AI-powered recruitment, VUI's, and coding in the cloud
Good morning. TGIF. After a tireless month of doom-scrolling, we bring you back to your regular broadcast of tech & product highlights... or at least, you very first edition.
With your help, we're building The Edgelist — bi-weekly, highly curated, and thought-provoking industry highlights. We want to make this newsletter epic, so keep your ideas and feedback coming by commenting below.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT:
✍️ Attention is my most valuable asset
zwbetz — A nice short essay about attention and spending quality, focused time on work. While it's from a developer's perspective, there's a lot of insight that's applicable to all kinds of work. In particular, the mention of The Eisenhower Method seems especially relevant to product building.
💼 The future of recruitment
Oxford — We're keeping our ears to the ground when it comes to adapting business models for the future of work and the Open Talent economy. If you're interested in flexible business models, 2-sided markets, and algorithmic biases, listen in.
🧠 Grow your knowledge, grow your personal knowledge base
Dendron — Gathering notes from research, trials, successes, failures, both professionally and personally, can yield valuable insights when returning to a topic or discovering something new. Dendron helps you build that knowledge graph right in VS Code.
🛒 Build a direct-to-consumer store—in minutes
Swell Ecommerce — Like Shopify, but headless. APIs for ALL THE THINGS empowers product builders flexibility to create anything eCommerce. Of particular interest are their native subscription features.
IN THE PRODUCT WORLD:
🏗 The art of tidying up your design components
Figma — When it comes to design system work, Figma took another step forward at Config Europe this September. One feature we’re particularly excited about is Variants. Variants helps you group together related components, clean up the asset panel, and more closely relates to how the component will be structured in the development world.
🗣 Passing the "toothbrush test" today—designing for voice (vui)
NPR — Voice User Interfaces (VUI) support speed, efficiency, and convenience for users. Roughly 24% of consumers in the United States own a smart speaker (60 million - up 22% from last year). With COVID-19, those numbers have only continued to grow as users rely on voice interactions for daily routines.
👁 Design for the 95%, not the 5%
Norman Nielsen Group — According to this study, most users can perform tasks such as “one-click-buy”, yet only 5% of people could perform more complex tasks (ie - schedule a meeting on an application using only information from an email). Those of us reading this email are in the 5% — so take Jakob Nielsen’s recommendation: keep your design extremely simple, or the majority of the population can’t use your product.
✅ Accessibility pre-flight checklist
A11y Project — An awesome project focused on digital accessibility. They host loads of resources, including some very useful checklists, for ensuring your site is accessible and inclusive. For example, check out No Mouse Day.
🌠 Trend: Rubber hose character design
2C — A collection of subversive and surrealist character designs. Animation styles from the 1930's are having another resurgence in the graphic design world, after being re-popularized in 2017 by the release of the Nintendo game Cuphead and the work of Hattie Stewart. With Netflix's The Cuphead Show! airing in 2021, our spidey senses are telling us this trend will grow a bit more into the mainstream.
IN THE TECH WORLD:
🏠 Keep your home office sync'd up
VSCode Settings Sync — No need for extra extensions and syncing Github gists to keep your VS Code installs across devices in sync. It's built right into the editor now. You just need a Github or Microsoft account to get set up.
🌴 Give your laptop a vacation; Code in the cloud
GitHub Codespaces — Still in Early Access, but invites have gone wide lately. Developers are experimenting with cloud-based coding in all sorts of contexts. VS Code makes it particularly easy with built in support for remote file systems.
✨ NPM just leveled up
NPM 7 — The omnipresent package manager for Node gets a new release with a few significant features: Workspaces will help a ton with nested projects/dependencies. There's even built in support for yarn.lock files!
☁️ Another round of app platform simplicity
Digital Ocean App Platform — The focus of this Heroku competitor is fixed/known pricing. While all builders should be wary of vendor lock-in, it's always good to see competition and innovation in the hosting space.
🔥 Better, faster, stronger
Webpack 5 — You might not want to rush to upgrade existing projects since configuration can be a bear, and this release does have breaking changes, but there's a lot here that ups performance, file size, compatibility, and general maintainability.
Special shoutout to Taylor Beseda for helping curate this content.
Follow him on twitter @tbeseda.