We’re talking about designing and building HEY with Jonas Downey, the lead designer behind HEY. In their words, “Email sucked for years, but not anymore.” We were super interested in how they went about solving the problems with email, so we invited Jonas on to share all the details and a behind-the-scenes look at the making of HEY.

We first launched a membership back in 2013… before they were cool! 😆 Now we’re back with a brand new edition. It’s called Changelog++ and we hope you love it. This episode of Backstage is a tell-all about the program. Why we think the timing is right, what we hope it can become, how we’re experimenting with ideas to make it great, and what you can do to get involved.

1️⃣ Value contributions to documentation just as much as code contributions
2️⃣ Put documentation and code in the same project repo
3️⃣ Make documentation a requirement for a merge or release milestone
4️⃣ Have a consistent contribution process for code and documentation
5️⃣ Have well-documented processes for contributing to documentation

That’s the TL;DR, but each of these is expanded upon in the article.

These iconic, low-resolution designs are the perfect tool to learn the basics of physical interface design. Armed with 52 different bricks, let’s see what they can teach us about the design, layout and organisation of complex interfaces.

The gang officially welcomes Amal Hussein as a panelist! After that it’s Pro Tip Time, then we finish up by attempting to demistify CSS Sweeper and the Space Toggle Trick.

Peter Ohler:

I had a dream. I’d write a fast JSON parser, generic data, and a JSONPath implementation and it would be beautiful, well organized, and something to be admired. Well, reality kicked in and laughed at those dreams.

This post lays out Peter’s plan, his journey, and his lessons learned in great details. Seems like it’d pair nicely with the recent Go Time all about JSON.

JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is used all over the web as a text-based way of transmitting data. In this episode, we explore Go’s encoding/json package, and others with Daniel Marti.

Have you heard the phrase, “Put yourself in their shoes?” In this episode, the conversation focuses on the “HOW” and why it all begins with empathy. Empathy is the key that enables access to another person’s perspective and emotional state. It is also a fundamental aspect of building and sustaining relationships with others. The fascinating thing is that there are 3 types of empathy: cognitive, social, and empathic concern. Plus there’s a counterpart component called compassion that moves us to take action.

Leszek Zalewski:

The impact of COVID-19 is multifaceted. Our infrastructure team observed an exhaustion of our server resource pool for auto scaling due to a drastic traffic increase! Learn how we achieved 2× faster application run with only 1/3 of the servers by tuning auto scaling rules and switching to Puma threads.

Nikola Đuza makes a compelling case for the powerful text editor that developers love (or love to hate):

What Vim is excellent at is navigating, making some changes, and repeating the process. The process most call editing (not to be confused with writing). Most developers tend to overlook this fact, but this is one of the strong selling points of Vim. Developers are more prone to reading code, jumping from file to file, making small incisions in the code, and writing code all the time.

James Blizzard, writing for Browser London:

in my view, a number of factors are converging to make change ever more likely. Namely, the huge scale of cloud computing providers, Apple’s plans to migrate their laptop products to ARM-based processors, and the opening up of the educational space to include ARM-based systems.

There are some great thoughts from James in this article. From my vantage point, ARM is well-positioned for the short/medium-term, but RISC-V might just disrupt that for the long-term. One small piece of evidence: how Apple positioned this transition to Apple Silicon instead of to ARM.

This looks like a great resource, but seems targeted at folks who’ve already dipped their toes in to the water. For first-timers, the maintainers of Rustlings suggest the official book and Rust By Example.

A cool mashup (remember those?) of Google’s Cloud Vision API and Repl.it’s API. You can view a demo video on the twitters.

Una Kravets does a great job explaining these 1-liners. It’s amazing what you can accomplish with very little modern CSS. See also the demo site of all the layouts.

Come hang with the bad boys of natural language processing (NLP)! Jack Morris joins Daniel and Chris to talk about TextAttack, a Python framework for adversarial attacks, data augmentation, and model training in NLP. TextAttack will improve your understanding of your NLP models, so come prepared to rumble with your own adversarial attacks!

Luckysheet’s list of features is quite impressive and there’s more coming soon.

Lars Wikman:

With Microsoft’s strong push into open source it is easy to assume that they are fully open source and that their flagship code editor and its cool LiveShare and Remote extensions are there to play nice with the wider world of free software and open source. This is not entirely the case as this post outlines.

Jeff Sheldon is the founder and creator of Ugmonk. Jeff is a designer by trade, and an entrepreneur by accident. I been following Jeff’s journey for the better part of Ugmonk’s existence. I’m also a customer. Jeff and I hold several similar values near and dear to our hearts. In addition to my appreciation for Jeff’s product design abilities, and how he leads his business, I also appreciate Jeff’s awareness and focus on the long hard path.

Adam Wathan shares the backstory of Tailwind CSS, from humble beginnings to a multi-million dollar business. Thankfully, if you read the story, Nathan hated Sass enough to do something about it. Sometimes changes to our tools force us to change as well, and that change JUST MIGHT lead to scratching a multi-million dollar itch.

We’re also about to cross $2 million in revenue from Tailwind UI, our first commercial Tailwind CSS product which was released about 5 months ago — a bit under two years after the very first Tailwind CSS release.

Here’s the story from the beginning, while it’s still fresh enough to remember…

SVG and designed on a 15x15 grid. Use ’em inline or as Sprites. Interactive preview here.

Kayla Cinnamon, Program Manager at Microsoft for Windows Terminal, Console, Command Line, and Cascadia Code joined us to talk about the release of Windows Terminal 1.0 and the new Windows command-line experience. We talk about everything that went into rethinking the command line experience on Windows, the UX and UI design behind it all, the learnings of working in open source, and what’s to come for the Windows command line experience.

Mikeal and Chris welcome (back) special guest Fred K. Schott, who you may recall from our episode on Pika. This time, we’re talking ESM: what it is, what’s new about it, why it’s the future, writing libraries with it, and much more.