Jonathan Snook's Blog, page 6

Quicker Thoughts on Chips

I think Canadians and Americans might view chips differently. Reading Dave Rupert’s thoughts on chips, I realized that I classify chips differently—namely by its primary ingredient.

The Potato Chip

If you ask me for a bag of chips, I will instantly think potato chips. That’s the default. And when it comes to any chip aisle in Canada, it’ll be filled with potato chips of all flavours and brands.

Canadians are known for their ketchup and dill pickle chips which—thankfully—are easier to find in the States. Can’t forget the amazing All Dressed. How about Roast Chicken? Or Cheddar Jalapeño? Or Magic Masala? Or Chicken and Tomato?

Want to go Ruffles? Sweet and Spicy is gat damn amazing. Sour Cream n Bacon. Au Gratin.

There’s also the regular Ruffles which are fine on their own but best paired with a dip like dill pickle, french onion, or sour cream and onion.

Seriously, so many flavours. And that’s only Lay’s and Ruffles. Add in Miss Vickies and Old Dutch and all the other brands and it’s potato chip heaven. I’ll even give a hoser shoutout to Hostess Hickory Sticks.

It’s easy to forget that other types of chips exist.

The Corn Chip‌

Corn chips aren’t as popular in Canada as they are in the States. There are a couple brands, and I usually go for Tostitos’ restaurant style or hint of lime. The corn chip is really a vehicle for salsa.

There’s Doritos. I agree with Dave in that they need to have a lot of flavour. Cool Ranch are a classic. (Although, oddly, I haven’t had any in 30 years. I wonder if they still taste as good as I remember?)

Sun Chips, which are corn based, are decent but not amazing. It’s like whole wheat or rye bread. Interesting from time to time but it’s not white bread. I ain’t making a grilled cheese sandwich with a loaf of whole wheat.

I think the superiority of the potato chip over the corn chip is clear.

The Not Chip Chips

Where I think Dave’s analysis surprises me is the inclusion of things that, to me, aren’t chips. Cheetos and pretzels fall into the same category as popcorn. It’s like nuts or jujubes or chocolate. Clearly not chips. They’re snacks, but not chips. Even Pringles, while made of potatoes and in the shape of a chip, I find questionable in calling them chips.

Favourite

Miss Vickie’s original are my current go-to, followed by Lay’s Bar-B-Q (which taste different than American barbecue chips, being sweeter and less smoky) and Lay’s Dill Pickle.

Hooboy, I’m getting hungry.

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New Year, Old Me

We have crossed over a collectively agreed upon arbitrary date line once again and as such we vow to become better people than the year before. Two weeks in, I’ve already failed and thus will throw the entire year out the window and succumb to debauchery and other toxic behaviours.

Okay, not really.

I’ve done the resolutions thing. I’ve tried the theme word. They get written down at the beginning of the year and never referred to ever again. The end of the year comes around and as I look back, I see that the year looked nothing like what I thought it might at the beginning of the year—sometimes in a good way, sometimes in a bad way. Three hundred and sixty-five days is a long time. Like a river, it’ll ebb and flow and reshapes itself over time. I find it very difficult to sum up an entire year in such an absolutist way, beforehand or afterwards.

Dealing with life in small measures, whether measured in days, or even hours, feels more manageable. I started doing a daily reminder—a mantra, if you will—on my phone for when I wake up that helps me set my expectations for myself.

I’ll check in with myself throughout the day and be able to say whether or not I met the expectations I set for myself.

And yet, even then, it’s easy to fall into binary thinking. “Whoops, I made a mistake. I guess the whole day is a failure.” When in reality, I mostly succeeded.

And thus, in looking over 2023, it could be easy for me to see the terrible events and paint the entire year with that brush.

I had memorable trips with my boys. I completed my bucket list adventure. I hung out with friends around the world. I made progress in and out of therapy. I even started getting excited about developing again.

I’d rather let those things overshadow my outbursts and heartbreaks.

As I look to the year ahead and think of the potential milestones, the word that seems to come up the most is “progess”. Progress in my emotional regulation. Progress in my own healing. Progress in finding joy in my work and hobbies. Progress in developing happy and healthy relationships.

Which, looks like last year. Progress isn’t binary. It isn’t linear. It’s a squiggly line in time. One might even say it’s a big ball of wibbly wobbly, timey wimey stuff.†

This year, like the ones before it, will undoubtedly be a tapestry of joy and sadness, adventure and stillness, love and loneliness, difficult to summarize into a single word.

† I have not watched Doctor Who since the days of Tom Baker, so unsure whether that reference was appropriate or not. Also, I still want a scarf like that.

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Dream with me

It can be fun to buy a lottery ticket and dream of what you might do with the winnings. Maybe imagine a huge mansion with a ten car garage out in the suburbs? How about a yacht sitting in the Monaco harbour? Or a thousand acre property in the middle of nowhere where you invite all your friends to live on a commune with you?

Do you ever think about what it would be like in those moments after reading out the numbers and realizing that you’re the winner? You don’t have the end money yet. No house. No yacht. No land. There’s everything you need to do in between.

Perhaps I’d call up a lawyer. Should I or can I claim the funds anonymously? There’s getting the funds into the bank. I wonder what the look on the teller’s face would look like. Do I carry that oversized cheque into the bank? Or maybe they just wire it in. That’s more likely. Then I’d be hitting refresh on my banking page until I saw the funds. Do I tell people? Who should I tell? Who can I trust? Am I splitting the money and if so, what’s it going to be like to tell everybody else in the group? Should I just call them or make it an event?

Sure, this is all pretend but I do have fun imagining all of the nitty gritty details.

Skip to the End

I’ve always felt it important to put together a plan to figure out how I’m going to get to the end result. It’s great to dream wistfully about what things will be like way down the line but I also need to dream about all of the steps in between. If you fail to plan, you plan to fail. Or something like that.

If I’m writing a book, I’ll start with an outline. I might not stick with the outline. I might have to change some things along the way. The outline gives me some hooks to hang the meat of the actual work onto.

In product development, there’s always that urge to envision what things will look like at “the end” and build towards that. But the end is some grand vision that literally takes years to get to. Is there some early checkpoint—or, dare I say, minimum viable product—that can be built that is something usable?

I started conceptualizing a new app with a few friends and felt myself shying away from the grand product vision and instead looking at something more barebones. They almost seemed like two different apps but then it clicked how I could see one transition into the grander vision. I could envision the steps along the way.

It’s easier for me to buy into something and get excited for it when I can understand the path to be taken.

I’m like that when it comes to coding, too. I don’t like using frameworks or libraries that I can’t conceptualize. (I mean, I’ll use them because I have to but there is an uncomfortable unease within me when I do.) When I first learned CakePHP, I read through the source code to understand what was happening. I’ve been wanting to do the same with 11ty because I feel like there’s more I could take advantage of if I had that understanding.

But Here We Are

Perhaps this is more deeply tying into a fear of the unknown. It’s not a crippling fear but definitely an anxiety that spurs me to prepare myself. Which, I guess, is the point and ties into my last post about the details. In that post, it was about the end result I want. What does the experience look like? In this post, it’s about how I get there. What do I need to do to achieve the experience?

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Caught on a Bur

Every now and then I am struck by how the things I initially thought unimportant and thus not worthy of paying attention to are the things that inevitably bother me to no end.

I bought a new place and when it came to the laundry room, I figured I wouldn’t care. Here’s a room that most people won’t see and that I’ll barely spend any time in. Washers and dryers are all the same, right? They wash and they dry. And perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s the room the gives me the least amount of joy. Not because it is laundry but because it is a dull room that doesn’t serve my needs. The dryer supplied by the builder was ineffective at drying my clothes. There are no shelves for detergent or dryer sheets; Everything just sits on the floor. The walls and floor are grey.

I should’ve paid attention to the details. But as they say, ”perfection is the enemy of done” and is something that I run into with my web projects, too.

With many of my personal projects, I hit a point where I just want it out in the world, even though I know there are parts of it I still want to adjust or change or build. This design element isn’t that important. That feature isn’t needed. Of course, those are the parts that bother me to no end every time I open the site.

On my Photos site, I launched with what I needed. I didn’t specify height and widths on photos because they are output programatically and I didn’t feel like dealing with how to read those out. As a result, I’m annoyed every time I load the site and see the photos popcorn themselves into the page.

So while I consider my apartment “done” (like I consider my photo site “done”), I still have more work to do—little tweaks to polish off the burs that snag my attention.

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External isn’t Internal

Stupid title, I know. I just wanted to say that when a person or company blogs about an idea or approach or concept, you might think—naturally so—that they’re telling you about something that they’ve personally implemented and have seen great success with.

In reality, we share ideas for many reasons. Sometimes we just want the idea to exist in the world. Sometimes we want to document something for posterity. Sometimes we want to talk about our successes and never our failures.

I was reminded of this while digging through my archives and coming across where I made reference to the Spotify organizational model. And while we never followed their model while I was at Shopify, we definitely liked the “guild” aspect of the model. And yet, we’re told that Spotify doesn’t use the Spotify model.

Which reminds me of when I first started working at Shopify and a bunch of the team got to learn that I rarely used rem units in my projects, despite having been one of the earliest people to talk about it.

Suffice it to say, what we present to the world is often a very different picture than what the reality is behind the scenes.

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Pruning

As I’ve been going through my projects, I’ve been needing to ask myself the question of what to get rid of.

When I rebuilt the SMACSS site, I was able to simplify a lot but also cleared out a bunch of stuff I no longer needed, such as workshop reference materials for workshops that were from six years ago.

For this site, I’ve been wanting to consolidate some content. Namely, I’ve linked to Flickr for a number of my photos. Trying to find every reference to Flickr, grab each image, upload it to my own server, and update the reference is… well, time consuming and tedious. In reality, these are images being linked from sometimes decade-old content that really isn’t relevant anymore.

Which leads me into the question of pruning old content, in general. App reviews for defunct applications and code examples for outdated frameworks feel like content that could disappear and no-one would be the wiser. And yet, there is still some charm to occasionally dig through the archives like an old photo album, reminiscing about how things used to be.

I’ve also long been a proponent of maintaining URLs. Content that I wrote twenty years ago still has the same URL to this day!

Like that old photo album, it’s time to pack away a few things into a box and tuck it away into storage. For this web site, that’ll mean backing up what I have, tossing it onto a hard drive somewhere, and—like a closing scene to an Indiana Jones movie—carted off into some storage facility.

Then I won’t feel bad about cutting off the dead branches of this site, giving room for new growth.

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Burnout

I was reading Dan Mall’s blog post on Income Transparency a while back and my attention was caught by a particular section on burnout.

In his post, he quotes Psychologist Herbert Freudenberger, who coined the term “burnout” in 1975 and defined it as:

Emotional exhaustion: the fatigue that comes from caring too much, for too long
Depersonalization: the depletion of empathy, caring, and compassion
Decreased sense of accomplishment: an unconquerable sense of futility or feeling that nothing you do makes any difference.

It reminded me of a period near the end of my time with Shopify in which I experienced burnout. To be fair, that burnout wasn’t entirely Shopify’s fault but rather spread over multiple issues for which I cared about for too much for too long in both my personal and professional life. That fatigue led to a depletion of empathy and fuelled anger that definitely spilled into work. I was and still am embarrassed by my behaviour.

To add onto that was definitely the decreased sense of accomplishment. I felt like I was solving the same problems over and over again. Every app is just feeds, index, and detail views. Title bar at the top. Collapsible navigation on the left. Detail views with main content and sidebar columns. Let’s throw in some modals. And all the buttons. Most front-end work doesn’t feel like it’s pushing any boundaries and probably importantly, that’s a good thing. Does an app need to be conceptual art? Absolutely not. People want predictability.

What could be important for managers (and employees alike) to recognize is that burnout might not come from a single source: work. It can be a culmination of many things and while work might seem like the culprit, it’s just the straw that broke the camel’s back. For me, this became more evident as I went from job to job and still felt myself dealing with the symptoms of burnout. It’s only been through dealing with my personal shit—yay therapy and self reflection—have I been able to spark my creativity and be productive again.

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Still No CSS Reset

It was interesting to read Chris Coyier’s recent post about Andy Bell’s recent post. It made me think of my personal projects and remembering that I didn’t use a reset for any of them.

Well, sort of.

The only thing that I consistently have across all of my projects is body { margin:0; }. I say sort of because this doesn’t stand alone as part of a “reset”—it sits with all of the other body declarations.

I couldn’t remember if I had written anything on CSS resets before and sure enough, back in 2008, I wrote about the rise of CSS resets and why I chose not to use one. Here we are 15 years later and my opinion really hasn’t changed. Adding the styles when I need them has helped keep my files smaller and easier to inspect.

To expand on that last point, one of my frustrations with using the browser inspector tools over the years has been seeing CSS resets add a lot of unnecessary clutter, showing struck-out property after struck-out property while I try to figure out what is being applied and from where.

So, yeah… still no CSS reset for me.

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Imaginary Conversations

One of the things that has helped my mental health is recognizing all of the imaginary conversations that I have. Full blown arguments that get me angry and frustrated and at the end of the day, the only person involved in those conversations is me.

Each time I notice that I’m doing this to myself, I start to say in a sing-song way, “you’re having an imaginary conversation!” Best to put a bit of cheer into it! Then I ask myself if I’m replaying past conversations or preparing for a future conversation?

If I am replaying a past conversation then I can stop. I’ve already had the conversation and no amount of replaying it is going to change the outcome. What’s done is done. I recognize that I’m trying to process what happened and play “what if” scenarios to change an outcome that I have no control over. I can’t change anything that got me to where I am now. And as much as I wish many things didn’t happen, everything feeds into present me. If those things didn’t happen, where would I be now? Worse? Better? Who knows.

If I’m preparing for a future conversation then it’s a question of the likelihood of that future conversation. Sometimes it seems handy to have talking points ready for social issues for the next gathering I might find myself at. But replaying those conversations in my head repeatedly doesn’t help. If I’m about to make a phone call to the government then maybe a little bit of prep is good. Do I have all the information handy that they’re likely to ask for? Good.

The fact, for me, is that most of the imaginary conversations I have had have and will never have come to be and all I’m doing is getting myself upset or angry over nothing.

If there’s an issue I have with someone that needs a discussion, then I need to have an actual conversation.

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Recently Read

I don’t consider myself an avid reader. Sometimes I go months without reading a book. I have been in a season of reading, engaging my brain in a different way. As I get back into writing more, it’s a delight to read those who write well. (And perhaps frustrating to come across a book that isn’t written well.)

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

The last handful of books I’ve read must’ve been off of a list somewhere because I can’t remember how I stumbled across them. On Earth by Ocean Vuong was a captivating story of a man growing up in America dealing with his Korean identity and his gay identity. Ocean Vuong is a poet and at times in the book, his writing slips into poetic prose in a way that feels ephemeral and touching.

A Ghost in the Throat

This book is a work of autofiction in which she researches a poet from the 1700s while dealing with her own life as a mother in the present. The perspective was fascinating in a way that made me feel like I was in her head, hearing her thoughts. I didn’t find the story as compelling and as such, it took me months to get around to finishing it.

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow

This book was at the top of Amazon’s books for 2022 and figured I’d give it a go. I was surprised to discover that it was about two childhood friends who end up starting a video game company. In some ways, it reminded me of the nostalgia of Ready Player One, but with better writing and less nostalgia, if that makes sense. The book is really about relationships spanning over the course of decades and the game references brought back good memories without feeling like it was pandering in a way that Ready Player One often did. Overall, I enjoyed the story and definitely felt myself compelled to finish the book once I hit the pivot midway through it.

Sea of Tranquility

Also came across this on Amazon’s book list and was surprised to find Canada featured so prominently in the first chapter. The book is an interesting story at time travel that is short enough and delightful enough to make the book an enjoyable quick read. With a story that reaches a few hundred years into the future, it would’ve been easy for it to lean on clichés but I think Sea of Tranquility does a great job of painting a realistic environment.

No One is Talking About This

I debated mentioning this as I haven’t and will not be finishing this book. It felt like I’m reading someone’s Twitter feed and not in a good way.

Next?

I’ll likely hit up a list or two to see if a book stands out. Or maybe it’ll be my movie era and I’ll spend the next month binging on movies.

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