Final exams? Today?? I’m gonna fail! All my classmates were horsing around the room, celebrating the end of the school year. My fingers fumbled through a 10-pound textbook as I tried to cram eight chapters of American history. I’m fucked. What a nightmare. Literally. It would haunt my sleep every…

Asian parenting treats children as commodities and fails to set them up for success in alternative societies — Twenty-four years ago my mother disowned me because she hated the man I was dating, and for five years she refused to speak to me despite my regular phone calls. Conflicts like this are not uncommon for people like me: Asians who grew up in Western countries with their immigrant…

It was time to put that little voice in my head to bed. — When I was a kid, I spent hours drawing cartoon characters like Care Bears and Ninja Turtles. Then in high school, it was my favorite ball players like José Canseco, Jim Abbott, and Mark McGwire. Despite that, I never thought of art as a career choice. An English teacher turned…

Many companies observe practices designed to improve operations and efficiencies. One of those practices is the retrospective meeting. Retrospectives take place after a project is completed, and typically the teams and individuals involved attend them. Retrospectives serve two purposes: To recognize what we did right during development (labeled as the…

When I was pursuing my journalism degree at Mississippi State University, I took an interviewing class my senior year. No, not interviewing as in chatting with Meghan Markle while she spills the Heinz Beanz on her in-laws. I’m talking about job interviewing. The class was offered through MSU’s Communication Department…

At Zoosk we have a UI component called a tooltip. It resembles a speech bubble and provides helpful information to our users. It appears when you either click on, tap on, or hover over another element. We have many tooltips on our desktop and mobile websites, and they come in…

I spent a few days watching Udacity’s accessibility course by Google to get a handle on basic accessibility techniques. It turns out that accessibility isn’t as daunting as it might sound. This article summarizes what I learned from this course. …

There’s a lot of debate on whether to use em or px for breakpoint units in media queries. A few years ago Luke Wroblewski demoed his site at An Event Apart using em breakpoints. When he increased the browser’s font size, the page morphed into a layout that better accommodated…

In the last 16 years I’ve never had a project that required custom styles for disabled inputs. I know this because when I worked on such a project last week I was pulling my hair out. Most of us in the business know that browsers like to render inputs in…