Web Witch Weekly

Issue 9: Keep It Simple

August 11, 2023

Welcome to the end of another week. I’ve found myself rather busy trying to get a routine in place to balance the work I have coming in with lots of personal admin. I was ill at the start of the week and took it easy and then bounced back rather quickly. I’m looking forward to a barre class this weekend and hopefully a return of the sunshine.

Keep It Simple

I’ve been thinking about simplicity lately.

I love the puzzle shrines in Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. I like that it feels like I’m using a different part of my brain and I actually am disappointed when I come across a shrine that isn’t a puzzle. I was reading a reddit thread about something Zelda related and came across a comment that said something along the lines of “the shrines are designed so that small children can figure them out, stop overcomplicating things.”

Do we as adults make things needlessly complicated? I think we do. Especially in our careers and in companies. Teams and hierarchy structures and who makes the decisions can become a muddle, and even if you’ve built a culture of accepting failure as okay, we’re still human and are afraid of failure. We often work hard to avoid failure, but this can make things more complicated unintentionally. We might even trick ourselves into thinking that complexity is always needed, instead of realizing that simplicity could teach us important lessons through hands-on experience.

And so I find myself in a video game, needlessly complicating the solution because it couldn’t be that simple, could it? A friend shared a clip from his wife’s Zelda stream of attempting to solve a shrine puzzle and it all went wrong. Suddenly I find myself letting go of the notion of how something should be solved and letting it be simple.

I’ve been listening to this song by Mt. Wolf with spoken word over a very mellow and moody instrumental (I personally love tracks like this).

“It's just we get so messy, it's not that we are doing lots of wrong things / Our mind is so messy / We don't keep it simple / And we end up making the life that we are living, so in-ordinarily complicated / Completely unnecessarily, and it's such a shame to end up feeling, in a real muddle / When actually, you ought to be having the time of your lives”

Will everything be simple? Probably not, and I’m certainly not advocating to avoid challenging yourself but to let go and lean in.

Career Things

My work contract with Rapid officially ended on July 31st, finally ending that chapter of my career and life. I’ve written a few thoughts about the experience and shared what’s next over on the blog.

I’m doing design and product consulting work, If you’re in need of design work, a design and/or UX audit of your website, or product strategy work feel free to get in touch. I’m booking out beyond September at this time.

My book is officially in print and is 45% through August 18th with the code pbstimac! Grab a copy today!

On the Web

“What is a PWA?” - Justin Willis gives us a nice intro to Progressive Web Apps. A good refresher if you’ve forgotten what the benefits are.

“Introducing perfwork” - Tim Kadlec has launched a job board for web performance engineering roles. It’s even got an RSS feed (hooray!).

“Frosted glass depth-based blur in CSS” - Really cool CSS demo

”Igalia Mid-season Rankings” - Brian Kardell goes over Igalias contributions to the web platform.

“Do we need WCAG 3 (now)?” - Eric Eggert gives some thoughts on WCAG 3 as the next standard and what’s happening in that space.

Books of Note & Music

I am usually reading multiple books at once because what I want to read changes day-to-day unless I’m really hooked in a good fantasy novel.

Currently Reading:

Finished Reading:

Dragonfly in Amber (Outlander Book 2) (A re-read)

Music:

I’ve been revisiting old playlists and listening to lots of Depeche Mode and Lord Huron.

Emotional Tracks playlist, for when you want to lean into feeling moody. I used to take my pup on walks around Redmond, WA and listen to this in the winter.
Essential Depeche Mode playlist
Strange Trails album by Lord Huron

Cheers and have a great weekend,

The Web Witch (Stephanie)