Hey everyone!
It’s probably safe to say that whichever province of South Africa you are reading this edition from, at some point this week you were freezing. It’s raining in the Free State during winter, there were road closures because of snow, and we’re all surprised by how long winter is dragging on, just like every other year.
Crazy August weather aside, we are dedicating this edition to all the women in the South African tech space, and more importantly, to all the incredible women in the FEDSA community. Whether you have done a talk, helped at an event, or just follow along for the sake of community, we celebrate you this Women’s Month.
In this edition:
Una Kravets shows just how far modern CSS theming has come, and how much you can now do without dragging JavaScript into the room.
Cassie Evans takes on that weird animation moment where technically everything is working, but your eyes are still saying “ag, no man”.
Kat Homan asks an important design question: when someone is already overwhelmed, should your interface really be trying that hard to look clever?
Our Open Browser Tabs
Modern CSS theming with light-dark(), contrast-color(), and style queries
Una Kravets, lead of the UI & Tooling Developer Relations Team at Google Chrome, walks us through combining some new CSS features to create a dynamic theming system. No JavaScript, no build step, no theme config file. Just CSS, and it works in every modern browser as of right now.
Check it out here
Better UI interactions. Introducing easeReverse
Cassie Evans, developer relations engineer at GSAP, tackles the tricky moment when you call reverse() on an animation and something just feels wrong. The motion plays backwards correctly, but it lands strangely. GSAP's easeReverse fixes this, and you can now decide how the reverse feels instead of accepting whatever the maths hands you.
Follow along with Cassie in this video.
Designing For Distressed Users
Most UI trends exist to grab attention and make a product look forward-thinking. That's fine for a lot of software. It's a problem for mental health apps. Those products have a different job. They need to lower cognitive load, earn trust quickly, and feel like a place someone can exhale. Product Designer Kat Homan has developed a framework for telling the difference. It gives you a way to run any trendy visual or interaction pattern through a few questions before you commit, so you can see whether it actually serves the person on the other side of the screen.
Read more here
The FEDSA Feed is proudly sponsored by Khanyisa Real Systems
EVENTS
Job Opportunities
Investec - QA Automation Engineer
This isn’t a happy-go-lucky testing role. Investec is looking for someone who can get technical with testing and test infrastructure itself. Check out the role hereLula - DevOps Engineer
Your mission will be to make life better for developers, using all of the industry-standard platforms. Apply here.Nedbank - Senior Product Manager
Figure out how customers get stuck, using research and data to decide what needs to be fixed, and work across the bank to get the improvements implemented. This is basically a “make the home-loan experience less painful” gig. Apply here.Mr D - Product Designer
A mid-level product opportunity. Figure out what data products are actually useful, prioritise what gets built and work closely with engineers and data people. Apply here.CSIR - Senior Software Engineer: Information & Cybersecurity Centre
Work on security-heavy engineering and research problems, rather than consumer apps. This is a senior role inside the CSIR’s Information & Cybersecurity Centre in Pretoria. Check it out here.Entelect - Senior Product Designer
Own the design thinking on complicated projects. Lead research and design direction, work closely with engineers and BA’s, and help other designers navigate the messy bits. Apply here.
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