Author: Nadreck

Link: Be Kind, Design

Over at Medium, Nat Dudley has a nice (lengthy, well researched with clear examples) article, Be Kind, Design, based on a talk they recently gave. Worth some consideration.

You might be asking yourselves why we’re the ones who have to care about this. After all, everyone else is treating their customers poorly, so why should we be different.

It’s a matter of scale. Like Penalosa’s urgency for good urban design in cities, we need to care because our work has reach. The work we do is part of every industry on the planet. We are defining or redefining the interaction models for every part of society, and we’re doing it at a scale we’ve never experienced before. Changes we make can affect millions of people in seconds without their knowledge or consent. Decisions we make can reinforce existing power structures and biases, or they can break them down.

Link: Last Blog Standing

Over at Nieman Lab, Laura Hazard Owen has a nice interview with Jason Kottke about blogging, Last blog standing, “last guy dancing”. A salient bit:

There has to be room in our culture for that type of stuff — that stuff that is inspirational and aspirational — because it provides some sort of hope that we can actually have more of that in our lives, rather than less.

It’s like that quote from John Adams. I have it pulled up here. “I must study politics and war, that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.”

That’s a really interesting way to think about progress. Not everyone is going to be on that continuum at the same time, but I think the goal should be to get more people moving toward it.

Happy Valentine’s Day

To all of you (with or without that special someone), I hope you’re feeling loved and appreciated. Not just today, but today’s as good a reminder as any. I thought about writing something pithy about dating in the modern era (seriously, take all of the performative bullshit of modern society and crank it up to 11, since dating was already pretty performative), but instead I’ll just leave it here: love who you love.

Link: Who Killed the Junior Developer?

Melissa McEwen asks Who Killed the Junior Developer? over on Medium. Or as I like to call it, “Why are industries so bad at thinking about the future?” If you don’t want an industry (whether you’re talking about software or automotive or energy or…) to fall afoul of being starved of senior expertise, then you have to think about cultivating new hires, so they can build that expertise. And that means spending time training and mentoring. Will that sometimes be abused by people taking that training and then leaving? Yeah, sometimes. But so what? Where do you think your new mid-range (or senior!) developer learned their trade?

Melissa actually mentions the job hopping, and makes a good point:

I’m not sure what the industry-wide solution is. I’m not sure whether companies that lack junior devs are unbalanced or smart. The reality is that most software developers don’t stay one place very long, so maybe it doesn’t make sense to invest a lot in training someone? Or maybe the industry should ask itself why people keep hopping jobs? Maybe it’s because a lot of them suck, or for a lot of us it’s the only way to advance our salary. I can either wait for a stupid, meaningless yearly “performance review” to bump me up 1% or take my resume and interview elsewhere and get 10% or more.

It’s not just a sign that an individual company is broken, it’s a sign the entire industry is broken.

Yep. If you weren’t on a track for your entire life (going to the “right” schools, then getting the “right” internship), even getting a foot in the door in the software industry feels more like a lottery than a job hunt.

New Camera!

I’ve been running an original Canon 5D for the past 12-13 years (basically since it came out), and decided to finally pick up a new camera in anticipation of my upcoming trip. I’ve been a Canon user since I went digital, but decided to mix things up a little bit and try a (well-reviewed) alternative this time around, eventually settling on the Fujifilm X-E3.

I took it out to Vista House on Crown Point on Sunday afternoon, in time to catch the sunset. Other than feeling incredibly rusty (I haven’t been shooting a lot in the last year or three), it was a lot of fun, and got to experiment with some of the features of the camera. For instance, I was pretty impressed with its panorama feature — even zoomed in, the stitching is damn near perfect.

Panorama from Crown Point

The colors are also nice and vivid. (For the record: I adjusted the highlights slightly on the panorama, didn’t touch the Vista House shot at all, and fiddled with tones on the highlights and shadows with the shot looking east up the Gorge.)

Vista House in Afternoon Light

Sunset in the Gorge, looking east

Looking forward to playing with this more.

Link: palm.computer

Some of the more old-school amongst us might remember Palm OS, and some of the experiments done around the late 90s. Someone built a… thing. Not really an emulator, but sort of an homage/recreation, at palm.computer. Explore it, feel the pain, feel the joy. Note the attention to the little details, like the bizarre rendering patterns, and the artifacts in the sponsored content videos. This is clearly a labor of love.

Word Viruses

You might know what I’m talking about when I say “word viruses” — and I’m not talking about Microsoft. I’m talking about memetic payloads that lodge themselves in your brain, sometimes even after hearing it only once, and you find yourself still randomly saying it years later. We all pick up catchphrases and idiosyncrasies and remember memorable quotes, but sometimes there’s no good reason for something to stick in your brain, but it does anyway. Those are word viruses.

An example: there’s a 20 second soundbite on Galactic’s Crazyhorse Mongoose called “Cafe DeClouet” where the lead singer talks about having his coffee, and his bagel, some hot chocolate. That album came out in 1998 and I quote it all the damn time.

Another example: there was an episode of “Mad About You” that I saw once, back in 1995, where one the characters picks up a habit of saying “splink splink” whenever he puts ice in a glass. It’s 23 years later and I still find myself randomly doing it (not every time, and sometimes it just pops out when I’m not even near ice).

How about you, do you have any word viruses? Things you don’t even remember where you picked up, but find yourself saying randomly?