Things I Like
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I am frightened sometimes by the thought that a student would complain again like he did in 2009. Only this time it would be a student accusing me not of saying something too ideologically extreme — be it communism or racism or whatever — but of not being sensitive enough toward his feelings, of some simple act of indelicacy that's considered tantamount to physical assault. As Northwestern University professor Laura Kipnis writes, "Emotional discomfort is [now] regarded as equivalent to material injury, and all injuries have to be remediated." Hurting a student's feelings, even in the course of instruction that is absolutely appropriate and respectful, can now get a teacher into serious trouble.
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That's the culture: the on-board shuttle group produces grown-up software, and the way they do it is by being grown-ups. It may not be sexy, it may not be a coding ego-trip — but it is the future of software. When you're ready to take the next step — when you have to write perfect software instead of software that's just good enough — then it's time to grow up.
This whole article is fantastic and I am grateful to Rob for the link. I had a hard time picking out a quote, so picked the above, but there is also a fantastic section on mistakes and how a mistake isn't owned by one person since the team reviewed code and it was allowed to get to the point of error. I really like that idea, the idea of things being a team effort, truly. And the rise of Gitblame, in my opinion, can be harmful for the team attitude when it comes to writing software.
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It’s routine from the cockpit to see storms form in real time, and from them the fall of new rain on the roof of the ocean, or to overfly the endpoints of glaciers, where shards of the ancient snow-glass tumble into the police-light blue of northern seas. When, after long hours over desert or sparsely inhabited land a city appears, the water we see near it — lakes, dams, rivers locked in their rolling green frames of vegetation — looks holy as blood.
I really love this piece and the way the pilot describes his point of view on flying. So very different from what we experience in our seats. I've started to be much more nervous about flying lately and it coincides with having to do it more than ever, so it was nice to be reminded of the amazing parts of it all.
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This is a great podcast on how tech was used in the 2012 US Presidential election. But more than that, I really love the way Harper Reed talks about how we talk about tech. He makes so many great points, so much to think about.
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The "web" is not a part of nature. It was not discovered; we don't have to just accept it. The "web" is an infrastructural system that was built by people, and it was built very recently and very sloppily. It currently has the property that it forgets what must be remembered, and remembers what must be forgotten. It manages to screw up both the sacredness of the common record and the sacredness of private interaction.
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Whereas the mega-machine operated by violent means—forcibly divorcing the human-cogs of identity and absorbing their productive and creative energies through wage or slave labor—the mega-algorithm doubles back and promises you reunification with this alienated self through “authentic” (or “creative” or “social”) work completed on your own time. We are sold a desirable narrative about the wealth of networks, decentralized production, cognitive surplus, collaborative consumption, social engagement, and instant convenience. The techno-utopic discourses of emancipation and community that surround the technologies and sociopolitics that make up the mega-algorithm serve as an effective ideological veil, which shrouds the practices of exploitation and control. Don’t think of yourself as an overworked, underpaid laborer trying to hustle for a paycheck. No, you’re actually an entrepreneurial individual, building your personal brand and finding (or making) your niche in the marketplace.
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You want some advice: stop reading advice articles. Advice from someone you do not know is not advice at all it’s just another opinion (yes I realize the irony of that sentence). Do you really need more opinions in your life? Formulate your opinions from doing, not from reading how others do.
I wish two things: one, that people would write articles with more caring and not as if they are law and two, that we would be able to read them that way instead of feeling like we are doing something wrong.
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It’s time to recognise that this is the wrong approach. We shouldn’t try to compete with native apps in terms set by the native apps. Instead, we should concentrate on the unique web selling points: its reach, which, more or less by definition, encompasses all native platforms, URLs, which are fantastically useful and don’t work in a native environment, and its hassle-free quality.
YES! This is the key part of that quote for me “concentrate on the unique web selling points”—let's start concentrating on the parts of the web that are unique. As my friend Jason Grigsby has said time and time again, you can't link into a native app, but you can link to the web
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There needs to be a cultural change in how we approach building for the web. Yes, some of the tools we choose are part of the problem, but the bigger problem is that performance still isn’t being recognised as the most important factor in how people feel about websites (and by extension, the web). This isn’t just a developer issue. It’s a design issue. It’s a UX issue. It’s a business issue. Performance is everybody’s collective responsibility.
I've been thinking a lot about the topic of performance on the web and how to change culture. I hear a lot of people talk about the need for culture change, but I hear very little about how the developer who cares goes about doing that. So, while I'm grateful people are talking about performance so much, I wish a little bit of that conversation focused more on the how of culture change.
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And web developers? Stop buying into the ‘native is better’ myth. (It’s just different.) Progressive enhancement has never been an optional extra and it’s high time you make sure that your managers and your CEOs know that.
Last one on this topic, promise. But the writing and the compilation of quotes is just so good.
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The thing about this idea of consent is that it implies that simply being somewhere—entering a space, looking around, staying there for however long—is indicative of consenting to whatever happens in that space. If you didn’t consent, you would just leave, right? But that neglects the possibility that you might need to be in that space, that you might be obligated to be there, while also disagreeing with all or some of what is going on.
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The movement toward toolchains and ever more libraries to do ever less useful things has become hysterical, and with every day that passes I’m more happy with my 2006 decision to ignore tools and just carry on. Tools don’t solve problems any more, they have become the problem. There’s just too many of them and they all include an incredible amount of features that you don’t use on your site — but that users are still required to download and execute.
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Ever since then, I’ve found myself more and more rating both my feelings and the importance of any particular decision on that same one-to-ten scale. Is the decision non-critical and I don’t actually care that much one way or another? Then I’ll voice my preference, but follow up with “but I’m a two-out-of-ten on this, so whatever you want to do is fine.” Is the topic mission-critical, with far-reaching effects? My opinion will probably be a bit stronger and I’ll debate a bit harder or longer.
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What we have, uniquely in America, is a political class, and an entire political party, devoted to the idea that any money spent on public goods is money misplaced, not because the state goods might not be good but because they would distract us from the larger principle that no ultimate good can be found in the state. Ride a fast train to Washington today and you’ll start thinking about national health insurance tomorrow.
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We now have a vast and costly health-care industry devoted to finding and responding to turtles. Our ever more sensitive technologies turn up more and more abnormalities—cancers, clogged arteries, damaged-looking knees and backs—that aren’t actually causing problems and never will. And then we doctors try to fix them, even though the result is often more harm than good.