A dose of dopamine for your 🧠
This week's theme: Humor
Ever hear the expression "laughter is contagious"? Well, not to scare you, but It's true. In 1962, Tanzania had a laughter epidemic, that started small and spread quickly for the span of 3 months.
We've been managing our own pandemic for the last year, which has reduced the volume of original content tenfold. So much so that one picture of Bernie Sanders has exploded into a web of memes.
Laughter feels good. It's also proven to have plenty of benefits to the brain. It triggers the emotional reward center, delivering a heaping dose of mood-lifting serotonin and feel-good dopamine. Scientific evidence suggests that when we infuse humor into our communication, we tend to retain that information much better over time.
We're less likely to laugh as we age, however. Researcher Robert Provine found that that babies laugh 300 times a day, while adults laugh only 20 times per day. That means we are 15x less likely to receive the benefits of humor, unless we choose to find the comedy in things.
But, we get it. Sometimes it's hard to be positive. Something I learned while I was doing a stint in Improv: time + tragedy = comedy.
Pro Tip - Take a screenshot when someone says something nice to you in Slack, email, or text and compile those into a :clap: folder. They’ll be a nice reference for you whenever you need a healthy boost.
🔮. Indie Spotlight - Allie Mounce, based in Memphis, TN
Pretty Useful Co. — Her artwork spans murals, enamel pins, lettering, portraiture, patches, and so much more. She’s co-founder of Pretty Useful Co. where her mission is to design stuff she likes and sell enough of the stuff she makes to be able to make even more stuff. So far, so good. Not only is she crazy talented, she’s earned confidence as an indie: “the single most powerful thought that propels me through life is ‘if these dumbasses can do it, so can I’.” My favorite of her pieces: a Bachelor-themed tarot deck called The Right Reasons.
📰 Ueno design agency joins Twitter full time - “Now, about that edit button, @jack”
Ueno — Welp, it’s official, Uneo is now an embedded part of Twitter design and research. After having worked together, the two companies share a close relationship and the acqui-hire only felt natural. Uneo has famously always had a love for Twitter, going so far as to mention the view of their coinciding offices in their website footer.
👸 Super Variant Bros - mix and match your favorite Mario Bros characters in Figma
Joey Lamelas — An illustration design system for gaming nerds. This file componentizes and "variantizes" the Mario character crew so that you can mix and match (most of) their facial features! For those interested, this is a good way to understand how Figma variants work conceptually — and also how illustrations can be built into a design system.
📝 For product owners who need a good laugh, user stories we pray never actually get written
Shit User Stories — In the middle of a monotonous spec session, this compendium of poorly written user stories might give you a nice break from writing real user stories. For example, “As a user at-risk of churning, I want to receive a vague and meaningless push notification to prompt me to open the app, so that I'm bumped back into weekly active user numbers”
😂 A physicist, chemist, and programmer were going to lunch together...
When they got in the car though, it wouldn’t start.
“Maybe it’s out of gas?” said the Chemist.
“Maybe it’s a problem with the engine?” said the Physicist.
“Maybe if we all just get out of the car and get back in.”
— Read more programming jokes on Hacker News
💪 "Zero to hero" guide to get started with a few pieces of a rising tech stack - CRUD API using NestJS, Mongoose, MongoDB and Docker
Francesco Ciulla — NestJS is a super powerful framework Node.js framework with a proven track record for scale. MongoDB needs no introduction, but not everyone has tried the Atlas platform from the company behind Mongo. The author helps connect the dots with a few other pieces of tech to get you started.
⏳ Software development topics I've changed my mind on after 6 years in the industry
Chris Kiehl — Insight from developers at various stages in their career is always valuable. It takes a great deal of insight to actively change your mind about specific opinions in software development. What's the saying? "Strong opinions, loosely held." It will be interesting to see what the author thinks in another six years.
🏎 CSS Cyberpunk 2077 Buttons - Taking your CSS to Night City
DEV.TO — The game may not have had the smoothest launch, but the style is undeniably rad. Check out this thorough walkthrough of recreating similar visual effects with CSS.
As always, special shoutout to Taylor Beseda for helping curate this content.
Follow him on twitter @tbeseda.