are digging away at the coalface behind their company firewalls.
Thus far, our little roadshow has travelled within the UK to companies in London, York, and elsewhere. This week, we’re spreading our wings a little further. On Friday, I’ll be doing some DOM Scripting training in Basel, Switzerland located right on the nexus of France, Germany and the Confoederatio Helvetica.
It won’t be my first time to Basel. I’ve been there on a few occasions, mostly for the unique annual spectacle of the Morgensterich carnival. I used to live fairly close by, over the border in Freiburg, Germany.
I arrived in Freiburg many years ago with my bouzouki in hand and started busking on the streets. I ended up staying for about five or six years. Along the way I met Jessica, worked in a bakery and played bass in a surf-rock band. Then that whole web thing came along and set me on my present course.
I haven’t been back to Freiburg since moving to England six years ago. Seeing as I’m going to be in Basel anyway, I think I’ll take a trip up to the old town this weekend. I’ll revisit my old haunts and revisit the beer and wurst while I’m at it.
I hope my German hasn’t become too rusty in the intervening time. I guess I’ll find out if I’m able to comprehend the Schweizerdeutsch spoken in Basel.
Expect my Flickr photostream to fill up with pictures of Freiburg’s quaint alleyways and its wonderful cathedral. Tchüß… bis später.