Published
Weekend Reading — Oddly Satisfying
Brand New Roman "Brand New Roman is the most corporate Corporate Font ever created! Now all your content can be sponsored content, and sponsored by everybody!"
Design Objective
The ultimate guide to proper use of animation in UX This article makes good use of animation, to illustrate how to make good use of animation in application/web design.
Dan Duett Absolutely:
Scott Belsky:
“The Product Life Cycle”: (1) Customers flock to a simple product, (2) Product adds new features to serve customers + grow biz, (3) Product gets complicated, (4) Customers flock to simple product. 😩Dan Duett:
A product leader's job is to yield to complexity as slowly as possible.
Paul Boag Which law talks about the meetings, stakeholder feedback, and endless design revisions, that result in these websites:
Hick's law states that there is a predictable increase in the time it takes somebody to decide, as the number of options goes up. Yet we regularly bombard users with options on our websites.
Ha Phan Where do meatballs fit in this analogy?
Somebody told me that the 2nd floor of IKEA with the faux rooms is Browse and the 1st floor with the warehouse is Search. That is spot on. Browse is aspirational. Search is about having direct control.
Tools of the Trade
Serverless Docker Beta While there are tools that make serverless platforms easier to use (*cough*AWS Lambda*cough*), Zeit made their serverless platform so easy to use, you don't need additional tooling. It's super easy to configure, effortless to deploy, got all the right features, natively supports Node/Go/Rust, and Docker. And their Node micro framework is a blast to use.
nicbravo "This is Skype White. It’s the white noise that Skype inserts into every side of every call, just loud enough that the listener knows that the line is still connected. It’s a repeating pattern. (Visualized in iZotope RX)"
Nick Craver It's been many years since I SQL-ed, so I had to think about this for a second, but sounds right:
Related fun fact: “I would walk 500 miles, and I would walk 500 more…” was the first song to really popularize SQL. Their message about a massive commit failure and equally long rollback resonated with many people.
SMTP over GDPR
Web-End
A Crisis of Permissions On the current state of browser permissions:
The web needs to be naturally resistant to these kinds of abuse, harassment and privacy violation. Anti-abuse measures must be built into a permissions standard to stop bad actors.
Architectural
Notes to myself on software engineering Fantastic stuff. Go read, bookmark for later, share with your team:
- The most powerful mental models are modular and hierarchical: simple at a high level, yet precise as you need to go into details. In the same way, a good API is modular and hierarchical: easy to approach, yet expressive. There is a balance to strike between having complex signatures on fewer objects, and having more objects with simpler signatures. A good API has a reasonable number of objects, with reasonably simple signatures.
jordwalke "Immutability: A story in three acts."
Lines of Code
Cindy Sridharan Hardest problem in computer science is getting good at naming things:
The chapter on naming from the book “The Philosophy of Software Design” has so many quotable lines:
- names are a form of abstraction: they provide a simplified way of thinking about a more complex underlying entity
- names of Boolean variables should always be predicates
Ethan Lee "Someone sent this to me last night and now you have to look at it too"
Peopleware
Top 5 lessons learned working at startups Some things to consider, if you're working at, or looking to work at a startup.
The Peter Principle is a joke taken seriously. Is it true? I'm not seriously suggesting this is a good strategy, but maybe it will lead the path to a creative idea:
If performance at one level of a hierarchy is uncorrelated with performance at the next level up, the best strategy is simply to promote the very worst people. Nobody knows whether they will make good managers, but at least they will no longer be dreadful staff — or as Dogbert in the cartoon strip Dilbert put it back in 1995: “Leadership is nature’s way of removing morons from the productive flow.”
Just saw the CAP theorem used on people: “I guess you must be available and fault tolerant - because you certainly are not consistent”
Techtopia
josef 💤
is "dream about your smartphone screen breaking" the new "dream about your teeth falling out"
Internet of Shit (hint: this company uses yellow for its logo)
Oh it's just the terms of service of all the apps printed on the ground
I like that the long one is from the company that uh 'deletes' your photos
Locked Doors
Vess I'm posting this because not too long ago, someone asked me about one of those John McAfee scam apps, based on an ad that took too much credit for McAfee's history at McAfee. So here's what you need to know:
OK, folks, I hear that John McAfee claims to have invented cyber security. (I don't know; he has blocked me.)
Gather 'round the fire, kids, for a short story, because I was around at the time.
A Deceitful 'Doctor' in the Mac App Store Reminder that downloading apps from the Mac Store is generally safer than a random website. But it is not absolutely safe. This article tears into one of these, Adware Doctor, which ranks 1st in the Mac App Store paid utilities category, yet will steal your browser history.
So We Got Tracked Anyway Now that many browsers block third-party cookies, the next surveillance trick is using TLS sessions:
As Facebook isn't as pervasively present in all of the web, it went even further. It is enough for you to visit any website bearing a Like button every second day to allow Facebook to profile you, even if you never dreamt of logging into that service.
None of the Above
Ian Laking "I 100% subscribe to this philosophy"
Cheish Hell yeah:
Mother: can you please fix my computer
Me: *leans back in chair* well... well ... well ... if it isn’t Miss ‘Get Off That Computer’ Years 1994 to 2006
ziphi renata Some languages you can learn quickly:
I’ve been trying to learn how to speak Dog. So far it seems like everything translates to, “Are you gonna eat that?”
Sofía Martínez-Villalpando "Dogs herding sheep 🐑🐑🐑 via Tysonism."
don hertzfeldt Someone invent a device for listening to cat dreams!
my cat probably dreams about me. and in his dreams, i’m probably talking to him, like i always do. so when he dreams, his subconscious must simulate a gibberish cat version of the english language for him to hear and i really want to know what that sounds like.
Trammell Hudson Also known as "2 hours".
Michael 🤔
You know those silly critiques of anti-capitalism, like "You can't critique capitalism, you have a smartphone!"
I wonder why they don't ever use the critique that would actually work on me: "You can't critique capitalism, you're really looking forward to your free birthday month gift as a member of the Sephora rewards program!"
I mean if I'm going to tear down capitalism I want to look good for the public beheadings.
Zack Kanter I'll take Fortnite, thank you very much:
Fortnite is impressive, but it’s absolutely dwarfed by the world’s largest video game, LinkedIn, played exclusively by 40-50 year old white guys who compete by sending random connection requests in a quest to build the furthest-reaching “professional network.”
Birdnesting... The little one …
My nephew works in the North Sea on a wind farm project he sent me this today -
‘Had this hawk chasing this bird around a boat yesterday. The hawk flew into the window and knocked it’s self out, the bird it was chasing then landed on the hawk. #lad ‘
Burrill Strong When people are asking for the simplest sorting algorithm:
What do we want?
NOW
A SOCIAL MEDIA FEED PRESENTED IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER
When do we want it?
Existential Comics How come there's no emoji for garlic?
Tips for people new to cooking:
- Use more garlic.
- Every online recipe lies to you about how much garlic to use.
- One clove? Are you fucking kidding me? I can't even taste it.
- I want my whole mouth to taste like garlic for a week.
Jevholution This is all about representation. And they captured it on YouTube.
i noticed there was a blank wall at mcdonald’s so i decided to make this fake poster of me and my friend. It’s now been 51 days since i hung it up.
Nieman Lab Here's your periodic reminder that issues trending on social media are not a reflection of public opinion:
"A full 93 percent of tweets about vaccines are generated by accounts whose provenance can be verified as neither bots nor human users yet who exhibit malicious behaviors."
Mystery of the cargo ships that sink when their cargo suddenly liquefies On average, ten “solid bulk cargo” carriers are lost at sea each year, because liquefaction.
Oddly Satisfying Vol. 4 These CGI short loops are oddly and inexplicably satisfying to watch.