Published
Weekend Reading – Did you invent Bitcoin?
More awesome graphics and T-s by Glenn Jones
Design Objective
Anyway, my point is—and I can’t believe I still have to repeat this after all these years—websites do not need to look exactly the same in every browser.
My job as UI designer: 1) put everything on a screen 2) gradually remove/simplify 3) repeat 2
The Two Ways of Building talks about the macro and micro points of view to software design and development:
The macro view prepares for the future by extrapolating from the past.
The micro view prepares the future by imagining what’s missing today.
If you think this product is a clock then it’s in the clock category in the clock aisle with a clock price. But parents who bought the clock said they would pay $100 or more for it because it keeps the kid out of their room. It’s a sleep protector.
Mixpanel: How Addictive Is Your App? an interesting exploration from MixPanel data, about patterns of app usage patterns; for example:
Somewhat surprisingly, messaging apps have the top 20 percent percentile of users engaged for more than five hours a day. That said, messaging apps are less addictive than those in the Social vertical, with about 80 percent of users only messaging three or fewer hours a day.
The issue isn't whether the call to action is visible. The issue is whether your call to action is visible at the point where someone has become convinced to take action.
I use 2x2 spacer gifs, because Retina.
Tools of the Trade
Iconic takes another step forward with hiqh quality, responsive SVG icons, styled with CSS.
Chartspree offers SVG charts as a service. Use URLs instead of client-side scripts. Going to look at using this for emails.
RactiveJS (short for interactive, not reactive) is a library for building reactive user interfaces. Simple to use, check it out.
Move.js is a JavaScript library for animating HTML elements, uses CSS3 transform/transition.
A responsive approach to image scaling with CSS offers another hack to what should have been a simple CSS property.
JSON Redux AKA RFC7159 So JSON, the simple data format that could, is specified in five different documents!
JSON5 entirely unrelated to JSON spec number 5 (above), this is an attempt to add ECMAScript 5 features to JSON.
Grunt And Gulp Tasks For Performance Optimization Exactly what it says in the title.
cure53/DOMPurify is "DOM-only, super-fast, uber-tolerant XSS sanitizer for HTML, MathML and SVG."
The browser cache is Vary broken TL;DR don't use the Vary header, never return different content type/language/encoding for the same resource.
The Cat API Game: changed!
This book must be about continuous delivery:
How to Avoid Huge Ships
Lines of Code
lukehoban/es6features introduces the new ES6 features by means of examples. Handy as a cheatsheet.
Margin calls for technical debt always seem to happen on the weekend. You'd think the markets would be closed.
Duplication is far cheaper than wrong abstractions. We teach novices DRY without teaching them when to break that rule.
The person who wrote a piece of code has the least say about how easy it is to understand.
Minimal Viable
How You Build Matters. Finding Your MVP This:
Always be asking yourself, “can I do that tomorrow?” if the answer is “yes”, do it tomorrow.
This flies in the face of everything you learn about planning ahead and productivity.
But your goal isn’t to get a lot done. Your goal is to get the right things done. Be ruthless.
If scaling your business in 2014 requires hiring lots of developers, you are going to have a bad time. Find a way to grow with less people.
Postmortem of a Venture-Backed, Acquired Startup Reminds us of the dangers of over-raise and what you should do instead:
Do whatever helps you reach market-fit faster. In my experience, that’s raising modestly (if at all) and keeping the team small. 2 or 3 people can get a lot done and is small enough where you don’t have to worry about structure or communication.
How to Raise $10 Million for Your Tech Startup:
In the meantime, trust me on this, we’ll incubate the fuck out of this thing. It’s part of the value we add.
Peopleware
“The Hard Thing about Hard Things”: The most valuable book on startup management hands down Sounds like a must read.
Theo Schlossnagle on Leveraging Failure an engaging talk about failure, learning and story telling.
Locked Doors
Pretty much anything that can be remembered can be cracked. There's still one scheme that works. …
My advice is to take a sentence and turn it into a password. Something like "This little piggy went to market" might become "tlpWENT2m". That nine-character password won't be in anyone's dictionary.
How to Protect Your iCloud Keychain from the NSA breaks down how iOS keeps your keychain info secure. Also, Apple's full iOS Security whitepaper.
A vast hidden surveillance network runs across America, powered by the repo industry Private industry, so don't worry, your data is safe with the highest bidder.
None of the Above
1 in 10 in a survey think HTML is an STD. Actually, 21% just guessed at random, still a funny viral headline.
OpenSpritz is a speed reading bookmarklet, based on the Spritz demos.
Why You Should Opt Out of Forced Arbitration Whenever Possible Also a good reminder to opt out of Dropbox's arbitration clause. Only takes a couple of seconds.
The fat drug If antibiotics are so good at making farm animals fat, what are they doing to us?
Did You Invent Bitcoin? Take this simple quiz to find out. Salon at its best.