Published
Weekend Reading — Now what?
Design Objective
Designing a Better Notes App — Design + Sketch App Designing a simple note-taking app: from rough idea, through UX mapping, to low-fi UI sketches, and finally hi-fi interactive prototype.
A* - A Truly Iterative Development Process
In A*, the product owner has no vision of the solution, only a vision of the problem, and a clear idea of how we’ll know when that problem’s been solved. … They don’t describe a software product, they describe the world around that product, and how it will be changed by what we deliver. We ain’t done until we see that change.
7 Things Every Designer Needs to Know about Accessibility Covers the major things you need to know in order for your products to meet the minimum of Section 508 and the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0.
As an active empathy practitioner I imagined what the ongoing no JavaScript Web browsing experience could be. While the percentage of these users might be relatively low, we fail to remember that until the scripts load, that scenario is true for all of us.
Build Your User Base with These Human Behavior Hacks
So back in the day, a bunch of economists were trying to predict how people and markets would behave assuming they’d use rational criteria. What they found is that it basically never happened,” says Alvarez. “Instead, people were being driven by what researchers considered ‘supposedly irrelevant factors’ (or SIFS). It turns out these ‘irrelevant’ factors are everything.
Tools of the Trade
can-zone Zones provide a way to hook into the behavior of the JavaScript event loop.
@kventil "Docker."
Lines of Code
the one where writing a commit message makes you realise your solution isn’t actually very good so you find a better one
Beware of bugs in the above code. I have only googled the SO answers, not clicked on them.
Architectural
“The Art of Computer Programming” by Donald Knuth
… it strikes me that whoever chooses the constraints of the target development environment is choosing the playing field for our future innovations.
“Without requirements or design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file.” - Louis Srygley
As programmers,our most useful skill isn’t so much knowing how to solve a problem as knowing how to explore a problem we haven’t seen before
Peopleware
As long as your heart tells you to keep on coding and building new things, you will be young, forever.
Junior, mid-level, senior developers: I just realized what the actual difference is.
Junior devs need help figuring out how to do things. They don’t have the research skills to get things done on their own.
Mid-level devs have figured out the how & are starting to get the why, though they don’t communicate their ideas very well.
Senior devs long since figured out the how and the why. They have their own ideas and can get other people to go along with their ideas.
There’s a limit to how much impact 1 person writing code has. Senior-level impact is when you can change how other people write their code.
Work/Life
Intelligence and experience are valuable, but a scrappy person who fits well on the team can learn fast.
F*** You, I Quit — Hiring Is Broken
I wrote this story to share my tech interview experience during past several months and why I’ve decided to stop looking for a job.
Landing an internship has become way more important and complex than anyone's acknowledging No one wants to be the first full-time employer anymore of new college graduates who haven’t worked or interned anywhere. On the race to lock up the best interns early in their undergraduate career.
Locked Doors
“Everyone should run their own services, fight centralization!”
How about no, that’s what got us millions of unpatched Wordpress sites.
Recreate the famous "decrypting text" effect from the movie Sneakers (1992)
Techtopia
Bots are awesome! Humans? Not so much
What I learned about humans and AI while sifting through those conversations is fascinating and also a little disturbing.
When the next Twitterbot loses it, remember that its tweets are protected
The Dutch example illustrates what police might do in the event of a “true threat” from a Twitterbot. The Tay debacle suggests that a Twitterbot could produce speech so hateful that local, state, or federal government might want to prohibit it.
None of the Above
William Shakespeare, Playwright and Poet, Is Dead at 52 A modern day obituary. Brilliant.
An Amateur vs. ISIS: A Car Salesman Investigates and Ends Up in Prison The story of one man’s deepening obsession with a terrorist group is a reminder of how the Internet provides easy portals to distant, sometimes dangerous worlds. It shows the complications for law enforcement agents who confront an overeager amateur encroaching on their turf.
PodRide a practical and fun bicycle-car An all-weather bicycle!