Building playgrounds and thinking about beauty

Hey y’all, This week I've been working a ton on building out an in-browser playground for the upcoming launch of Database School. In the next month or so, I will be launching a new Intro to Postgres course. As part of it, students will be able to interact with a live database in the browser. It has been a ton of fun and a lot of work, but it doesn’t feel like work because it’s so exciting. I'm finally staying up late again to work on something which hasn't happened in a long time. I think it's a combination of novel and complex technologies. I'm learning a lot and doing things I've never done before. I think the payoff is going to be great. There's an article down below about burnout and payoffs and this feels like it's going to have a pretty high payoff. I think it will be a differentiator for my learning platform, so it's not just videos, but it's videos and hands-on practice. I've shared several tweets about it already, which you can look up, but at some point I will be making a video (or a series of videos) about spinning up all of these machines. --- ### Thoughts from the week This week I've been thinking about craft and beauty. I [tweeted a day or two ago](https://x.com/aarondfrancis/status/1963658688092324097) that a new website had a really amazing and aesthetic scroll animation on their homepage, and some people responded and said, "It's beautiful, but it's useless." Somebody else responded and said, "What's the point of it?" My immediate reaction was that beauty is its own justification! It doesn't necessarily need to have a point. There doesn't really need to be a purpose. We can just make things because they're beautiful, or we can just make things because we want to practice the craft. That's okay. Not everything needs to be utilitarian. When we optimize for utility, we end up with the new Cracker Barrel logo or the new depressing McDonald's interiors. Everything is just millennial gray. Don't be afraid to go over the top or do something extra just because you like it or it's beautiful. --- ### Things I found this week *Just a heads up that each Twitter/X screenshot has a link to the original post if you want to go follow the account.* [](https://x.com/bscholl/status/1962164588633530596) My friend Matt Wensing has talked about this [a lot](https://x.com/search?q=from%3Amattwensing%20burnout&src=typed_query). The idea that working hard does not lead to burnout, but the lack of hope leads to burnout. So if you're working really really hard for something that you don't believe will pay off, it's super easy to lose motivation. And that has happened to me in the past! But! If you believe that the thing you're working on will have a payoff, the amount of work almost doesn’t matter. --- [](https://x.com/AustinTunnell/status/1962541168429781478) If you love brickwork and you're not already following Austin, you're missing out. This is the coziest living room I've ever seen. --- [](https://x.com/SimpleCRE/status/1963267582250651888) There aren't a lot of these types of historic buildings around Dallas, but I have a dream of one day working out of a space like this. I'm always keeping my eyes open for an old church or fire station or water treatment plant or something, and if things go well over the next many years, hopefully I can move out of the apartment studio into a building with character like this. --- [](https://x.com/cynthiamcgillis/status/1963309747064668392) Everyone thinks that other people are doing things and aren't lonely when in reality I think most people really are lonely! A lot of that could be solved, or at least helped, by planning things. I am sure that your friends would be thrilled to death if you planned a monthly, low-pressure supper club where everyone gets together and has dinner at somebody's house once a month! Or planning a poker night, or a guy's breakfast, or a happy hour – anything like that. People really do want to connect and you can just give them a time and place to do that. I think one of the reasons that my friendships have stayed so strong is that we plan a lot of things. There have been periods in my life where I've been the leader and planned a lot, but in this stage of life I've told my friends I want to do things but I don't have the bandwidth to plan them and so other people have started planning things for me! You can do that for your friend group. --- [](https://x.com/RomeoStevens76/status/1963015140590420059) Boy, was this helpful for me to read! I think some of the reasons that I get stressed or bummed out is that I really like to have things finished. And in my current line of work, some things are just never complete, which is frustrating. This is a helpful reframing: my job is not to finish everything! My job is to finish what I can, and continually push other tasks forward. If I push enough tasks forward, then the business itself will be pushed forward. --- [](https://x.com/DudespostingWs/status/1963372737948520557) This is kind of a wild video, but it's a very good example of doing something super normal, which is reviewing a fast food breakfast sandwich, and taking it to the next level. Or maybe not even the next level, but injecting a bunch of your personality in it! This video is completely outside of my domain, but it still serves as inspiration for the stuff that I'm doing. --- [](https://x.com/BiancoDavinci/status/1963666735397015860) Now this is a suburb I could live in! Close enough to the neighbors to know them, while still being (literally) hedged in. My American brain has no idea where the cars go though… maybe they’re all underground. If that’s the case then I’m moving here tomorrow. I love cars being underground. --- [](https://x.com/BiancoDavinci/status/1963605469114552335) May we all still be useful and active at 90! This reminds me of the saying that a society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in. This woman is 90 years old and she's decorating her town with these beautiful patterns! And it's not in vain! --- [](https://x.com/emilkowalski_/status/1963593549221347685) This is a very good, long, and thoughtful [article](https://emilkowal.ski/ui/you-dont-need-animations) about when to use animations in your UI design and when it is counterproductive. I like the point of view on this because it comes from an empathetic place for the user. Yes, we like animations as designers and developers because they're cool and flashy, but it may drive the user crazy and there are some good guidelines in here on where and when to use them. --- If you’ve been enjoying the newsletter and think a friend may enjoy reading it each week too, please forward it to them! They can sign up to receive it weekly here: . That’s it for this week! I enjoy reading all of your replies, so if you see something interesting or just have a thought you want to share, please hit reply and let me know. Talk soon, Aaron {{ ENV.unsubscribe\_personal | default: visitor.unsubscribe\_url | hyperlink: "Click here to unsubscribe." }}