&yet

A few months ago I became a team lead. It was a pretty unexpected role shift. I’d always considered myself more of a worker bee than a leader. When the opportunity was presented to me, I didn’t let the idea sink in very long before I said ‘yes.’ Only I didn’t really say ‘yes.’ I said something like ‘Well, there are a few things about that role that I feel I might be good at, and lots of things that I’ll definitely need to learn.’ Luckily that passes for a ‘yes’ at &yet, and I was henceforth the Design Team Lead.

Then I panicked.

Here are a few of the fears that were swirling through my head:

😰 I’m too pragmatic and risk-averse in a team full of big thinkers…

Open road

I began my adventure working at &yet in January of 2018, and one of my first experiences was when suddenly, traffic on Talky plummeted. This was particularly jarring to me since one of the reasons I was hired was to be Talky’s product manager. How could traffic drop so quickly, and why didn’t it recover?

Initially, this felt like a fluke. Perhaps there was an issue with our usage monitoring, or maybe not all of our traffic was being reported? Because we don't gather data from our users, we didn't have regional information at our fingertips. Luckily, our support emails began coming in and we were able to diagnose the issue. All of the missing traffic had been coming from one particular country, The United Arab Emirates (UAE), and their government had banned our app.

Let’s Talky ‘bout UAE

What media or music helps you work efficiently and stay focused?

There are probably as many features about productivity advice on the internet as there are stars in the sky, grains of sand on the beach, or Kelly Clarkson repeat counts in your music library. So we thought, what the heck, why not add ours? Thus “Background Noise” was born, and we surveyed volunteers from the team to see what sorts of music and media helped them get to and stay in a productive mood.

What sounds do you listen to, to help you focus?

Amy Lynn Taylor, Art Director
For me it really depends on the task at hand. I either need lots of sound or none at all. If I need to focus on any writing or complex problem solving, I might gear up for it with really loud, energetic music (and caffeine) but to actually do the work, I often need pure quiet. I switch off everything other than white noise, so I can hear my thoughts clearly. If I listen to anything, it would be something instrumental like soft ambient music or classical strings.

Earlier this month I was deciding whether I should speak at a developer conference in the fall and found myself waffling between a pros and cons list. Turns out I ❤️ giving conference talks and I also don’t?

Every talk I’ve ever given was ultimately worth doing and I feel so, so grateful for each of those opportunities. But let’s be honest; prepping, traveling for, and giving a quality talk takes work, physically and emotionally.

This breakdown of benefits and drawbacks helped me think through the “why?” and “why not?” of speaking this time around.

It’s with fifteen gallons of mixed emotions that we announce that our friends at npm, inc. have acquired ^lift security and the Node Security Platform.

All the feelings:

Sadness to see some wonderful people move on from &yet. Joy for them to experience the ability to focus full-time on their passion for empathetically raising the bar for security, with the resources and audiences of one of the most influential companies in the JS ecosystem. Eager curiosity to see what the impact will be, knowing our former teammates’ immense vision and capabilities. Pride for what our team has built together in ^lift and nsp. Nostalgia, thinking of all the great memories. Gratitude for the experience of working with friends we care about and respect.

We wish Adam Baldwin, Nathan LaFreniere, Jon Lamendola, and npm success.

The first website I ever made was a fansite for a local Phoenix band called 17FourEyes. I was obsessed and compiled everything I knew about them, including transcribing the lyrics to their songs from demos and an eventual EP (I found out later I got a lot wrong). Through the site’s forum I connected with another fan where we gushed together and we eventually started hanging out at their shows. It was just so cool and got me hooked on the magic of the web.

Fifteen years later you could argue that most of my projects are still glorified fansites. Digital love letters to CSS, airports, reality cooking competitions, and my home state of Arizona.

I joke that I pride myself on creating projects that compel people to post on the internet asking “Why do this?” I recognize my work isn’t for everyone. As recently as last week a friend of mine, who no doubt gets me, said about the popularity of my airportcod.es project, “I just don’t get it.”

A lot of people question the practicality of the work or search for a deeper purpose:

Over the past ten years I’ve made ten different versions of my website. I call it my annual portfolio “refresh” since the content usually stays the same. I do always start with a blank CSS file.

some past iterations of lynnandtonic.com

I do this each year for a few reasons:

• to ensure I’ll complete at least one non-work project
• to experiment with and learn new techniques (a few standout refreshes were my first attempts at responsive design, flexbox, and this year, CSS grid)
• a year is about the right amount of time for a version to exist where I don’t feel sad once I sit down to change it

I used to feel like I belonged on the Internet. I didn’t feel like I belonged much anyplace else, but here, I knew who I was, and I could make any possibility happen with the support and encouragement of the other weird folks who called the Internet home.

For better or worse, the web feels different now. And it’s not just that everybody’s here. It’s that we’ve allowed a few large entities to dictate how we gather together, and we have not questioned whether the decisions they’ve made for their survival and growth are good for us as people.

There is certainly value in the big box social media we are part of (the fact that everyone is there being one of them), but these spaces are not feeding us as community is supposed to feed us. In fact, for most of us, they can be extremely toxic.

As unique as each person on our &yet team is, every one of them is one of the most passionate, caring people I’ve ever met. But that also means we’re a really sensitive bunch. The way our social networks are designed do more to make us feel isolated and anxious rather than filling us with a deep sense of belonging.

June 2nd and 9th sold out; register for the June 16th adventure!

The Internet has created the world’s most unsafe and heartless communities in the same place we’re building our society’s future.

Our most sensitive people, our most marginalized people—the people we need to lead us into a more empathetic future—are being crushed into the ground.

Is this the future we want to create?

Most APIs will eventually run up against the problem of paginating data. Sending entire data sets in one request is simply too expensive for both client and server. I am going to show you an easy way to paginate your data in hapi, in a way that is easy to use in your client code.

hapi-pagination

To add pagination to your API, the first step is to install the hapi-pagination module. It will automatically add page and limit parameters to the routes you want paginated, and is very customizable to suit your particular needs.

Here's the config I ended up going with