Published
Weekend Reading — Client brief
Design Objective
Stop Wasting Users’ Time Examples for design anti-patterns that do little more than waste our most precious resource.
Labelmask Interesting way to add input masks to form fields, but without the accessibility issues.
Responsive Design: Why and how we ditched the good old select element "The concept of pickers first appeared when we started designing the new Tradeshift from a mobile first perspective"
Good intentions + wrong mindset = bad design:
Just because a product has a social mission doesn't mean the product is great.
The best way to change a complex system is to add/remove friction based on values. The result might not be what you expected or could plan.
Flat design isn't cool. You know what's cool? Buttons that users actually know they can click.
Tools of the Trade
Page Loading Effects Hide, load and reveal transitions to make page loading a bit more obvious to end users.
Inline SVG vs Icon Fonts Why SVG render better than icon fonts and other advantages (although, browser support still an issue).
12 Little-Known CSS Facts CSS, the language that keeps on bewildering us.
AWS Elastic Beanstalk for Docker Docker just keeps getting better, as does its ecosystem.
Flynn Promises to be the PaaS of the future (think one layer above Docker). First developer release now available.
Chrome DevTools Features You May Have Missed Round up of screencasting, workspaces, source maps, flame charts, mobile emulation, and canvas debugging.
Project Naptha Chrome extension that lets you select & copy text from images.
Cache Invalidation Strategies With Varnish Cache Cache validation still a hard problem, but Varnish has some interesting tools to offer.
Uplink Latency of WiFi and 4G Networks How WiFi and 4G negotiate air time.
Collabinate
Activity Streams as a Service
Lines of Code
Better Javascript Promises Introduces a future keyword to handle future values, and cut down the ceremonial syntax involed with promises.
Being explicit does not necessitate a lot of extra ceremony or loss of productivity. You can be explicit and remain high-level and abstract.
Handling required parameters in ECMAScript 6 ES6 has default parameters that can evaluate expressions, here's how you can use them to enforce required parameters.
worst common denominator programming More bad coding examples, courtesy of the ever so prolific OpenSSL.
Contractual If you like Design by contract, Contractual has you covered. Best part: backwards compatible syntactic sugar that will work in any JS environment.
you have ruined javascript A rant about Angular.js. Don't know if it's warranted, but the service/factory/provider abstractions seem like a red flag.
Peopleware
If you want to build an organization that’s capable of changing society, society will change your organization right back. Our society’s norms are gradually changing to reflect the values of social justice.
How to Get a Job at Google, Part 2 The key take away: your resume should always provide the proper context, don't make the hiring manager guess.
frame your strengths as: ‘I accomplished X, relative to Y, by doing Z
The Diving Save How to deal with an employee about to quit for a better offer.
Closed Doors
No, don't enable revocation checking Why certificate revocation doesn't work in the real world, and bad news for every service who lost their server keys.
The Life of a Stolen Phone: For the Smartphone Industry, Theft Is a Part of the Business Model Shocking.
None of the Above
Non-Errors English usage that people insist is wrong but is actually standard English.
Google to end forced G+ integration, drastically cut division resources Google's Big Data analytics finally reveals what we've all known.
Stripe Open-Source Retreat Stripe is offering $7K/month for developers to work on open source projects full time. I wish more companies copied this.
The Ideal Length of Everything Online, Backed by Research Buffer finds correlation between engagement and length of your Tweet, FB post, title, etc.
Long access A safe deposit box in the cloud. Uses Amazon Glacier for pricing and data longevity, still fuzzy on the business side of things, but promises they're working on something.