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:

“…If you’re the anal one in your house who’s rinsing the yogurt out of the yogurt containers before you throw ’em out, YOU ARE RIGHT. YOU ARE DOING IT RIGHT.”

Roman Mars from Episode 341 – National Sword of the podcast 99% Invisible

On my lovely-but-brisk walk to work this morning, I was listening to episode 346 of the Shop Talk Show, a great podcast about front-end Web development. The smart and delightful hosts, Chris and Dave were discussion how React has become such a dominant force in Web development.

I opened up the WordPress app on my phone. Since it was cold and I had gloves on, I tried something unusual for me. I used the voice-to-text feature to speak this snarky little post into the phone and push it up to this very site. After correcting a new misheard words and capitalization, I used my cold fingers to publish this:

I took a spin in a time machine this morning. I jumped seven years into the future and what I saw was chilling.
Everywhere I looked Web developers were working diligently to remove React as dependency from their Web projects.

Feeling pretty cool about living in a future where you can spout off snarky quips and push them to the Web, I arrived at my desk to find an email from my friend Peter asking what my post was about. Peter is a fellow Web developer, but is smart enough to be immune to tech fads–unless they have to do with geolocation.

Peter’s question made it clear that my snarky quick robot-transcribed blog post was completely lacking in context for most human beings; perhaps even most humans who read this site. So, this post is to answer Peter’s question about what I was talking about.

First, React is a “Javascript library for building user interfaces” from the developers at Facebook. It’s powerful, flexible, and fast, but like any technology, it has its drawbacks and unintended side-effects. I was reminded of how technologies rise and fall in the Web development industry and how, unless they are a fundamental part of the platform, like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, they are inevitably replaced by something better.

Ten years ago, JQuery was the cool kid in the world of front-end Web development. Now, projects celebrate ridding themselves of a dependency on JQuery.

It’s easy to imagine, as I did this morning, a not-too-distant future where React has fallen out of favor, but still lives embedded deep within the walls of many of our websites.

As a Twitter-lurker-but-not-poster, I imagine this is what it’s like to use Twitter every day.

I might start initiating conversations the way the Canada Revenue Agency does in its emails:

“Don’t respond to this, but …”

I took a spin in a time machine this morning. I jumped seven years into the future and what I saw was chilling.

Everywhere I looked Web developers were working diligently to remove React as dependency from their Web projects.

During a discussion with Kara Swisher on the Recode Decode podcast, Ezra Klein said:

“[Time] creates space where judgement can creep in.”

— Ezra Klein on the Recode Decode podcast

Ezra was speaking about the pace of the journalistic process. While he enjoys the immediacy of blogging, he has learned to value the more measured process of a larger organization, which allows room for, as he says, judgement to creep in.

This echoes a sense I have when it comes to making most healthy decisions. Even a tiny bit of time can be enough to allow my slower, smarter, self to outsmart my fast, stupid, and selfish lizard brain.

Imagine a refrigerator with a five-second delay when opening the door. I’d wait if I really wanted or needed something, but if I was just mindlessly grazing for a snack I’m not even hungry for, it might be enough to stop me.

Time can also create space for poor judgement. When something on our computers takes a few seconds too long, these extra moments can be just enough for us to trigger our “let’s check the Internet for something new” impulse.

I have a complicated relationship with Christmas music. For the most part, I don’t like it. That said, there are a few Christmas classics that I do enjoy. Over a decade ago, I even assembled an episode of my (currently hibernating) music podcast dedicated to Christmas songs.

I also see how much joy my kids get from Christmas music. They love it, and I love that they love it.

I noticed a few songs that I wouldn’t quite categorize as “Christmas music”, but that are “Christmas adjacent”, or even just “holiday adjacent”. The two that come to mind are Non-believer by Joel Plaskett, and River by Joni Mitchell.

River is pretty close to being a full-blown Christmas song. She does repeat the refrain, “Merry Christmas…”. Plaskett’s Non-believer is better example of ‘Christmas adjacent’, as it’s not about Christmas, but alludes to Christmas Eve and carols in one of the verses.

‘Christmas adjacent’ music feels particularly appropriate in December, but isn’t completely out of place during the rest of the year.

Any other good examples?

We should all be able to find as much joy in the world as Brian May of Queen does in Nuno Bettencourt’s guitar solo in Extreme’s Get the Funk Out.