Bibliography
How Big Things Get Done
Big projects have a 99.5% chance of either being late, going over budget, or failing to deliver their inteded benefits. What do the successfull projects look like, and how can we do things like that?
Agile and the Long Crisis of Software
What is Agile? And where does it come from?
#agile , #software-development
The Folly of Design System “Foundations”
The idea of “foundations” is one of the biggest threats to creating a design system people use
Notes on a Genre
Notes on AI art generation.
Are We Really Engineers?
What can cross-over engineers who have worked in both "software engineering" and "real" engineering tell us about the process of making things in the world?
#engineering , #software-development
Is Progressive Enhancement Dead Yet?
Progressively enhancing web applications is not only an essential practice for accessibility, but it provides a framework to respect separation of concerns in technology _and_ reduce boilerplate, polyfills, and otherwise kludgy code.
Taking a no-motion-first approach to animations
Use the prefers-reduced-motion media query to help guide your animation principles. By default, do not include animations, which should only be approached as a progressive enhancement.
The Performance Inequality Gap
When we construct the digital world to the limits of the best devices, we build a less usable one for the 80+% of the world's users. A rule of thumb limit is ~100KiB of HTML/CSS/fonts and ~300-350KiB of JS (compressed).
#web-development , #performance
The Theory of Conceptual Labor
TKTK
#philosophy , #conceptual-labor
Agile as Trauma
The Agile Manifesto is an immune response on the part of programmers to bad management. The document is an expression of trauma, and its intellectual descendants continue to carry this baggage. While the Agile era has brought about remarkable advancements in project management techniques and development tools, it remains a tactical, technical, and ultimately reactionary movement. As long as Agile remains in this position it will be liable to backfire, vulnerable to the very depredations of bad management it had initially evolved to counter.
#agile , #software-development
A Clean Start for the Web
How do we make the web fun, participatory, and good?
Design Systems, Agile, and Industrialization
Design systems are reflections of organizational processes.
Evidence-based Software Engineering
This book discusses what is currently known about software engineering, based on an analysis of all the publicly available data. This aim is not as ambitious as it sounds, because there is not a great deal of data publicly available. The intent is to provide material that is useful to professional developers working in industry; until recently researchers in software engineering have been more interested in vanity work, promoted by ego and bluster. The material is organized in two parts, the first covering software engineering and the second the statistics likely to be needed for the analysis of software engineering data.
#software-development , #data-analysis
The UX of LEGO Interface Panels
Exploring user interface design via legos
Medium Design
To design effectively with a medium, knowledge and solutions to a system are less effective than understanding the relationships within the system, and how to manipulate and adjust those systems to move towards a set of outcomes.
Pattern Languages in Programming and Interface Design
Notes on pattern languages and Christopher Alexander's legacy on software programming
#pattern-languages , #web-development
There Really Is No Ethical Restaurant Under Capitalism
Building an equitable restaurant — where all workers are paid fairly, have benefits, and work without discrimination — will require undoing the way most restaurants are run
The Cost of Javascript Frameworks
Javascript inherently is a massive percentage of a performance budget, modern frameworks are less performant than vanilla JS sites.
The Design System Between Us
Design systems by default entrench existing workflows rather than changing them.
#design-systems , #web-development
Web Brutalism, Seamfulness, and Notion
The essence of Web Brutalism is a way of creating spaces for thought and expression on the web that reflect the nature of thought and the web.
The Epistemology of Software Quality
TKTK
Lost In Math
In theoretical physics, the proliferation of theory outstrips the pace of experiment, leading to a situation where theories must be assessed by criteria other than their relationship to the real world. The current criteria are aesthetic ones, and that has led to 30 years of stagnation.
#math , #aesthetics , #design
The Most Exciting Design Systems Are Boring
What it says on the tin.
#design-systems , #web-development
Designs for the Pluriverse
Escobar presents a new vision of design theory and practice aimed at channeling design's world-making capacity toward ways of being and doing that are deeply attuned to justice and the Earth.
No Longer No Sense of an Ending
In his PhD dissertation, Cybertext, game studies scholar Espen Årseth argues that the linearity and interactivity of a literary work have little to do with whether it was realized in print or on a computer. His most conspicuous example is the millennia-old I Ching, which is both non-linear and interactive. Årseth also showed how hypertext could be more linear than a regular paper book; it’s possible to skip around in a book, but in hypertext, we can only follow the links that the author has set out for us. As I became more comfortable with what was initially a challenging concept, I began to think about what it is, then, that makes hypertext interesting.
Design & Crime
TKTK
Everything Easy is Hard Again
What do we lose when it's easy to use?
The intentional creation of friction in an experience is an essential way to create experience and communicate values.
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team
Someone sent me a copy of _The Five Dysfunctions of a Team_. I didn't really like it.
The Nature of Order: The Phenomenon of Life
In Book 1, Alexander defines life and living structure as the necessary criteria for quality in buildings. Starting with an analysis of the arbitrariness of present-day architecture, and going to the root of functional order in the world, he proposes a scientific basis for looking at life as an objective concept that is rooted in structure
The Nature of Order: The Process Of Creating Life
How do beautiful creations come into being? Nature can make an infinite number of human faces, each one unique, each one beautiful. The same is true for daffodils, streams, and stars. But man-made creations - especially the towns and buildings of the 20th century - have only occasionally been really good, and more often mediocre.
The Nature of Order: A Vision Of A Living World
In Book 3 Alexander presents hundreds of his own buildings and those of his contemporaries who have used similar methods consistent with the theory of living process.
The Nature of Order: The Luminous Ground
Alexander addresses the cosmological implications of the theory he has presented. The book begins with a critique of current cosmological thinking, and its separation from personal feeling and value.
Foucault's Pendulum
The horror of meaninglessness leads us to seek a deeper meaning in pareidolic connections of arbitrary facts. Actively encouraging this tendency — even cynically and for profit — can lead to earnest commitment from your audience and end in tragedy.
Rhizomatic-Nomadic Internet Use
Deleuze and Guattari talk about Hypertext
Introduction: Rhizome
TKTK