Daniel R. Dafoe

Authentic. Poignant. Gutting.

An incredible talk by @ericwbailey.website at @a11yto.bsky.social today.

To value getting along with everyone is to admit it’s OK to never show up as your authentic self.

Happy Taylor Swift album release day to those that celebrate. 🥳

Me: vibing, listening to something cerebral being said on Modern Wisdom

Interrupting YouTube ad: “ERECTION PROBLEMS?”

We may not get to control the emotions that arise in each moment, but we get to choose how we interpret the moment.

- When's the last time I stood up or moved around? Should I change my environment and go for a walk while listening to this instead?
- When's the last time I hydrated? Do I need to grab some water?

Suddenly, an annoyance is turned into a pleasant reminder for myself.

How might I reframe how I think about YouTube ads? What if I treat ad spots as an opportunity? Here are a few ideas I had:

- How long have I been watching this video? Is it time to take a break?

Reframing is the most powerful tool for increasing your happiness, exercising creativity, and peace.

Scenario: I always get frustrated when a video I'm watching on YouTube is interrupted by an ad. "Harumph!" I think, as I scramble to smash the skip button.

Then I had an idea.

VoiceOver be like:

F-R-O, N-tilda-T, E, N-D.

Working on a keynote is infinite tension between inserting important content and changing the design every 5 minutes.

Do it. You’d be great.

I've become a basic bitch who drinks pumpkin spice lattes from Starbucks every morning after the gym.

They're fantastic and I love this unexpected character arc.

Source of joy: coffee shops with handwritten signs out front. Irregular baseline. Imperfect tracking.

Architect of the self.

Netflix turned my Instagram gleescrolling into doomscrolling with a single death scene from The Land Before Time in my feed to tell me it's now streaming.

Take my hate-watch, you manipulative emotion engineers.

What I love and hate about OpenAI encroaching on LinkedIn:

Love: LinkedIn will feel pressure to change. Finally.

Hate: LinkedIn will introduce more AI-driven features.

“Sisyphus”. “Happy”.

Which is the myth????????

I wonder what lo-fi playlist AI agents listen to when they’re flow state coding someone’s vibe code request. 🥸

Tearing up during a gym session is a new experience for me.

I guess that’s what happens when you unexpectedly hear Chris Williamson recite Richard Feynman’s love letter to his wife in an episode of Modern Wisdom.

My goodness does it ever punch you in the gut.

Has a recipe blogger ever actually used their own website before or nah?

Evidence: developer.x.com/en/portal/pe...

X's developer portal landing page has a body font size of 12.8px. Some text has a computed size of 8px. LOL.

Designer fashion websites must have such respect for this choice!

dancing with criticism

Slightly more at danieldafoe.com/posts/dancin....

The prerequisite to this exercise is that you're open to being wrong about things you now staunchly believe are true.

Changing your mind, whether by inspiration from someone else or your own agency, is a beautiful part of life. I'm consistently excited every time I notice it.

Taking this stance forces me to analyze the thing I'm interpreting as criticism. Is there truth to it? If so, what does that mean for me? Is this at odds with how I see myself? If yes, then I have something to work on.

A huge accelerator for my own self-growth has been to ask myself, "what if they're right?" when I'm on the receiving end of criticism.

My natural reaction is to defend and oppose it, but challenging myself to consider it as true has been a helpful—and often humbling—experience.

I'm gonna start referring to lazy loaded components as just-in-time (JIT) components.

This will do wonders for my code's confidence! If it's "lazy", it's apathetic and doesn't care if it's loaded; if it's "just in time", it's intelligent and optimizing for when it's really needed.

Tip: Hide notification badges for all of your apps.

These badges give a false sense that there’s something pressing to do. Removing them is a form of saying “no” to things that don’t matter.

Something doesn't become less useful just because it's complex or costly to implement.

I like that you bring in ROI, though. I appreciate that my original statement ignores that calculation.

business can act as a motivator for engineering teams to think through and discover alternative ways to either split work or re-architect solutions in order to better serve the needs of the business. To me, value shouldn't be dependent on complexity—it's a measure of usefulness.