I was talking to a friend recently about the perils of helping young kids manage uncertainty when they see disconcerting changes. My instinct is to say “Your mom & dad will always be together”, or even just “I’ll always be here for you.”

While I fully intent to fulfill both of those promises, they are dangerous promises to make as they can depend on forces outside of your control.

My wise friend shared the promise he makes to his son among uncertainly—a reminder of a reassurance that he really can promise: “I will always be your father.”

My friend at silverorange has written a beautiful tribute to his mother and her contribution to his life and our company.

Martha was kind and generous to all of us in the early years of silverorange.

About 18 or 19 years ago, she had an 1978 Volvo station-wagon sitting around that she let me borrow one winter. The only catch was, I didn’t know how to drive a manual transmission.

Martha didn’t seem to think this was much of an issue. She’d just teach me how to drive it when she dropped it off for me. There in the UPEI parking lot, my friend’s mother showed me how to drive a manual transmission so I could borrow their extra old car for six months.

She was a special person. See Nick’s full tribute: A Mother’s Mentorship.

Update: I submitted this to the Sketch team as a bug report. They’ve responded that it should be fixed in the next version and is already fixed in the current Beta.

Update #2 (May 31, 2019): This issue is now fixed in Sketch (v55.1). Thanks!

I’ve noticed a bug in Sketch and I’ve documented it here in a quick screen-cast in hopes that it will get fixed and that others can understand and work around it.

To trigger the bug:

1. Create two objects in a Sketch document
2. Group those two objects
3. Select one of those objects and move it with the keyboard in such a way that the group is now larger (for example, move the rightmost object further to the right)
4. Click anywhere on the canvas to clear the selection and apply the keyboard move
5. Select the group and notice that the width of the group is that from before the move – double-clicking on the portion of the moved object that is outside of the group has no effect

Now, to get Sketch to properly reflect the new larger size of the group, select one of the objects in the group and hit Escape. This seems to trigger Sketch to update the size of the group.

It sounds complicated when written out like that, but I’ve narrated a quick screen-cast to illustrate the issue:

I write a short post about how we chose the name “silverorange” for our company. We skirted catastrophe.

The best part about Monotype’s updated Helvetica Now font family is that we can stop pretending to know how to say “neue.”

“My friend Peter”, as I refer to him frequently in anecdotes around the house, has posted a few fascinating visualizations of how far people need to travel to vote in the upcoming Prince Edward Island provincial election.

For those not following along with the democratic experiments of Canada’s smallest province, this next election is paired with a referendum on proportional representation. While it is as much advocacy as information, I found this 8-minute explanation of the Mixed-Member Proportional (MMP) electoral system in question to be helpful.

My friend and brother-in-Web-development from silverorange, Nick Burka, has written an article about the new Web Authentication API (WebAuthn) from the W3C. It’s a good article on a cool topic.

My thought process on seeing this article in the Washington Post this morning:

1. Moving away from the death penalty is great.
2. He looks like the evil politician in a political action thriller movie.
3. Do I think everyone with their hair slicked-back is evil?
4. Yes. Yes, I do.

Life is a lot less disappointing if you treat umbrellas as disposable.

I gave a brief presentation internally at silverorange about the ways I’ve been learning to get better at receiving critical feedback. It’s now a blog post: How to receive feedback more better featuring delightful images like this: