The official book of California Stylesheets
(and that's okay)
It's a book about writing CSS.
And not writing CSS.
The official book of California Stylesheets
(and that's okay)
It's a book about writing CSS.
And not writing CSS.
Don’t go through individual CSS things at meetings.
It’s bad enough that you’re wasting time on CSS. Now you have to multiply it?
Every ten minutes you waste in a six-person meeting is an hour wasted. And that’s before all the overhead of breaking away from your workday and going to the meeting.
Could one person have handled the thing you addressed in the meeting inside of an hour? If the answer is “Yes,” then you’ve wasted time.
Look. There are two corporate philosophies.
In one corporate philosophy, meetings exist almost entirely to save the time of higher-ups. In the other, meetings are a necessary evil to exchange information to get things done.
All tech companies are the second one, except at the higher-up levels in the megacorps, and in some startups with an ego-tripping founder.
Dysfunctional companies almost always have some mid-level manager siphoning off the time of others to make his or her job easier. Steve Jobs could expect someone at his company to work for a month on a presentation that, for him, only lasts fifteen minutes, but saves his very important time. These mid-level managers will have the same expectation, without the “being Steve Jobs” part.
That’s the important part! Acting like Steve Jobs without being Steve Jobs, well, it’s a lot like just being a dickhead.
Your job would be easier too if you had a panel of people looking at your screen ready to answer any questions you had. So these managers don’t decide anything but instead run a decision meeting.
If you’re running a meeting, use it to get the team’s work done. Don’t use it to get your work done.
It’s fine to check in on everyone and everything or the usual meeting stuff. Just, whatever you do, don’t format this adventure as going through a list of CSS tasks.
If you’re wondering why this chapter is in this book, well, know this: Everything you think about meetings is true about CSS too. Why is everyone here? Why are we spending so much time on this? Didn’t we do this same thing last week?
CASS lets you have more 5% meetings. The 95% doesn’t need to be met over, usually. Information design is worth a meeting, sure, but not the implementation of that design in CSS.
The implementation of a visual design in CSS is worth meeting over. That’s where all the tricky stuff happens.
When people in tech complain about meetings, they’re really complaining about pointless meetings. CASS helps you cut down on those.
The Gumroad version contains a secret chapter that spills the dirt on CSS preprocessors, a tech CASS no longer uses.
