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Full Stack Creator - 007

Welcome to the seventh edition of Full Stack Creator. As always, thank you for reading, sharing and caring. On to it...

As a lot of you know by now, I am a huge productivity advocate. I am always trying to find a way to make something smoother, more streamlined, and as automated as possible. If you have tuned-in to previous editions of this letter, you also know I am a person that is constantly learning, evolving, and pushing the boundaries of my skill set. This brings me to my latest venture, finding a place to read/watch, store, and reference all of the information I am absorbing. It needs to be easily referenced from any device, at almost any time.

I have been a huge advocate for read later solutions. I have been using Pocket for a very long time, probably exceeding a decade. The read later experience of Pocket has been great, even with the free tier. The place where I started to feel limited was being able to highlight and search with ease. So instead of just signing up for the paid account, I sought out to find or make a solution.

That solution first started out with Safari’s read later feature. Yes, I use Safari. That was simple, but didn’t come close to solving the problem. It even lost to Pocket, due to no reading position syncing. Then I got creative, using things like iBooks and Notability to copy PDF versions of articles and mark them up with Apple Pencil. That looked pretty, and added a nice tactility to the process, but didn’t solve search or reading position. I then built out a complex solution in Notion. If you know me, you know I love Notion. This solution was pretty damn good, but Notion’s support on iPad is lackluster and broke down fast when throwing it through my tests. Long story short, I moved back to Pocket. Deciding to drop the money on the yearly subscription, I have the features that I needed. Is it a perfect solution? No. Might there be a better solution out there? Maybe, but I haven’t found one for my needs – Maybe I’ll build one. 🤔

“Siri, add make kick ass read later solution to my ideas list!“

Do you have a solution that you use? I would love to know yours, if you would like to share.

So, what have I been trying to learn, you ask?

I have been trying to learn more around accessibility. More-so, how it relates to product design. Focusing on each, equally important topic, I am falling down the rabbit hole. It is so interesting and so challenging. I have always been interested and semi-focused on accessibility, but recently I am locked on. I see all of the needs, not only for people with permanent disabilities or limitations, but even the people with temporary ones. I think I pushed 20 articles to Pocket from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) just this week. It is a lot to absorb, but I am taking it in slowly. Rereading articles has helped drill in the ideas and concepts. I plan on focusing heavily on this for the rest of my design career. Working for companies that don’t second guess their actions and how those actions affect the user, has fueled me to be an agent of accessibility.

I will absolutely keep you in the loop regarding this, but I have to say it is going well so far. I am directing my design team to adjust our design system to account for color blindness, specifically in relation to button states. This is a small step, but a step that will get my design team thinking more about this. I hope to spread this passion for helping all kinds of users, by making our apps accessible to everyone.

This is the blooper shot of me capturing the photo for this post… That’s Drifter, my cat child.

Also, it has been nearly five months of social distancing and remote working. As of the day this is scheduled to deliver to you, it has been 147 days. That’s nearly half a year!

This tangent brings me to the point of...

How’s remote work going? Do you love it or straight up hate it? Are you able to work remotely? I’d love to know more.

Would you like an installment of this letter dedicated to remote work? What would you like to see/read?

If you want to put a toe into the rabbit hole of accessibility I have gone down, here is an amazing read for you.

Find this gem in the Stark weekly newsletter, written by Noah Glushien.

https://alistapart.com/article/a-designers-life-with-color-vision-deficiency/

I’ve heard my fair share of passive-aggressive comments about my career choice. Also about my passion for art and design. Because how could I possibly be a designer if I can’t see colors?

He goes into how it is to be a colorblind front end developer and designer. He does it while teaching a ton, in a very digestible manner. You won’t regret the read!

I also entered a Dribbble contest a few weeks back. Didn’t win, but it was a fun challenge!

Check it out here:

https://dribbble.com/shots/13987177-CommunityCast

Have a creative couple of weeks!