Jon Pudny 🗯

Jon Pudny, Senior Marketing / UX Designer / Researcher / DJ / Fell runner; *still hates trains (but only twice a week now)

[Rand Fishkin (follow @randderuiter on Threads) @randfish]

I can't stop thinking about these three graphs from @Similarweb's report last week.

And what they really mean, together, for how we should prioritize marketing work (and product design) 👇

[Jon Pudny 🗯 @Pudny]

@Flatt0pH8r @MadHermitHimbo These look great - they look like they should be some budget alcoholic drink 🤣

[Ihtesham Ali @ihteshamali]

BBC literally built the greatest sound library on the internet.

It is called BBC Sound Effects, and it gives you access to more than 30,000 recordings from around the world.

Just search any word, and it instantly finds matching sounds.

You can filter them by category, duration, and even the continent where the sound was recorded.

Every sound can be previewed inside your browser, downloaded, or added to the built-in mixer so you can layer multiple recordings together.

And the archive gets insanely specific.

You can find creaking ships, old typewriters, jungle ambience, distant church congregations, and even someone vigorously washing their hands.

There is a good chance a BBC engineer recorded the exact sound you need decades before you were born.

https://t.co/vdOBewxyg3

[Paul Boag @boagworld]

You hit a ceiling when you're the only UX person in the room. Not because you lack ability, but because everyone around you assumes you should already know what's right. There's nobody to sanity-check your thinking, nobody to challenge your assumptions, nobody who's done this a hundred times before.

I met with a designer who's been in that position for two years. She's good at what she does. Worked her way into UX from front-end development, built a design system, trained her team on components. By all measures, she should feel confident.

Instead, she talked about hitting a wall. Workshops and online courses stop working when there's nobody to help you apply them to your specific mess. Self-directed learning has its limit. At some point you need someone who's seen enough situations to say, "Here's what I'd do," not because they're brilliant, but because they've done it before.

The worst part? She'd already asked for coaching support. Her organization said "the budget doesn't work right now." They'll pay for workshops. They won't pay for the thing that actually accelerates growth.

If you're that person, or you're managing one, take it seriously. A solo designer without external perspective is a timer ticking toward burnout or departure. It doesn't take much (even a few hours a year with someone who knows what they're doing) to make the difference between "I'll stick with this" and "I need to find somewhere else."

#UXDesign #Leadership #ProfessionalGrowth

[Rob Staton @robstaton]

Too many people treat Argentina as this romantic love letter to football because of one player, Messi. They are a horrible, horrible team. Call it out. Don’t glorify what they are. A disgrace.

[Awful Announcing @awfulannouncing]

"I thought it was crap." - Wayne Rooney on the FIFA World Cup final halftime show

[CallUnc @Callunc]

Me stuck in a meeting that has nothing to do with me but the manager still wants me in

[Ricky Gervais @rickygervais]

Good Boy ❤️

[Fifty Shades of Whey @davenewworld_2]

In the United States, roughly 30% to 40% of the entire food supply goes uneaten

[Mark Ajzenstadt @mardehaym]

A senior architect told me she'd stopped approving AI-generated PRs from her juniors.

Her VP noticed. Approval rates dropped. Cycle times spiked. Suddenly, she's the bottleneck.

So she invited the VP to a code review. Just to observe.

The junior explained the PR. Confident. Articulate. Code executed. Tests passed.

Then she asked, "What happens if we add a second payment provider next quarter?"

Silence. The junior stared at the code.

The model that generated it doesn't know the roadmap. The code didn't contain an answer, because the system design didn't exist beyond the current ticket.

In 8 months, the juniors shipped 40,000 lines of code. None of them could explain how the system worked outside of their immediate task. They thought they understood the codebase. They never actually read it.

"They're not bad engineers," she said. "But they've never been wrong long enough to learn anything."

The VP had offered courses, certifications, book clubs. But the architect needed something else, and it wasn't more training.

She needed permission to slow things down, so the juniors could build a real mental model. One that lives outside the chat window.

Juniors don't develop judgment from getting things right. They develop it by sitting with wrong answers, long enough to understand why they failed.

You want to test their understanding? Ask them to diagram the system. No IDE/docs/ AI.

If the diagram has gaps, those gaps exist in their heads too.

You won't notice, until something actually breaks.

[Fermsy 🎒 @Cryptoboyy_Aji]

BOOMER UNCLE: “You kids switch jobs too much.”

ME: “I stayed loyal for 4 years. Got 3% raises every year.”

BOOMER UNCLE: “See? Hard work pays off.”

ME: “Inflation was 8%. I took a pay cut every single year.”

BOOMER UNCLE: “That’s just how it works.”

ME: “I switched jobs. Got a 34% raise in one move.”

BOOMER UNCLE: “Nobody has work ethic anymore.”

ME: “I didn’t leave for less work. I left for equal pay.”

BOOMER UNCLE: “Companies can’t afford to keep raising salaries.”

ME: “The CEO got a $11 million bonus that same year.”

Loyalty is a value.

But it was never meant to be a financial strategy.

Companies stopped being loyal to workers decades ago.

Nobody told the workers to stop expecting it in return.

[Jacob Miller @pwnies]

A bunch of people were asking how I made the effect for the "renderaissance" style page I made previously.

Here's a full walkthrough of creating that depth / dynamic lighting effect for the web.

Interactive version: https://t.co/CdEXq46TXS

[Adam Grant @AdamMGrant]

The internet doesn't bring out the worst in people. It makes the worst people more visible.

Across all 30 countries studied, those who are nasty in online political discussions are nasty in real life, too. They seek status through hostility.

Don't feed the hand that bites you.

[Advanced Web Ranking @awebranking]

SXO isn't about making users "feel good."

@gfiorelli1 explains that SEO has always been about improving the search experience, from discovery to satisfaction. That's what SXO is really about.

Watch now ⬇️

[Geordiemike @Geordiemikee7]

@keithsu31240536

[Ashley Mayer @ashleymayer]

This is incredibly uncool. If your Instagram is public, Meta is granting people the right to reuse your content with AI features *by default.*

[Count Binface @CountBinface]

On my way, Clacton.

[Krishnan Guru-Murthy @krishgm]

A Farage reset will mean the clock on his declarations also resets - so if there are other declarable "gifts" he received in the year before the 2024 election that we don't know about he will no longer have to tell anyone. The inquiry into the £5 million - when it resumes - could ask him direct questions about that - but he may or may not answer

[The Purple Pimpernel @Eyeswideopen69]

@ellencarmichael “In America, things couldn't be more different. We simply can't accept a wrong left unrighted.”

Bullshit!

Your president is a convicted rapist, an insider trader, and very likely a paedophile who led a violent putsch against his own country.

How wrong is that?

[The 44 ⚽️ @The_Forty_Four]

THAT IS ABSOLUTELY INCREDIBLE 🤯🤯🤯

GOAL OF THE TOURNAMENT AND CAPE VERDE POTENTIALLY ABOUT TO CREATE HISTORY 🇨🇻🤯