Over 500 quotes

Part of Book Notes: Apprenticeship Patterns

I started a refresh for this site. I want to continue writing regularly. However, I don’t think it will take the form of long articles about design sprints and design tools. I started writing newsletters to experiment with shorter writing, but even those took longer than I expected each time. I still want to send something out. For the next issue, I’m going to try writing a short post each day and collecting those to send together bi-weekly.

I would write the newsletter and then re-write over and over and try to make the whole thing coherent. Sometimes things got a bit forced because links just don’t always relate. And I was finding myself putting it off because I was looking for very large chunks of time to work on it. And of course, I wasn’t finding those large chunks of time.

Writing seems similar to working out in that you’ll see improvements through consistency. You can’t work out for 8 straight hours to make up for 8 individual hour-long workouts.

I’ll share links and book quotes and share some thoughts to how they can relate to different stages of a design sprint. Sometimes. Other times I’ll share how they relate at least to design.

Thanks for bearing with me.

Last week, I read Apprenticeship Patterns by Adewale Oshineye and Dave Hoover. I picked it up after seeing Ale Muñoz (designer/developer working on Sketch) recommend it as a resource for learning how to teach in a response to Koen Bok (Framer co-founder).

It’s about improving as a developer and looking at programming as a craft. A lot of it can be applied to improving as a designer. (Not to mention a ton of other careers.) One of the patterns discusses the importance of writing down what you learn:

When Dave was Reading Constantly during his apprenticeship, he kept a text file in which he transcribed all the quotes that shaped his learning. Over the years, that file grew to contain over 500 quotes, and Dave eventually decided to upload it and share it online.

(And “Reading Constantly” is another pattern I’ve been trying to apply.) Over the years, I’d like this site to have over 500 quotes. This is one of the first.