The five best design links, every weekday

Category: Reflections

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ratfactor.com

A programmer’s loss of identity

That lost identity was "computer programmer" and it was arguably one of the biggest.

jonnyburch.com

Life after Figma is coming (and it will be glorious)

As code becomes source of truth, design tools become interfaces on code, not the other way round.

ilyabirman.net

Design is dead, it’s all evolution now

There’s no design in digital products anymore. It’s been replaced by evolution.

quinnkeast.com

What, then, are we paying for?

Software is problem ownership.

chrbutler.com

Progress without disruption

There’s nothing about progress that inherently requires disruption—except our inability to cooperate for stability.

terrygodier.com

Phantom obligation

Why RSS readers look like email clients, and what that’s doing to us.

itsnicethat.com

Faking ‘realness’ on a computer doesn’t get us anywhere new

What does “analogue” actually mean when most things are made, shared, and consumed digitally?

randsinrepose.com

Sometimes your job is to stay the hell out of the way

A take on the mythical 10x engineer, except that they aren’t a myth.

blog.vbuckenham.com

Some thoughts about tool design and AI

Asking questions and waiting for a response is not the most productive way of doing things.

blog.jim-nielsen.com

CTA hierarchy in the wild

Writing about the big beautiful mess that is making things for the world wide web.

youtube.com

The persistence of decay

A funeral for a lighthouse, a sermon in fungus, our vanishing digital media, and the arrow of time.

carlbarenbrug.com

Friction by design

What gets lost when everything is effortless?

addyosmani.com

21 lessons from 14 years at Google

Lessons learned from 14 years of engineering at Google, focusing on what truly matters beyond just writing great code.

antirez.com

Don’t fall into the anti-AI hype

It does not matter if AI companies will not be able to get their money back and the stock market will crash.

davekiss.com

Ideas are cheap, execution is cheaper

In a world where ideas are cheap and software is cheaper, what truly matters now?

shreyasdoshi.substack.com

10 ideas for 2026

Thinking is the foundation of everything we do and, for most of us that foundation has many cracks.

alearningaday.blog

Fall in love with your new reality

Sometimes our role in life isn’t to judge something—it is to figure out how to fall in love with it.

uxdesign.cc

A product manager’s 48 reflections on 2025

The year when AI stopped feeling like just a tool and started to feel more like a mirror.

thealgorithmicbridge.com

The shape of artificial intelligence

They say the shape of things only becomes legible at a distance.

linear.app

Design is more than code

Design as a search, not a pipeline. How tools carry opinions, and how those opinions shape what feels “reasonable” to attempt.