Welcome to Lessons from the IDE, a recap of successes, failures, and glitches (so, so many glitches) from my daily coding. This article was originally posted at bret.design

Today I started working through one of the free challenges from Frontend Mentor, the “Stats preview card component.” It was listed as a “newbie” difficulty, so I thought as a newbie, it wouldn’t cause too much of a problem. Spoiler: I was wrong.

That said, the value of any project is locating gaps of knowledge. In this case, I found quite a few gaps in my understanding of CSS and divs. …

Personal knowledge management (PKM) is on the rise, with popular applications like Roam Research, [Obsidian MD](https://obsidian.md/), and [Notion](https://www.notion.so/) leading the charge into a new kind of note-taking. Except, it’s not exactly new. Well, not all of it, at least.

If you’ve ever kept track of valuable information through a bullet journal, word document, or an online task manager, then congratulations: you’ve had some experience with personal knowledge management. The gist of it is that we’re surrounded by information, and without a system to handle that information, it’s easy to become overwhelmed.

Writers like Nicholas Carr have warned us about the…

I press down on the accelerator, and the car rolls down the hill, gathering speed. I lose traction for a moment, the tires sliding on the dirt road, and a slight bump sends me into a drift. That’s okay. I’m still gathering speed as I crest the next hill. The car takes to the air and I hold my breath.

I’ve misjudged.

I hit the ground and slam on the brakes, but the angle is all wrong and a collision with a tree brings my journey to an end.

Damn. I take a deep breath, considering where everything went wrong…

The train ambles past a small graveyard in the middle of a field lined by pastures. Its half-crumbling stonework rises in a column at the center, a lonely fortress standing watch over the interred. With the return of a misty Irish rain, drought-browned grass is just a memory of the past month as the island reawakens from a pause. I breathe in the sensation of moving through the world in ways that are unfamiliar.

Masks hide the faces of half the passengers in our carriage, separating the gamblers — those who place trust in low community transmission rates and luck…

If you’ve ever struggled to share an idea with a friend, family member, or co-worker, then you know that effectively communicating with other people can be challenging. Whether you’re posting to social media or arguing in the comments section of an article, it’s important to understand how to effectively persuade others. Luckily for us, the best tool for solving these problems has been in the public domain for roughly 2500 years: rhetoric.

While rhetoric has a long and complex history, it’s often simplified as something like “the art of bullshit.” I wish I could give you an academic definition that’s…

The Covid-19 crisis reshaped the landscape of education. While many schools and colleges are pushing for a return to in-person classes, online and hybrid teaching will remain part of the conversation for the foreseeable future. It’s hard to overstate the challenges this poses to creating an effective learning environment: many students don’t have access to reliable internet at home, or face precarious family or work situations that place additional demands on their time. While these are also concerns in face-to-face classes, they’re amplified greatly in online contexts where there isn’t a physical class grounding the experience.

In my online classroom…

By day, I’m a writing professor. At night, I’m a podcaster. Over the past few years, I’ve gone from making podcasts as a hobby to viewing them as an integral resource in my teaching toolbox.

While there’s no single correct way to build a podcasting assignment into a class, this guide is meant to help you figure out where to start. I’ll begin by talking through some of the reasons you should consider using podcasts, and then I’ll walk you through some of the resources and strategies you might find most helpful based on my experiences in the classroom.

In…