#45 — The Illusion Of Control In Web Design, Compose Of Skills Competition
Things worth sharing each week
This is Thomas Mak. Every Friday I share links and stuffs worth reading. Enjoy!
What I’m working on
This is not a productive week for me. I was watching Netflix’s Lost in Space and Timeless. West world season 2 is released too. This ain’t going to be productive.
My classes are finished and the new class hasn’t started yet. During this class break, I’m writing the CSS3 books, in both English and Chinese. More on that later when I make progress.
Links worth sharing
If you only have time to read one essay: the illusion of control in web design — Start simply. Code defensively.
Boring Business Advice (that works really well for everybody)
CSS Grid examples to compose magazine-like layout.
Many CSS radial gradient examples from Codepen.
NYTimes’ guide to reduce carbon footprint. My key takeaway is to eat less meat.
Skills Competition
In last email, I shared about what a competition event looks like. In this week, let me share about the participants of a skill competition.
There are different roles that compose a skill competition:
Competitors
Experts
Skills competition manager
Workshop manager
Chief experts
Deputy experts
Usually when we attend competition, the organisation and competition committee are in charge of all the preparations. But in skills competition, the participants prepare for the competition. The organisation focuses on the area outside of each skill.
For each participant country or region, there is a competitor and an expert to attend. The expert should be professional in industrial with experiences on what standard real projects is like.
The experts are grouped together months prior to the competition week. They work remotely through private online forum (Still using phpBB). The experts from different regions come up with test projects and assessment criteria together. These are the test projects that competitors will work on in the 4-day competition. The chief experts and deputy chief experts help leading the experts to ensure the preparation progress. These experts may also be the mentor of their competitors.
There are workshop manager to manage the competition area and support the creation of the test project. In web design and development, this means setting up the server-client environment and essential modules for PHP and NodeJS environment.
The skill competition manager is the bridge between the organisation committee and the competition. Basically this role is in charge of everything in the competition.
From the roles, you can tell that this competition is different than others. There is no one party to decide the test project. What and how to test the competitors are based on the collaboration from the experts all over the world. The skill competition manager is the jury to ensure every aspects and details are fair to every one.
Because the experts works together for months. They builds up friendship and team chemistry. This is the reason why I keep coming back to the web design skill team every 2 years. It is a big family.
That’s it for this week. Hope you enjoy my sharing.
Until next week,
Thomas Mak