It is time to be more vocal about the profession’s pain points and shed light on the testing craft. In the fast-moving IT world, it is vital not to lose your compass when drifting into the ocean of opportunities. The hype around automation and related tools sometimes pushes us to rethink the role of testers in digital product development. The biases around testing form the perception of testing professionals in tech companies which is sometimes reduced to “regression tests maintainer” or “bug detector”. The same stereotypes likely affect the self-perception of testers and create the feeli ..read more

Five things vibe coders should know (from a software engineer) Tips to keep you and your users safe with actionable security improvements. Credit: Tianyi Ma A few days ago I saw this tweet: https://medium.com/media/86a5b185da27ea32a87d463025e67920/href Followed by this one: https://medium.com/media/ebcc127cb263bdd3ea655c2bfa546866/href And it underlines a bit of a problem with vibe coding; people are unaware that the code they’re generating and the apps they’re deploying might be leaving them open to vulnerabilities. That’s a problem not only they need to resolve fast, but the t ..read more

In effect by mid-2025. The European Accessibility Act. Image: https://wpvip.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2023/10/European-Accessibility-Act-2025-featured-blog-image.png Depending on your field of work as a UX designer, you may have come across accessibility requirements from time to time. These requirements dictate how digital products must comply with accessibility standards, to make the product more accessible to all users, including users with disabilities. In the EU, a significant change is coming. From mid-2025, all private companies must comply with a new set of accessibility requireme ..read more

How open-source community champion Gints Zilbalodis out-rendered Big Animation. This year at USA’s Academy Awards, while many expected either Inside Out 2 or The Wild Robot to win, the award for best animated feature went to Gints Zilbalodis’ Flow. So, it was the Latvian artist (who conjured an animated feature film out of a fractional budget of roughly 3.5 million euros) who carried away the golden statuette — the charming story of a cat and its friends navigating a world of apocalyptic flooding. In contrast, Inside Out 2 cost $200 million, while The Wild Robot had a budget of $78 million. W ..read more

Here’s when it works (and when it doesn’t) Thank you to Erin Weigel (Author and Senior Design Manager @ Deliveroo), Angèle Lenglemetz (Product @ Cleo), Daphne Tideman (Author and D2C Growth Consultant), Joseph Fitzgibbon (Founder @ Growth & Company, former Head of Growth @ Graze and ClickMechanic), and Octave Auger (VP Marketing @ Faria Education Group) for contributing to this 🙏 I hear this all the time from founders: “Let’s not re-invent the wheel” “What do the best in class do?” “It works for them, it’ll work for us. Right?” Not necessarily. In reality, 9 out ..read more

The ability to identify and frame problems is your most valuable asset. Engineering won’t be the most valuable tech skill for much longer. As no-code app building becomes commonplace, and vibe coding gets better, the important question changes from “how do we build this” to “what should we build”? Guess who’s great at figuring out what to build? Why, your friendly neighborhood designer, of course! Design’s true superpower is identifying problems people will pay to solve. Developers and PMs can also do that, but design is uniquely positioned to translate those ethereal ideas ..read more

Experimentation is a critical part of growing as a designer Photo by Yaroslav Shuraev: https://www.pexels.com/photo/pensive-female-botanist-doing-an-observation-8512667/ “Seems like you’re struggling a little bit with this one.” My project manager responded after more design iterations failed to hit the mark. The truth is, I wasn’t moving as fast as I could have with this project. I was experimenting with a new AI tool. In today’s design market, with tight budgets and even tighter timelines, it may seem like all you can do is keep your head down and keep working. Even as ne ..read more

A comic illustration of Luke Skywalker facing Darth Vader and the Emperor within the Deathstar’s throne room. Darth Vader and the Emperor have butts for heads, and Luke’s is transforming back and forth between a butthead and a human face. Credit: Me. Let’s talk about working with difficult people, or as I like to call them, “big ‘ol buttheads” (or “B’OBs,” TM pending). We’re surrounded by them; people who can’t see the bigger picture. They refuse to move towards the greater good. They don’t have vision. They’re reactive, shortsighted, and maybe a little incompetent? Instead of building a ..read more

My Korean language journey In 2023, coming out of the doldrums of the pandemic, I was rediscovering my love for type design. At the beginning of that year I dusted off an old type project, Peasy, and worked diligently to get it ready for release. I spent a lot of nights and weekends, and even though the later stages of “finishing” a font can be tedious, it was a great learning process. Later that year, my dad, feeling lonely since my mom passed in 2022, said he might want to move to Korea to live in a Silvertown. This is the name they give to pricey senior apartments where they prov ..read more

More and more, we are being pulled away from truly important issues to satisfy executives obsessed with superficial innovation. Generative Art. 240716a by takaw. OpenProcessing, 16 de julho de 2024 Yes, we’re being pulled away — from essential topics like accessibility, which are often overshadowed by technological distractions. A 2024 study by WebAIM analyzed the top 1 million homepages worldwide and found that 96.3% had detectable accessibility issues, with an average of 56 errors per page — highlighting how far digital accessibility still is from being a priority. A friend working on a ..read more