Today, you probably know Nicholas Felton best for his most widely seen work, Facebook’s Timeline. But since 2005, he’s been working on a cult-favorite project all his own, the annual Feltron Report. The 2012 version is out now for $28.
As always, the report is a meticulously documented year in…
A question that inevitably comes up very early in the process of designing a new app is this: should the interface refer to the user as “your” or “my” when talking about the user’s stuff, as in “my profile” or “your settings”? For a long time, this question ate at my soul. Which is right? The answer…
/' // . // |\//7 /' " \ . . . | ( \ | '._ ' / \'-' A mystical CSS icon solution grunticon is a Grunt.js task that makes it easy to manage icons and background images for all devices, preferring HD (retina) SVG icons but also provides fallback support for standard definition browsers, and old…
Recently I internationalized a Node/Express web application that I’ve been working on and it seems to have gone fairly well (users in multiple languages are using it happily and I’m seeing a marked increase in traffic because of it!). Not much of what I’m writing up here is particular to Node, per…
Twelve years ago, Buster Benson started tracking how different web links affected his mood (the Morale-O-Meter!), and he was surprised to find that other people were interested in his data. In this inspiring video, Buster shares some snapshots of what he has tracked over the past several years,…
Over the years, I’ve been in and out of relationships with dozens of film cameras, Pentax, Canon, Nikon, Minolta and others, as a result of my passion for photography.
In the late 1990s, after college, I snapped so many photos that I ended up building a 5-by-6-foot darkroom in the corner of my…
You should take time to design your URL structure. If there’s one thing I hope you remember after reading this article it’s to take time to design your URL structure. Don’t leave it up to your framework. Don’t leave it up to chance. Think about it and craft an experience. URL Design is a complex…
Windmills have always fascinated me and for a long time I was dreaming of one day building my own. Where I live there are still machines from the 1600’s that are just as magnificent today as when they were first built. When you see one standing in a field rotating and converting passing air into…
April 2012
A palliative care nurse called Bronnie Ware made a list of the biggest regrets of the dying. Her list seems plausible. I could see myself—can see myself—making at least 4 of these 5 mistakes.
If you had to compress them into a single piece of advice, it might be: don’t be a cog. The 5…
Adam Savage's talk at Maker Faire Bay Area 2012. Adam tells a great story about his Indiana Jones hat, how he got started building his obsessions, and why makers should embrace the things that they have no choice but to make.
Flickr is somewhat unique in that it uses a code repository with no branches; everything is checked into head, and head is pushed to production several times a day. This works well for bug fixes that we want to go out immediately, but presents a problem when we’re working on a new feature that takes…
Vimeo “We shape our tools and our tools shape us.” As more of the tools we live with every day become digital instead of physical, our opportunity — and responsibility — as designers is multiplying. We live in a world of screens, and we are the ones who decide what goes on them. We are in a unique…
Adam Lisagor is the undisputed king of the pan flute. Famous for his triple-tongue staccato technique that allows him to play three times faster than the average pan flutist, he is known worldwide as “The Speed of Light”. He is also the only artist who can play G major diatonic instrument…
I am always amazed about the lack of support for progressive enhancement on the web. Whenever you mention it, you face a lot of “yeah, but…” and you feel having to defend something that should be ingrained in the DNA of anyone who works on the web. When explaining progressive enhancement in the past…
While some folk will argue that verbose code aids readability, I think almost the opposite, and in this post I’m going to list some basic tips for minimising redundant clutter in your code. JavaScript is a fun language at its core — it’s worth learning the tiny details.
I hope this post is useful to…
August 9th, 2011 by Rich Armstrong
Okay, let’s just assume that you’ve bought into the idea that a happy developer requires a clean, attractive, comfortable workplace that encourages healthy, sustainable productivity.
You don’t want to do this piecemeal. You asked for a big monitor and you got it.…
It started with a question. It always does. This time, the question was simple: How much sunscreen should I wear?
I’m a pale geek who burns. I wanted to know the optimal. A simple question with a simple answer, right?
Wrong.
This simple question took me on a massive journey through the data,…
stratified by perceived importance. There’s no shit work when the work is all yours, there’s just work you like to do and work you have to do.
Occasional stints on the latter are a good perspective reset for everyone on the team, but being left too long on “have to” work is a guarantee of eventual…
I'm just back from judging Google's first Science Fair for kids 13 to 18 at its corporate headquarters in California (yes, those are tomatoes growing in the foreground).
Google's famous food program
Why famous? It is:
On this last point, the recycling program is comprehensive and the campus is…
The Typemock Insider Blog: The Difference Between Unit Testing and Integration Testing This Page has been moved to new address The Difference Between Unit Testing and Integration Testing Sorry for inconvenience... Redirection provided by
pua is a simple web application that shows you new photos from your contacts from Flickr as they are uploaded and older photos when they are updated. It can also show you new photos that your contacts have faved.
pua is just a web page, like any other. You can use it in any modern browser on the…
Posted on June 30, 2011.
For the past year and a half or so I’ve been working full-time at Dumbwaiter Design doing Django development. I’ve picked up a bunch of useful tricks along the way that help me work, and I figured I’d share them.
I’m sure there are better ways to do some of the things that I…
g introduced to the concept of postal cake. I found myself wondering, in all seriousness, if I might have done better at University had I, rather than baking through my revision schedule, kept my head down a
Nothing wrecks your living room decor quite like a giant, rented hospital bed.
The one my Dad laid in for a couple months in the fall of 1974 was an alarmingly stiff and sturdy affair, the frame of which was forged of impossibly heavy iron, with half a dozen jaggy coats of putty-flesh latex paint…
adrian