It's wild how you can be a company like Meta and have your Facebook content look like shitty embedded DoubleClick ads.

Job I'm very qualified for: "We've decided to not move forward."

Job I'm only marginally qualified for but not really: "Let's schedule a time to talk!"

Remember needing to have fonts opened on your Mac in order for them to work? Yeah...

Entries on a resume shouldn't be more than a few bullets, but somehow every job description is longer than a CVS receipt.

It's wild how many people confuse UX Design with Full Stack Engineer.

They should just use AI to write a coherent job title and description.

Tutorial: You could always just use JavaScript, but I'm going to use this third-party custom widget that only exists in GitHub and I won't link it below in the description despite saying that I would.

Just use the thing that's available to everyone.

Oh nice - got a request for an interview.

They want to know if I can relocate, because I completely missed that the role was hybrid in a state 12 hours away.

Well, at least I got past an ATS, so that's nice.

Every time I do something in Illustrator or Photoshop, I imagine there is someone wagging their finger at me on TikTok.

In hindsight, I knew that this was when I should have been actively interviewing elsewhere.

If only there were elsewheres to interview with.

Leadership: NO MORE DEFECTS!

Also leadership: Move fast, break things! NOW NOW NOW!

I forgot about all of those darn LCK files that used to be a thing.

Job description: senior level unicorn

Job salary range: intern level from 20 years ago.

Seriously. Good luck to you PadSplit.

How people don't blow out their mics with hard S and plosives is beyond me. How do you do it? Like - using crappy iphone microphones, too. How?!?

People rely on me for quite a few things. I'm always there to help, to talk, to guide, to assist.

I can only do so much, and only have enough energy for some things right now. In fact, I'm the one who needs some assistance at the moment.

How do you just not?

As far as I understand it, resumes today need to be the size of an index card.

I now officially know enough about PDF tagging to know that Acrobat is just going to tag things however it wants. Forget trying to format in InDesign because you might as well be trying to change the course of the ocean.

I'm going to go ahead and give up on my dream of having an mp4 file play in the HTML 5 video tag. It only seems to want to work on a page that I'd like to remove.

I'm going to join the chorus of folks who have found the DHS Trusted Tester exam process alarmingly terrible. The language of the questions, the lack of definition of terms, and the awful "exam web pages" ensure that you never know if you're being given a completely broken site or a broken question.

The stars have aligned to delivery unto me an in-person interview in the very office building, in the very office suite, where I once worked for 12 years, with a completely different company.

Of all the office parks in the city, I can't seem to shake this one.

I'm suddenly painfully aware of something called "cloudflare".

After some years of not writing code, I managed to get a walkthrough from an ai assist.

I mean - I guess it's not ALL bad.

Is it?

Was "Southern Spear" an affectation given to Bubba's anatomy?

Just asking.

I successfully talked a developer out of overriding a UX decision that was determined through research.

It took a while, though.

The DHS Trusted Tester ANDI applet failed to find a live region in its own test page used to demonstrate that very feature.

I'm pretty sure we have QA engineers who should have been prosecuting attorneys.

The fact that a UI design or interaction can cause actual physical pain is unfortunately lost the folks chasing the latest "wow factor". Relying on users to know how to adjust their accessibility settings in order to manage through a poor experience doesn't say much for user-centered design.

People are cranky today over things that don't need the crank.

Lord help me. I want to paint a very large canvas. But I don't have room for one in my house. I'm pretty sure my wife wouldn't be into it if I hung it up. It's just an image that needs a large canvas.

Someone please buy the painting that I haven't painted yet, so that I know I can paint it.

I'm all for giving back to the next generation, especially for a youngun' who has had some hard knocks.

But still - maybe ask.

There was that one time that my ex decided that she was going to give my old skateboard to one of the kids she mentored through AmeriCorps.

Maybe ask me first?

I still have the skateboard. Bury me with it.