A couple drawings… I was visiting a relative a couple years ago. My poor cousin (the CEO of an insurance company) had been sold the Agile Silver Bullet ™ and was pissed. He said something like: It’s a
Views When writing software, consider both the implementation and the architecture of the code. The software you write is most effective when written in a way that logically makes sense. In addition t
Over the past six months I’ve had the opportunity to work on a simple PWA using Vue . To speed up the learning curve we brought in Eduardo San Martin Morote , a Vue core contributor, to help us on the
I’m home, but I can’t sleep . My parents are away, so my grandmother is babysitting. We’re sharing a room, and she’s snoring loud and hard. I’m only seven, but I’m a serious child, awake with anxiety.
Terence Eden, open standards lead at GDS This year’s cross-government open source meetup in October covered many interesting topics, from documenting code best practices to changing an organisation’s
Technology is just another human creation—like religion or government or sports or money. It's not perfect, and it never will be. But it's still a miracle. Nerds, we did it. We have graduated, along w
“Sunny day flooding” is flooding where water comes right up from the ground, hence the name, and yes, it can certainly rain during sunny day flooding, and yes, that makes it worse. Sunny day flooding
Stories from the frontlines of Agile and Digital Transformations Inês Almeida Jun 16, 2018 · 22 min read Business agility is the ability of an organisation to sense changes internally or externally an
In January this year Charity Majors wrote Engineering Management: The Pendulum or the Ladder as a follow up to The Engineer/Manager Pendulum . It's a great article with a realist lens on the career pa
In the battle for Kobane on the Syrian border everyone talks about the enemy - IS - and the frightening ideas that drive them. No-one talks about the Kurdish defenders and what inspires them. But the
Some of the first people to be called “engineers” operated siege engines. A siege engine is a very old device used to tear down the walls of an enemy city. Depending on the century and the army it mig
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
A team stumbled and hacked its way through the jungle. The group had a vague idea of where they were headed and what they would find there. Days before, search planes flying high above the Andean foothills had spotted the debris of a crashed helicopter dotting a steep, rocky slope. Reaching the…
Listening to Steely Dan’s Gaucho . 1. The cover of Steely Dan’s 1975 LP Katy Lied shows an out-of-focus praying mantis floating amid bulbous plants. I used to stare at it as a kid, listening to the record in my dad’s leather reading chair and wondering who this “Steely” was. He sounded sort of like…
Please note that this piece contains a bit of swearing. The seventh of May 1931 was a hot, dusty day in the mountain town of Corbin, Kentucky. Alongside a dirt road, a service station manager named Matt Stewart stood on a ladder painting a cement railroad wall. His application of a fresh coat of…
In his 1977 book “A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction”,Christopher Alexander defined ways to architect physical spaces toenhance and support how people interact. This concept was veryinfluential in software development, leading to the popularization ofsoftware design patterns , which…
Something happens to a novel as it ages, but what? It doesn’t ripen or deepen in the manner of cheese and wine, and it doesn’t fall apart, at least not figuratively. Fiction has no half-life. We age alongside the novels we’ve read, and only one of us is actively deteriorating. Which is to say that a…
About The Author Vitaly Friedman loves beautiful content and doesn’t like to give in easily. When he is not writing or speaking at a conference, he’s most probably running …More about Vitaly … August 19, 2015 From Russia With Love: Behind The Responsive Redesign Of Kremlin.ru Upgrade your inbox and…
Note: My first novel, Farisa’s Crossing, will be released in early 2020.
Agility is a good thing, no doubt, and the Agile Manifesto isn’t unreasonable. Compared to a straw-man practice called “Waterfall”, Agile is notably superior. Yet, so much of Agile as-practiced is deeply harmful, and I don’t…
Idle Words > Talks > What Happens Next Will Amaze You This is the text version of a talk I gave on September 14, 2015, at the FREMTIDENS INTERNET conference in Copenhagen, Denmark. Good morning! Today's talk is being filmed, recorded and transcribed, and everything I say today will leave an…
Stewart Butterfield Feb 17, 2014 The memo below was sent to the team at Tiny Speck, the makers of Slack , on July 31st, 2013 . It had been a little under seven months since development began and was two weeks before the launch of Slack’s ‘Preview Release’. It is presented verbatim, as written…
Page speed is increasingly important for websites. If you’re looking for a page load time benchmark for your site, this is it: users expect pages to load in two seconds, and after three seconds, up to 40% of users will abandon your site. Moreover, 85% of mobile users expect sites to load at least as…
Idle Words > Talks > Web Design: The First 100 Years This is the expanded version of a talk I gave on September 9, 2014 , at the HOW Interactive Design conference in Washington, DC. Designers! I am a San Francisco computer programmer, but I come in peace! I would like to start with a parable about…
“HELL YEAH WE'RE USING @SlackHQ AT WORK I. LOVE. SLACK.” “Dear @SlackHQ, I love you. Yours, Dan” “@SlackHQ YOU COMPLETE ME” You’ve probably heard about Slack’s exponential growth. And you may have read how the internal-communication platform — now just two years old — is already used by more than…
“So much of our manufactured environment testifies to carelessness,” Ive says. Things are “developed to be different, not better.” Photograph by Pari Dukovic I. Launch Day In recent months, Sir Jonathan Ive, the forty-seven-year-old senior vice-president of design at Apple—who used to play rugby in…
Eddie Huang Credit Nathanael Turner for The New York Times On a cold, dark street in Tijuana, Mexico, I asked Eddie Huang a question that many people were sure to ask him in the months to come. “What did you expect?” For the past week in December, Huang had been venting about his tortured…
Recommendations Like iOS 7 before it, Yosemite is an aesthetic one-way valve . Though the new appearance is not particularly radical, it’s so comprehensive that it quickly establishes itself as the new normal. Switching back to Mavericks after a week or two in Yosemite is like returning to iOS 6.…
There are many valuable lessons to glean from Code Red_, Steven Brill’s Time Magazine cover story on the rescue of healthcare.gov. For those calling out Silicon Valley for its apparent narcissism, there is a reminder of those who dropped everything to work practically 24/7 to save the Affordable…
Even 28 years after his last hit, Michael McDonald can still trigger laughter and tears. Though he's still a fixture on the R&B/soft rock nostalgia circuit ( catch him with Toto and Kenny Loggins this summer), that sui generis voice has been touring without him, so to speak, for decades. Recently,…
On the Nature of Digital Transformation: 10 Observations A few things I’ve noticed about how technology works I’ve had a long relationship with digital technology. First simply as a user, then as a novice developer and designer, and always as a curious observer. Over that time I’ve become…
“I Pretty Much Grew Up Going To Sun Ra’s House”: an Interview With Fhloston Paradigm | Thump The VICE Channels words May 28, 2014 4:45 PM By Lauren Martin As cult UK label Hyperdub celebrates its 10th birthday this summer, even a cursory look back through the years shows up some of the most…
I am sat in the basement of a hotel on the outskirts of Munich; the sort of hotel that must have sprung up fully-formed overnight, a massive swelling of glittering commerce emerging from the abandoned building sites and car parks and motorways that ring the city.
In the months leading up to the hunt, Dylan Mayer trained twice a week in his parents’ swimming pool, asking friends to attack him, splay their arms and grab him, drag him to the surface and shove him below it, pull off his mask, snatch his regulator, time his recovery. By last Halloween, he was…
The 55 miles from Campbell to San Francisco make for one of the nicest commutes anywhere. The journey mostly zips along the Junipero Serra Freeway, a grand and remarkably empty highway that abuts the east side of the Santa Cruz Mountains. It is one of the best places in Silicon Valley to spot a…
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