Labnotes

Published

Weekend Reading — Sets a Pokelure in the meeting room

Design Objective

Complexion Reduction: A New Trend in Design IMO this new fashion trend makes apps easier to use:

The defining characteristics of this hot new trend sweeping across Silicon Valley are:

  1. Bigger, bolder headlines
  2. Simpler more universal icons
  3. Extraction of color

How much interface does your analytics product need? This is the approach we took with our product at Broadly, and customers are loving it:

By optimizing towards more lightweight use cases — e.g., monitoring and reporting, rather than exploration and data mining — we can remove the user from a lot of the work that needs to happen.

A designer’s guide to Parkinson’s Law of Triviality What to do when your team is focused on unimportant details.

Snapchat and the Art of Upstreaming What every consumer application can learn from Snapchat:

And that’s what Snapchat gets that nobody else does. You’re making a product for humans, not scientists. The average user doesn’t care about full resolution 6MB images saved on their camera roll backed up to Dropbox/Google Photos etc. Camera rolls are the new cutting room floor. The best photos already found their way to Instagram months ago, leaving behind a mess of duplicates, blurry outtakes, and screenshots.

Nine Nasty UX Truths "Utter lunacy"?

What this means for you, as a designer, is that you must keep close to your coders, try as much as possible to anticipate the anxieties that will besiege them, and keep them from derailing the experience with utter lunacy.

The UX Secret That Will Ruin Apps For You "Facebook servers crunch your data in milliseconds, but the user interface takes longer to load. That's by design."

Designing complex products How to keep product complexity down:

Complexity in product design tends to rear its head in two ways 1) the complexity of managing people and opinions. And 2) the complexity of designing the product itself.

The Future of Browser History Re-designing the browser history to reflect how we actually search for answers.

@jglovier "We changed from a declared font, to a native system stack. Twitter reactions in a nutshell lol:"


Tools of the Trade

HyperTerm Hackable terminal emulator, using HTML/CSS/JS.

Marp There are plenty of tools that let you author presentations in plain text/markdown, Merp comes with an editor that offers live preview and PDF export.

netdata Real time performance monitoring. This projects gets data presentation right on so many levels.

alindeman/zonebie Randomly assigns a timezone on every test run: a chaos monkey for all your time-handling code.

awslabs/chalice Amazon's own Python serverless microframework.

How to make your own bittorrent client in Node.

@csswizardry "For when crem on its own just doesn’t seem to work."


Webdev

A Comprehensive Guide to Font Loading Strategies Everything you wanted to know about font-display, pre-loading, data URI fonts, FOUT/FOFT and more.

Coding mobile-first emails CampaignMonitor explains all the hacks they use to deliver responsive emails that work in all the popular clients.

ChromeLens Chrome DevTools extension to develop for the visually impaired – as in 4% of your site visitors/app users.

@sgharms "CSS"


Lines of Code

@deadprogram

"nil leads to panic. Panic leads to fear. Fear leads to functional programming" -- @francesc #gophercon


Architectural

Race conditions on the web

The goal of this blog post is to raise awareness about race condition attacks in both developers and security people, because I feel like not many know about this kind of bug

@ewolff

If you think those complex conspiracies are for real: join an IT project and see even the simplest plans fail.


Peopleware

How A/B Testing at LinkedIn, Wealthfront and eBay Made Me a Better Manager

A/B testing does more than elevate products faster — it does the same for teams. Using universal A/B testing as a management tool sends a message to PMs of all stripes: intelligently tested ideas will rise to the top, regardless of who thinks of them.

This Is Your Brain on Silence Contrary to popular belief, peace and quiet is all about the noise in your head.

@SwiftOnSecurity

*sets a Pokelure in the meeting room*

"Okay everybody who wants to learn about the employee handbook on data security"


Techtopia

Pokemon Go and the Traveling Salesman Problem Pokemon maps are popping up all over the Web! It is hunting season for the traveling salesman problem.

@_woahaydrian "Idk if I should catch it or apologize"


Locked Doors

@SwiftOnSecurity

If you ever anticipate having to give your phone up for a legitimate but limited reason, enable Guided Access, which locks them to that app.


None of the Above

Two Types of Travelers There are two types of travelers in the world, which one are you?

Optimal Stopping How to find the perfect apartment, partner, and parking spot without searching forever.

Nintendo Classic Mini The NES revived, this time with HDMI, USB, preloaded with 30 games. Launching in November.

How Samantha Bee Crashed the Late-Night Boys' Club

Bee took the same approach to hiring writers, creating a blind application process that didn't favor people who'd already had success. (It spelled out, for example, how scripts should look when submitted, leveling the playing field for the uninitiated.) Lo and behold, she ended up with a writers' room that looked kind of like America: 50 percent female; 30 percent nonwhite

Everything we love to eat is a scam With little of no supervision, and misleading labeling laws, what you think you're eating is probably something else.

Emails From A CEO Who Just Has A Few Changes To The Website Truth.

How technology disrupted the truth What it means when institutions like journalism crumble.

The Origin of Florida Man: The World’s Worst Superhero What's behind the prolific public life of Florida man?

German Race Car Driver Uses Eye Tracking Goggles to Reveal How F1 Drivers See the Track That's super human response time.

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