Last month I finally finished or rather forced myself to finish Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, which probably took me 4 weeks while mixing it up with other books. I just couldn’t handle reading only a single book for several weeks straight. That’s why I took a few breaks with shorter ones to read in parallel.

Catch-22

This was one of the longer fiction books I’ve read lately with 466 pages. It was recommended to me because of its humour and unique take on the war. I struggled to get into this classic and it only really started to become enjoyable after around 200 pages. Once you learn to appreciate that things are weird, crazy and don’t always need to make sense you realise that it’s a decent book with many hidden gems throughout.

Get Catch-22 on Amazon

Nicely Said: Writing for the Web with Style and Purpose

Ever since I attended Kate Kiefer Lee’s talk at Webstock a few years back I’ve been wanting to get my hands on this book. There is lots of good advice on how to write for a business, although at times it felt too corporate. However I did learn a few things that I could apply directly to my work (like reading out loud or writing the way you speak) but many of the activities seemed aimed at entire teams of copywriters or marketers.

Get Nicely Said: Writing for the Web with Style and Purpose on Amazon

Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered

This one probably took me a day or two to finish. Easy to read and full of small motivational tips to get you to put your work out there in front of people. I’m not going to lie, I’m a fan of Austin Kleon and enjoyed this book. Nice change of pace from the other ones on this list.

Get Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered on Amazon

You Are a Writer (So Start Acting Like One)

Stumbled upon this one while browsing Amazon on my Kindle. It was cheap and had many good reviews so I thought “Why not?”.
Jeff Goins writes about his change of career and the steps it took to become a full-time writer. Turns out writing is only part of the story. Good read if you want to follow his footsteps.

Get You Are a Writer (So Start Acting Like One) on Amazon

Ego is the Enemy

I was pleasantly surprised by Ego is the Enemy as I didn’t have any expectations when I picked it up. This book drew me in and it kept getting better after every page. I especially enjoyed all the anecdotes of famous people who were able to suppress their ego and what impact it had on history in hindsight. The snippets about Ryan Holiday’s own professional and personal experiences were also interesting.

Get Ego is the Enemy on Amazon

When I submitted a support ticket to my hosting provider last week, I noticed an all too familiar message in my inbox. It was an urgent message I received a couple of years ago from the support team. The title is straightforward: Urgent: Website Hacked Abuse Report.
I remember being confused when I first saw it, holding my breath and quickly opening the message to see what it’s all about.
This was the message:

“Unfortunately we’re experiencing an issue with your website or account and need your help to remedy the situation ASAP. Failing to respond to this notice via email or ticket with our Abuse department could lead to suspension or termination of your account(s).

We have temporarily suspended this account because of a hacking issue. Your website has been hacked, defaced or infected. Please get in touch with us to help resolve this matter so we can work together to get your account back up and running again.
Unfortunately due to the severity of the compromise you will need to remove all data from the account and install from scratch.

Reply back to this ticket with your questions and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible.

Thank you”

That sounds pretty scary, right? My account was hacked and with it all my websites. At first I thought this was a mistake, since there was no way I could’ve been hacked. I mean, I’m conscious of security and use randomly generated passwords (thanks 1Password) just to make sure. As you can see the first step was obviously denial. After that I quietly freaked out for about 5 minutes and then read the email again more calmly. The only thing that stood out to me at this point was their surprising choice of words. That, and their apparent lack of empathy.
Let’s take a look:

“[…] we’re experiencing an issue with your website or account and need your help to remedy the situation ASAP”

Alright so there’s an issue and you want me to help resolve this? ASAP? Not sure how I can help but okay.

“Failing to respond to this notice via email or ticket with our Abuse department could lead to suspension or termination of your account(s).”

Now I could be wrong, but to me this sounds like a mild threat. Why would my account get suspended or terminated though? I didn’t do anything.

“We have temporarily suspended this account because of a hacking issue. Your website has been hacked, defaced or infected.”

Oh so you went ahead and suspended it anyway. And we learn that my account was hacked (or defaced or infected, who knows).

“Please get in touch with us to help resolve this matter so we can work together to get your account back up and running again.”

Look they said “Please”! (Still no apologies to be found though.) This is the first sentence that sounds like it was actually written by a human. I feel a bit better about the whole thing and am happy to find out that we can resolve this together.

“Unfortunately due to the severity of the compromise you will need to remove all data from the account and install from scratch.”

Now that’s a bummer. I expected them to help me recover my stuff through backups or something. But no. Nada. Not today. They want me to wipe all my content just like that and re-install everything from scratch? It would’ve been nice of them to take responsibility or at least offer some kind of help to fix this. Instead they basically said “delete everything k thx bye” and that’s it.

I ended up replying with a few questions involving backups but had to wipe all my files shortly after. It left a very bad taste in my mouth. Not the issue itself, but rather how they communicated with me throughout this ordeal. In fact, the support team’s replies were tone-deaf and didn’t take into account how I felt. It was the first time I’d been hacked and I was naturally worried about the inherent implications.
What really freaked me out was a text file that contained 5 account names and passwords, including my own. Maybe this was a trivial issue for the hosting provider to deal with and it might happen all the time. But they could at least use nicer words and consider how customers might feel when they get hacked through their service.

Many of these thoughts came to mind after reading
Nicely Said: Writing for the Web with Style and Purpose by Nicole Fenton and Kate Kiefer Lee.
I first heard about it during Kate’s talk at Webstock and can’t recommend it enough if you’re interested in writing for the web.

Also check out Mailchimp’s Content Style Guide and their Voice & Tone guide for more good stuff.

I saw this little introduction to music making by Ableton on Hacker News the other day and spent more time on it than I’d like to admit. To be honest I didn’t expect much when I clicked the link but then there I was, jamming in my browser almost immediately. All it took was reading the first paragraph on the page:

“In these lessons, you’ll learn the basics of music making. No prior experience or equipment is required; you’ll do everything right here in your browser.”

No prior experience or equipment required? Cool.
Do everything right here in the browser? Let’s get started already!
The barrier to entry seemed so low that it was hard to resist giving it a try, even just out of curiosity.

The lessons are broken down into chapters where they give you a few instructions and explain basic music concepts. There is no right or wrong answer though and every task seems achievable without much trouble. You can also choose to do whatever you like on the canvas provided.

A few chapters in, I was hooked and wanted more. This was like a gateway drug that took the complexity out of music making for me. As a result of this free course I checked out their products to see what a beginner would actually need to start making music. In the end, my girlfriend was able to talk me out of getting a whole studio setup for now but I’m definitely in interested music production after this.

When companies share knowledge or resources for free and actually help the community without expecting anything in return, the message they send is more genuine than any ad they could come up with. I’ve never heard of Ableton before, so well done to their team for working on this. Remember, sharing is caring.

Earlier this year the art collective Boa Mistura returned to the favela of Vila Brasilândia to continue working on their project “Lus Nas Vielas”.

In 2012 they painted a series of words in anamorphosis on the walls of the São Paolo favela. The concept was to display the values of the people in the neighbourhood on a big urban canvas. The artists achieved this by combining big white letters with bright colours on the walls and floors. They wrote: “amor, orgulho, doçura, firmeza, beleza” (love, pride, sweetness, strength, beauty).
The whole process was a collaboration that extended beyond the walls to create new relationships between people and make them smile.

Five years later they added 2 new words: “poesia” and “mágica” (poetry and magic). It goes to show that with a few buckets of paint you can turn dull walls and irregular buildings into true works of art which people can feel proud of. Another welcome side effect is the attention this project has brought to an otherwise neglected part of the city.
The artists explain:

“We as urban artists have to reverse that process of negativity, because the favela does not have to be synonym with violence, because life in this place is more intense and real, because there is no purest and most sincere poetry, than the one that comes from the favelas.”

Find out more about the collective and their projects on their website.

Airbnb’s design team released a new open source library for Sketch based on React. It allows to generate templates, components and assets directly from code instead of drawing them in Sketch. This eliminates the need to maintain their design language system across Sketch files for designers and Github repos for developers, so that everyone uses the exact same elements from a single source of truth. In the past we’ve seen many plugins try to generate code from Sketch files in order to bridge the gap between design and development, but the React Sketch.app is doing the opposite.

Once you dig a little deeper you start to see the many advantages of this new approach, especially for big international platforms like Airbnb. As their design system grows, new components can require changes that include colour, typography or spacing. Imagine having to redraw things like that in Sketch every single time to see if it’ll work across thousands of devices and hundreds of languages. You can use code to do the heavy lifting for you and generate content on many artboards with different sizes instead.
The library also makes designing with data really easy by allowing you to use traditional APIs and GraphQL endpoints. The same goes for internationalisation if you want to see how titles or button labels fit across your design system.

Even though I’m not too familiar with React I’m very excited to explore the possibilities that come with this open source library. It further reduces the gap between design and development in a radical way. Head over to airnbnb.design to read more about “Painting with Code” where Jon Gold explains the framework in more detail.