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Is shipping broken products the new normal?
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My upcoming workshop: https://smashingconf.com/workshops/workshops/ny/kevin-j-powell-css/
My video on Figma Sites: https://youtu.be/ZsFIvULxkHI
The full live stream: https://youtube.com/live/JBz68wD9dU8?feature=share
Nobody Saves the World: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1432050/Nobody_Saves_the_World/
Teja's talk from Smashing Conf last year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiZ6dwmVtYU
In this week's episode of General Musings, I discuss the frustrating trend of shipping broken products, with a focus on Figma Sites and their current shortcomings. I also dive into the topic of AI and the hype surrounding it, as well as the challenges faced in the gaming industry. Plus, I share some exciting updates about my upcoming live workshop in NYC and a major revamp of my advanced CSS courses, as well as a few recommendations if you have kids.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to 'General Musings'
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello, my friend and friends, and welcome to my podcast, General Musings. My name is Kevin, and here my podcast, I talk about whatever is front of mind for me in any given week, usually in some way that's related to front-end development, and will definitely be tangential to it at least a little bit today, though it relates in a way directly to it as well.
00:00:17
Speaker
But before we get to the actual topic of the week this week, which I'm sort of winging it ah just because I don't want it to be too similar to some other things that I've been putting out this week that you might have seen.
00:00:28
Speaker
But yeah before we do that, I do want to do a quick little bit of housekeeping just to let you know. I might have talked about this
NYC Workshop Announcement
00:00:34
Speaker
last week. I haven't been posting about it in places and other stuff, though, but I'm doing a live in-person workshop in New York City on June 24th,
00:00:42
Speaker
with the smashing people. I think I did talk about this last week, so I'll keep it short. But if you're interested in it, you I'll put a link in the description where you can grab a ticket for that. I think it's me a lot of fun. It's called the new CSS toolkit, and we're going to be talking about new CSS stuff where the majority of it is either usable now or usable as a progressive enhancement.
00:01:02
Speaker
I'm going to be trying my best to focus on things that are well supported and then ah supplement that with things that are good progressive enhancements. And then there'll be the little bit of cutting edge stuff that you can look forward to using in the future. But a very big part of it is sort of a modern take on writing CSS today that you can bring to your work and actually use. I don't want it to be this thing where it's all just based on like the future things, though those are always fun to play with. So there'll be some things in there, very hands on workshop, lots of exercises, things that we'll be doing together. And yeah, I'm really looking forward to it because I haven't taught in person in quite a while.
00:01:37
Speaker
So I think that'd be a lot of fun June 24th if you were interested in
Courses Update
00:01:42
Speaker
New York City. The other two things I want to mention really quickly is I am doing an update of my course beyond CSS, which is my most advanced course. So just in case you're looking at sort of advanced CSS stuff, you you understand CSS, you're happy with it. You want to get into more about organization, project management, building reusable project and getting a starter template going and it goes way beyond that. It was into like design systems and theming.
00:02:09
Speaker
And if you go into the higher tiers of it, we get into creating an Astro project and other stuff and scope styles and all of those things. So yeah, I fixed up modules one through three and I'm currently going through module four and we'll be going through module five with some fixes and updates to that course.
00:02:25
Speaker
And once all of that is wrapped up, I am doing a complete revamp relaunch like tear down completely new course for CSS Demystified, which I'm really looking forward to doing. It's been its it's due and I think it's yeah, I'm looking forward to it. And I'll just let you know that if you purchase the current one, you would get the new one for free and it will be cheaper if you get the current one than if you wait for the revamp to come. So I'll just throw that out there and let you know.
00:02:51
Speaker
that That is an option. It'd probably be a little while away just because I'm starting from scratch on that one, but it shouldn't take me too long. I think I have some things for it already in development. So I've just paused those while I'm doing this beyond CSS stuff.
00:03:05
Speaker
Sorry for the extended sort of shameless plugs there. We'll get into today's topic, which is more of what you're
Critique on Product Quality
00:03:12
Speaker
here for. But I guess what that's going to be this week is how I'm really fed up with the current state of shipping broken products.
00:03:21
Speaker
And this just seems to be this new normal now. I don't know what started it. I understand this idea of pushing or I don't know if it's deadlines and companies needing to push things out. But the reason I'm talking about it is Figma sites. So you might have seen my live stream. I did everything will be linked in the description if you want to check out the replay to that. The beginning of the live stream, I decided to i wasn't going to be talking about Figma sites.
00:03:47
Speaker
But I had been looking at it and i was like, okay, I need to talk about this because they're really, really, really bad. And then i actually broke that off and made it into a standalone video.
00:03:58
Speaker
With Figma sites, it's just to me is in the stage of what should be a closed alpha instead of a public beta. And of course, by saying it, I think they're saying it's a beta. I'm not even 100% sure if they are.
00:04:11
Speaker
I probably should look, but I really don't care. It's public. And that's the only thing that really matters right now is everybody has access to it. I don't know if you need a paid plan or not. I have one, so I have access to it and it's trash. It's And I don't like being negative. I really don't like putting down a company and saying, because like there's a lot of job developers who worked really hard on making this actually work.
00:04:32
Speaker
Clearly hacky things going on to solve problems that they had, like every string of text, the last letter in that string of text is in a span. There's no way that would be there unless there is a reason that that's there. So I guarantee you that the people who worked on it probably worked really hard.
00:04:51
Speaker
But it's just not ready for production like or a public release. Yeah, but whatever. It's not a polished product. It's really bad because not only do you have all those spans in there, but every string of text is also just a div and every button is a div. And they're using JavaScript for like to make it into a link, basically. And they're well they're sort of trying to be accessible about it, but they're doing it in the wrong way. They're adding area labels to things that shouldn't have them. So if you are using a screen reader, it actually reads the text twice.
00:05:20
Speaker
The hover states are done with JavaScript instead of with CSS for some reason. a lot of it is, I think, the limitations. And I've seen other people talking about this where the limitations of Figma have made it so like because it's a tool for designing pictures and they're trying to like shoehorn in this ability to then turn that into a website that it just it's missing.
00:05:44
Speaker
stuff. And that's a bit of what I talked about in the live stream. So I don't want to repeat myself too much, but it was just, I feel like there's a layer missing within their UI. And when you go to their sites thing, they need this extra layer that enforces some sort of using semantic tags on things the same way things like Webflow and Framer and other products like that do these no code editor thingies that do make you assign not only a style to something but a assign like a role or a semantic i'm using this is a section this is a main this is a heading this is a paragraph there's tools out there that do all of this without any code so like i just find it's they ship something that was really broken and i think when a company of figma size releases a product this bad it should be called out on which is why i'm actually talking about it i don't like
00:06:35
Speaker
putting down something when I know a lot of people that worked on it worked really hard on it. And it's not necessarily their fault where it's at. It's the above people within the chain that are pushing for this to be like this. And at least that's my assumption of how this has happened.
00:06:53
Speaker
And it's not only with that, right? Like I'm talking about Figma because ifs it's something that's directly related to our industry is have the designers make the things in Figma and then we get to turn those into
AI Technology Concerns
00:07:05
Speaker
websites. So everybody's familiar with it, or at least most people are familiar with it.
00:07:09
Speaker
And it, but AI, I've talked about this before with AI, where I feel like AI is this thing that has been shipped for public release before,
00:07:20
Speaker
I don't think it's before it's ready. I think AI is a little bit different in that. And well, first of all, like I hate calling it AI. It's not really AI, but you know what i mean, right? Like these large language models that I think for some things could definitely be used, but it's just there.
00:07:37
Speaker
We're being told that they can do things that they're not really able to. Like I still get ter is These new models are coming out. These new things are happening and I use it for some stuff to to make my life a little bit easier and for productivity things.
00:07:51
Speaker
And just every and then I'm just like, oh my goodness. I'm trying to remember the most recent one. And it was, I think it was a simple search. It was, yeah, it was a simple search on something. I don't, don't know what it was, but because now if I search on my phone, the first thing is like the AI answer in Google before I actually see Google results.
00:08:09
Speaker
And just the thing it said at the top was completely wrong. And as it's looking at it, like this isn't even a hard question. Like I was, I was looking for like a clarification on something and then it just for some reason decided to tell me something completely different or something that I knew was wrong. And then I verified that it was wrong and it it was.
00:08:27
Speaker
And it's like these tools can be used for pretty cool things. I'm talking to Tejas, who, if you don't know, does like lots of conference talks and stuff. That's how I've met him was at a couple of conferences and he's heavily involved with AI and some of the stuff he shows me is so cool, but he's using it in really smart ways within like local systems to do specific tasks that you sort of set up to make it do those things for you type of thing. Like behind the scenes as like a backend that can like pull the information from the bank you've provided it to be able to do certain things.
00:09:03
Speaker
I don't want to get into the specifics. oh If I remember, I'll put a link to one of his talks where he showed some of this stuff off. And it's really cool. And using it in those types of ways to me is how it should be being used.
00:09:17
Speaker
And it I guess the problem with that is it wouldn't be something that's public facing. It's something that would be like developer facing and back end stuff. which has huge use cases and is really powerful, but these companies need to be able to fund themselves. They need funding because they're, they don't make money. They're losing money like crazy because it's so expensive to run these things.
00:09:38
Speaker
So they just need to like keep getting investor money and to get that, you need the hype and to get the hype, you need it to be public facing. And so that's why I'm not sure what the Figma thing, I don't know. where they are at when it comes to being a public company versus private company.
Figma's Strategy Shift
00:09:52
Speaker
And I just have this sneaking suspicion that with config coming up, which is their annual conference that they do where they announce all their new stuff like that, by having that conference, it puts a deadline on when these things have to happen. And they had four products coming out at the same time that they were launching. And it's like,
00:10:10
Speaker
So like why did they have this? ah They could have done two and then just like held back. But obviously it makes it a lot more of a hype cycle around everything they're doing. If they have four awesome, cool new products all coming out once. Oh my goodness. And like you just get distracted with all these things going on and it makes the company look like it's like doing these amazing things when in reality it's not.
00:10:34
Speaker
And again, If you listen to the live stream or or the video, I do apologize for repeating myself a little bit. But what I find disappointing most of all, I think, is the reason Figma got to where it is today is because it just made a better product than the competition.
00:10:48
Speaker
And I know not everyone loves Figma in general, but it still ah became industry standard because especially early on, it just simply was better. Right. And the free model helped, but I don't think it was just because of the free model that they went with like that, that got them the users using it. But if it was crap, people wouldn't have continued using it.
00:11:08
Speaker
And they did some really good stuff for a while. And then it just feels like now that they have that, it's sort of the same thing you saw with Adobe and like everything else where it's like, okay, we're on top of the market now. So now we can do what we want. I don't know, uh, with, with them specifically, but it, and I'm talking about Figma, I'm talking about AI, but like, you see this with so many products and so many things these days, it's so big in the gaming industry,
Tech vs. Gaming Launch Issues
00:11:31
Speaker
right? Where the game has to launch.
00:11:33
Speaker
And then these days with the games, they're full of bugs and then they just patch the bugs. And you always hear about how in the old days that wouldn't happen because you couldn't patch things. So the game had to be polished. I do think that's a little bit different, especially for the AAA game, just because I think with the AAA games, if they don't launch it at a certain time, the cost of those things can be so insane that they sort of need the money to be able to continue developing it.
00:11:58
Speaker
And they are also on time deadlines. So I feel bad for the developers on those because they obviously work very hard as well. But it's I think that is a bit of a problem in that sense that the companies see things in a way where it's like, OK, this is a model we can do to get it out so we can fund fixing the problems that are there. Like maybe there's a better way of doing things.
00:12:18
Speaker
But I don't know enough about the gaming industry industry. I don't want to comment too much there other than knowing like, okay, I'm not, yeah I might buy a game when it comes. I won't even, I often now don't because I'm like, it might be buggy. It might not be, but it's also hopefully going to go on sale eventually because games are expensive now and I don't have time to play them anyway. So I i get them and then I play like six hours and I'm like, this is awesome. I have no time to play.
00:12:39
Speaker
Yeah. I wish I had more time. ah Usually during, if I do have time to game, it's playing with my kids on, some silly games that we've had some good ones just in case anyone is looking for ones. I think it was he was eight when I played with him. It was my youngest one. My older one actually is the one.
00:12:54
Speaker
The reason we got the game is because my older son, but then it ended up being me and my youngest one played it. So you can do single player or two player co-op. And so we did the two player co-op and it's called Nobody
Gaming with Kids
00:13:05
Speaker
Saves the World. And it was yeah, it's a really fun game. Really, really good. It's a little arcade thing. It doesn't take that many hours to get through.
00:13:12
Speaker
I have 32 hours of time in that, and that was I think we beat the we didn't get 100% completion, but we did both the full game and the DLC and he was like eight at the time. So it takes a little bit longer to get through it, but it it was tons of fun playing that and highly recommend it.
00:13:28
Speaker
And I'm trying to look quickly. I know I've played a few other co-op games with my kids over time, but I can't find any of them looking really quick now. It has been a little while or since we've done other stuff because lately we've been playing sort of things I don't know that I wouldn't recommend. They're not bad and just kind of boring.
00:13:43
Speaker
So I actually with my older son, we got into portal, which is a lot of fun. That was a good one. We actually we need to finish it. We stopped at one point because we got stuck on something. We should revive that. We got pretty far in the game.
00:13:54
Speaker
yeah That was a fun one to get into it with him. he was 12 at the time, I think, when we started playing it. So a few ideas there if anybody has kids that they want to play some games with. where now we're we're really, really far off topic. So I do apologize for that.
00:14:07
Speaker
um But yeah, just I guess I'm going to wrap up there.
Episode Conclusion
00:14:10
Speaker
Links to everything that I've talked about in the description, including the games. I'll put links to Nobody Saves the World down in the description. And I guess that's it for this week. So thank you very much for listening. And of course, until next time, don't forget to make your corner of the internet just a little bit more awesome.