And by ‘we’ I mean ‘you’. 📗 Will’s forthcoming book ‘101 UX Principles’ which is available to pre-order now on Kindle, eBook and in paperback. In this post I’m going to argue that we, as a generation of designers and developers, have failed. Failed spectacularly. Failed to make interfaces that are…

There’s a colorless, odorless, and largely benign gas that humanity just can’t get enough of. We produce 40 trillion kg of carbon dioxide each year, and we’re on track to cross a crucial emissions threshold that will cause global temperature rise to pass the dangerous 2°C limit set by the Paris…

J ustin Rosenstein had tweaked his laptop’s operating system to block Reddit, banned himself from Snapchat, which he compares to heroin, and imposed limits on his use of Facebook . But even that wasn’t enough. In August, the 34-year-old tech executive took a more radical step to restrict his use of…

When I was in college I took two intro economics courses: macroeconomics and microeconomics. Macro was full of theories like “low unemployment causes inflation” that never quite stood up to reality. But the micro stuff was both cool and useful. It was full of interesting concepts about the…

Seventy-eight-year-old Mauro Morandi often walks along the rocky shores of Budelli Island and looks out over the disconsolate sea, feeling dwarfed by the phantom forces that tug and twist the tides. “We think we are giants that can dominate the Earth, but we’re just mosquitos,” Morandi says. In 1989…

It’s time to kill the web S omething is going on. The people are unhappy. The spectre of civil unrest stalks our programming communities. For the first time, a meaningful number of developers are openly questioning the web platform. Here’s a representative article and discussion . Here’s another .…

The work world as we know it is changing, and with it how we interact. Say hello to what’s next. F irst let’s start with this: America has long worked as a place people can find good jobs and build a stable life in large part because of its raw size — there’s so much space here that plenty of good…

America’s transportation economy and landscape is about to be utterly transformed into a world beyond driving. Or drivers. Or even car mechanics. Enjoy the ride. Let’s get right to the punch line: a very strong case can be made, and will be below, that within 15 years virtually all vehicular traffic…

One of the most profound consequences of the information age is the ability to do so many things while ignoring location. I no longer need to visit most shops, libraries, or travel agents. (I'm looking forward to the day I don't have to visit a dentist.) Most of the world has seen this, but it's…

Why Agile Isn’t Working and What We Do Differently Agile started off as a set of values . Values are subtle and abstract, so as agile spread, what spread wasn’t the values but the practice of working in cycles. Cycles are easy to explain and easy to copy. People in our industry think they stopped…

Credit: anoldent via Flickr Every now and then during the workweek—usually around three in the afternoon—a familiar ache begins to saturate my forehead and pool in my temples. The glare of my computer screen appears to suddenly intensify. My eyes trace the contour of the same sentence two or three…

Blade Runner (1982) is a magnificent film, but there’s something odd about it. The heroine, Rachael, seems to be a beautiful young woman. In reality, she’s a piece of technology — an organic robot designed by the Tyrell Corporation. She has a lifelike mind, imbued with memories extracted from a…

The Attention Merchants: From the Daily Newspaper to Social Media, How Our Time and Attention Is Harvested and Sold by Tim Wu Atlantic, 416 pp, £20.00, January 2017, ISBN 978 1 78239 482 2 Chaos Monkeys: Inside the Silicon Valley Money Machine by Antonio García Martínez Ebury, 528 pp, £8.99, June…

“Thankfully perseverance is a good substitute for talent.” — Steve Martin “If you get one idea out of a $20 book that changes your life then it’s a bargain,” — Seth Godin On my 39th birthday I reserved two hours for myself and did something I had always wanted to do, I sat down and made a list of…

“You want to see some old media?” Alan Kay grins beneath his gray mustache and leads me through his Brentwood home. It’s a nice place with a tennis court out back, but given the upper-crust Los Angeles neighborhood it sits in, it’s hardly ostentatious. He shares it with his wife, Bonnie MacBird, the…

R. Kikuo Johnson Updated on December 28, 2017 “You are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts.” — Daniel Patrick Moynihan — “We risk being the first people in history to have been able to make their illusions so vivid, so persuasive, so ‘realistic’ that they can…

Wikipedia, one of the last remaining pillars of the open and decentralized web, is in existential crisis. This has nothing to do with money. A couple of years ago, the site launched a panicky fundraising campaign, but ironically thanks to Donald Trump, Wikipedia has never been as wealthy or…

The history of Apple being doomed doesn’t necessarily repeat, but it does rhyme. Take the latest installment , from Professor Mohanbir Sawhney at the Kellogg School of Management (one of my former professors, incidentally): Have we reached peak phone? That is, does the new iPhone X represent a…

Mint/Getty Images Almost a year ago, the Indian government rolled out an unprecedented policy move. Arguably, it was a time when the country was poised for economic success. With $9.49 trillion in purchasing power parity , it was the third-largest (in PPP terms) and the fastest-growing large economy…

In 1929 John Maynard Keynes predicted that by 2029 people in the developed nations could enjoy a perfectly civilised standard of living while working for 16 hours a week. His hope was for our precious hours of extra leisure to be devoted to such edifying pursuits as playing Grand Theft Auto and…

Techniques, strategies and recipes for building a modern web app with multiple teams using different JavaScript frameworks . What are Micro Frontends? The term Micro Frontends first came up in ThoughtWorks Technology Radar at the end of 2016. It extends the concepts of micro services to the frontend…

How we listen to and love our music I remember walking into the record shop. It was located in an odd spot, a strip mall in Orange County (as if there’s anything else there?). But the selection of house music was superior for Southern California. They even had a small UK Garage section where I…

Netscape 6.0 is finally going into its first public beta. There never was a version 5.0. The last major release, version 4.0, was released almost three years ago. Three years is an awfully long time in the Internet world. During this time, Netscape sat by, helplessly, as their market share…

“We were so hungry, we licked the margarine wrappers.” In the summer of 1975, my father and his two brothers loaded into an old truck and headed for Alaska, a fabled land for a teenage troupe of New England climbers. A mentor had shown them a faded photograph of the remote Arrigetch Peaks, in the…

Beginning with the most important skill of the 21st century Photo by — Unsplash E veryone is very busy these days. There is just so much going on with our personal and professional lives. On top of it, lo and behold, something like artificial intelligence starts to gather steam and you learn that…

In the internet era, consumers seem increasingly resigned to giving up fundamental aspects of their privacy for convenience in using their phones and computers, and have grudgingly accepted that being monitored by corporations and even governments is just a fact of modern life. In fact, internet…

Do you have a long list of goals, desires, and wants for your life? Do you want to learn more? Earn more? Improve your skills? Get the most out of your relationships? Live better? All those things are good. Life is about moving forward and making consistent progress. However, there’s one important…

Photo courtesy of Mitchell Jordan The beauty of getting older, is that if you pay attention, patterns will emerge. Below are the 38 most glaring. 1 . There are no words more powerful than, “I saw this and thought of you.” An unexpected gift at an unexpected time is the way into a persons heart. 2 .…

Last month, the right-wing media personality Mike Cernovich announced that he was conducting a ‘‘big pivot’’ away from the fringes of the news ecosystem. The move was unexpected, as Cernovich had carved out a comfortable niche for himself — railing against coastal elites and feminism, peddling…

[Update: A Google spokesperson reached out to say. "We have not asked Code Club or its board to refrain from criticisng us." Code Club also published a blog post stating, "We are not under any obligation to endorse any of the products or services of our corporate funders."] One of the founding…

The coffee scale that I bought at a steal while I was in Hong Kong. When I was in Hong Kong last October, I bought a coffee weighing scale for HK$98 from a cafe. While I was at it, I bought a cup of filter coffee for HK$78. I remember weighing scales that can weigh to a precision of 0.1g don’t come…

I hate to admit it. But reading this column will make you stupider. No, it’s not that what I have to say is particularly obtuse. It’s that you’re reading this piece online, where you are presented a dizzying amount of options: click here, watch this, share that. These may seem like trivial…

Ever since I can remember, I’ve been told to strive for balance. Yet I’ve noticed something interesting: The times in my life during which I’ve felt happiest and most alive are also the times that I’ve been the most unbalanced . Falling in love. Writing a book. Trekking in the Himalayas. Training to…

Are we saving the planet in spite of ourselves? is this all you need? So here’s a provocative idea that sounds nuts, but is totally true — we appear to be reaching Peak Stuff, on a planetary scale. Hidden in plain sight, macro downward trends in the amount of stuff owned, used, and consumed are…

I was reading one of those interesting facts posts on past accomplished writers, artists, etc. and one of them read “Stephen King has written at least 65 full-length books and about 200 short stories.” The number is astounding. The time commitment unfathomable for most. Now, for me, the time for…