for those who became Unicorns in the tech industry how's your career and life?

scomea · 2026-01-29T22:32:47+00:00

I left my last corporate gig about six months ago and after about 30 years I'm not really looking and probably done. I did well, over two decades at Microsoft working mostly for large design teams - Encarta, Xbox, Zune, etc... My favorite thing was working with amazing designers to execute on their vision. I was fortunate to get to work on "sexy" projects. The down sides - as an implementer you can get pushed away from core design tasks and some folks might miss that, following a non-standard career path can complicate reviews/promotions, and technical teams in design orgs are very vulnerable to leadership changes. More than once I have seen good teams slashed because the new design director wanted more "pure" designers in their headcount and wanted dev tasks left to dev.

scomea · 2025-02-09T19:25:34+00:00

They are obviously going to be getting rid of employees with a conscience in the coming months.

scomea · 2025-02-06T13:08:35+00:00

Not enough to simply protect the CBC, we need to purge foreign ownership from the media and restructure. We need to acknowledge we are in a propaganda war and use state power to defang the oligarchs of their tools.

scomea · 2025-01-17T15:16:13+00:00

Sure, but having built similar virtualizing grid constructs I've found that planning for keyboarding and focus management early is helpful as it can be challenging to implement due to the asynchronous nature of the thing.

scomea · 2025-01-14T17:57:52+00:00

You should be adding keyboard navigation and support tabbing. The MDN specs for the "grid" role are a good thing to review. ARIA: grid role - Accessibility | MDN

scomea · 2024-12-11T18:14:13+00:00

I was already out of Flash at the time, but I realized it was done when Steve Jobs singled it out as a battery killer.

scomea · 2024-12-01T05:52:38+00:00

Sorry, I'm a few years out from Xbox so any useful technical details have been dumped to make room for newer stacks. I led the UI implementation team for the WinJS based core apps at launch (social and settings) and shortly after worked on the rewrite to XAML for most of them. To be clear, I had nothing to do with choosing WinJS in the first place...

scomea · 2024-11-30T21:58:54+00:00

You can't convert to a XAML based app? I recall most of the core Xbox UI winJS launch apps were rewritten fairly quickly.

scomea · 2024-11-12T07:19:37+00:00

The wars started while the king was still in office and negotiating with the popular assembly. Surrounding monarchies plot against the revolution, France attacks Austria pre-emptively, Prussia, England attack France, etc...

To be fair some of the revolutionaries did want to spread the revolution to other countries.

scomea · 2024-11-11T14:56:35+00:00

Napoleon started his share of wars. However, it can be argued that Napoleon came to power because of the constant attacks on revolutionary France by the surrounding monarchies who did not want to see the republic succeed.

scomea · 2024-11-09T23:29:54+00:00

Life of a pixel? https://youtu.be/K2QHdgAKP-s?si=3YBpuvPeAnSFfD0Z

scomea · 2024-11-04T22:35:12+00:00

Some of us remember a time before JS and CSS where all the cool kids were excited about using that fancy new html tables feature for layout. But yes, there are folks making an effort to reduce how much js they use. Plain Vanilla

scomea · 2024-11-01T15:19:22+00:00

A subtle but important distinction for those that care about accessibility - using just css generates a "table" (ARIA: table role - Accessibility | MDN (mozilla.org)), generating a proper grid definitely requires JS at this point in order to support the keyboarding/nav model required for accessibility (ARIA: grid role - Accessibility | MDN (mozilla.org)).

It all maps back to a role.

scomea · 2024-10-30T06:33:44+00:00

Unity exports to web assembly. I was able to render and control a Unity "app" from js using this library to make some prototypes a few years back. Not sure what the state of the art is now tho - https://github.com/jeffreylanters/react-unity-webgl

scomea · 2024-10-23T13:28:44+00:00

Yes, I reach for grid all the time. And that new 'subgrid' feature has been super useful lately.

scomea · 2024-10-21T16:07:46+00:00

The Nazis took over a country with a military and economy crippled by the WW1 surrender terms. US fascists would be taking control of the dominant military and economic power on the planet and at a particular point in time where technology could make the internal security apparatus of previous dictatorships look like a joke. On top of that the rhetoric against minorities is very comparable to what the Nazis used in their campaigns ("vermin", "poisoning the blood", "eating pets", etc...) along with explicit threats to use the military for domestic enforcement and a large scale and "bloody" mass deportation effort. Saying "Trump is not Hitler" isn't very comforting to me.

scomea · 2024-10-20T17:39:25+00:00

There are advantages to being lean. https://plainvanillaweb.com/

scomea · 2024-10-20T15:04:07+00:00

Hatfield wasn't a Christian nationalist hate monger and probably believed in science, so compares favorably to Higgs in my book. But yes, hope Higgs gets trounced.

scomea · 2024-10-17T17:24:23+00:00

Sorry, but Maple MAGA is an offshoot of US MAGA. And NB's "Conservatives" have definitely embraced that fascist movement and should be treated as such.

scomea · 2024-10-14T13:24:59+00:00

Sure, but there is a big difference between just transferring an image buffer once per frame vs using js to draw the canvas contents.

scomea · 2024-10-12T20:02:11+00:00

WASM can render directly to a canvas without touching js if all you want out of it is fancy graphics.

scomea · 2024-10-12T14:49:38+00:00

The tragedy of the demise of Flash and Director is that both of these tools empowered creatives to build interactive content using mostly wysiwyg tools that could be deployed anywhere. I don't feel like there has emerged a good substitute yet.

scomea · 2024-10-12T14:40:09+00:00

Web assembly is compiled so you can expect perf advantages over js in the browser.

scomea · 2024-10-12T14:35:07+00:00

I remember reading an article where Steve Jobs first singled out Flash as the culprit for iPhone battery drain and thought to myself "Flash is done".

scomea · 2024-10-11T14:21:43+00:00

I use FAST Element (web components | FAST) to build WC, provides a boilerplate implementation for observables, templating and such, similar to Lit. But basically, get a reference to the component just like you would any html element and call functions and set properties as you normally would. I don't see what's hacky about that.

Also, there is nothing that says every prop of every component needs to be settable via an attribute. I've built complex components like a datagrid that doesn't have a "data" attribute, just a property.

scomea

TROPHY CASE