Labnotes

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Design Objective

What car park payment machines can teach us about usability:

So car park payment machines teach us that the best user interface is no interface.

But also:

Car park payment machines teach us that usability is a differentiator only when customers have a choice.

A Map of White Space for Product Managers On finding and addressing the critical gaps between users, developers and the business.

The Technology behind Hyperlapse from Instagram Remarkable and yet so simple.

Some Dark Patterns now illegal in UK The UK is regulating these dark patterns away.

Women as Background Decoration: Part 2 - Tropes vs Women in Video Games Nasty business.


Tools of the Trade

Kitematic A beautiful, open source, OS X app for working with Docker.

Requirify This Chrome extension will let you require('') dependencies from the Chrome console. See requiring npm modules in the browser console.

artoo.js Web scraping that runs in your the browser.

Chartist.js Responsive SVG charts with a simple API.

Medium’s CSS is actually pretty f#$^ing good. How Medium cleaned up their CSS and arrived at a good set of guidelines.

Making SVGs Responsive with CSS

Favicons, Touch Icons, Tile Icons, etc. What All Do You Need? How can such a simple feature be so complex?

gulp The vision, history, and future of the project and The State of Grunt

MakeDrive JavaScript library that provides offline-first, always available, syncing filesystem for web apps. Check the introduction post.

Simperium.com Offline-first, sync with merge resolution, as a service. From the creators of Simplenote.

tint2 Modified version of Node for writing native desktop applications using JavaScript (OS X and Windows).

What does the smiley face “:)” mean in CSS?

A single div Objects drawn with CSS and a single div.

@focusaurus:

jekyll is easy to install. Just XCode, homebrew, rbenv, bundler, nodejs, the jekyll gem and the npm dependencies. Easy!


Lines of Code

Keep a CHANGELOG A well maintained changelog is one of the best features you can add to your open source project. Read the link for tips on how to write a great CHANGELOG.md. See also The Semantics of Software.

Because software tools are for people. If you don’t care, why are you contributing to open source? Surely, there must be a kernel (ha!) of care somewhere in that lovely little brain of yours.

Enemy of the State: Handling State and Events in a Scalable and Maintainable Fashion (YouTube)

Staying sane with small incremental releases I can't think of any other way to manage releases. All features can be sliced down to small, incremental, manageable, chunks.


Peopleware

11 developer tools that will blow your mind

A bird on the wall … A simple hack that gets meetings to run on time and stay on topic.

The one word men never see in their performance reviews Care to guess the bias?

Self-segregation on social networks and the implications for the Ferguson, MO story

Last Responsible Moment

Reject the arrogant notion that with proper advance planning, you'll have a project that goes smoothly and results in a usable solution. Most of the time, from what I've seen, it doesn't work out that way. Not at all.

@cory_foy:

Instead of looking for employees that thrive in complex environments, how about looking for ones that excel at simplifying that environment?


Locked Doors

Feds warn first responders of dangerous hacking tool: Google Search I present you this link with no comments.

For sale: Systems that can secretly track where cellphone users go around the globe Apparently cell providers coordinate via a network called SS7, which is about as secure as the average WordPress blog.

Researchers Made a Fake Social Network to Infiltrate China's Internet Censors Ingenious. And interesting what China does and doesn't filter:

It's generally OK to criticize the government in China, as long as you aren't inciting others to act.


None of the Above

The girl with three biological parents Why and how people end up with the DNA of three biological parents.

Ebola doctor reveals how infected Americans were cured TL;DR Ebola does not survive contact with modern medical care.

Finding an ISIS Training Camp An interesting pook at how ground photos and satellite imagery analysis works.

GITenberg If you can't tell from the name, a collaborative digital library for books, rooted in Git.

Announcement: Readers who feel threatened by equality no longer welcome

LightMode - Electroluminescent Motorcycle Helmets An LED kit to light up your motorcycle helmets. Great for visiblity or that Tron look.

SMS Racing A time trial arcade racer that captures the “thrill” of texting and driving.

Don’t do what you love "Do what you love" is a privilege only afforded to a few.

Amazon doing what it must for the good of Valhalla

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