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The UI fund

Google is handing out bucks for CSS-related projects, so you might as well know about it! Nicole Sullivan:

All of us who work on the web regularly benefit from the work of people who create specifications, tools, demos, tutorials, and polyfills. Many of these resources are side projects, made available and supported free of charge. They exist because someone saw a need, created something to meet it, then shared it with the rest of the ecosystem.

We want to recognize and help support this work and invest in the CSS ecosystem.

Ya know how esbuild has seriously shaken things up for the JavaScript processing world? Maybe we need a cssbuild? It would process imports and do bundling (something we generally rely on Sass for). The point would be extreme speed. Maybe it would be plugin-based and compatible with the PostCSS API so that existing PostCSS plugins would work on it. Maybe it could make sourcemaps and do modification. Maybe it would run your Sass, too, I dunno. But something to spark the CSS ecosystem like that could be cool.

Or apply for money to do extreme accessibility testing and implementation on a public design system.

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My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry

That’s a heartwrenching title from Michael Williamson. I believe it though. It’s kinda like a maximized version of the blogging phenomenon where if you work on a post for weeks it’ll flop compared to a post that’s some dumb 20-minute thought. Or how your off-handed remark to some developer at the perfect time might cause some huge pivot in what they are doing, changing the course of a project forever. For Mike, it was a 3,000 line-of-code side project that had more impact on the world than a career of work as a software developer.

I’ve tried to pick companies working on domains that seem useful: developer productivity, treating diseases, education. While my success in those jobs has been variable – in some cases, I’m proud of what I accomplished, in others I’m pretty sure my net effect was, at best, zero – I’d have a tough time saying that the cumulative impact was greater than my little side project.

Impact is fuzzy though, isn’t it? I don’t know Mike, but assuming he is a kind and helpful person, think of all the people he’s likely helped along the way. Not by just saving them minutes of toil, but helped. Helped grow, helped through hard times, helped guide to where they ought to go. Those things are immeasurable and awfully important.

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