“CASE NIGHTMARE BLONDE, Part 2 - Charlie’s Diary”
“This is like having a skunk cross the road to avoid you because you smell bad.”
Why most software is only accidentally useful
“What is Value? - Think Different”
“In summary, if you are a software supplier, software house, or in-house software development shop, unless and until you understand your customer’s organisation well enough to know where its current constraint lies, you will never be in a position to deliver real value, except by sheer chance.”
“HR policy and performance improvement: are systems to blame? - Personnel Today”
“How we can make open education more feminist (REPOST) – Zoe Wake Hyde”
“Other Authors Are Not Your Competition—Marketing Advice from #WDC19”
“SUPERMAN SMASHES THE KLAN might be DC’s best comic this year - The Beat”
This honestly looks amazing and will sell like gangbusters in trade paperback.
GraphQL, fads, and tech fanboyism
“What Do You Need to Know About GraphQL? — Postlight — Digital Product Studio”
A fair, if a tad too positive, overview of GraphQL.
I’ve been doing a lot of research into GraphQL over the past few weeks and it’s worrying how little interest there seems to be in critical assessments of whether GraphQL is appropriate for you or not. Because, based on my research, GraphQL is likely to increase your coding productivity in the short term but, in most cases, substantially increase the complexity and code for your project.
And there’s frequently a mismatch between the GraphQL schema you’ve written and the optimum for the various data sources and APIs you’re integrating. So, as with React itself, it increases developer productivity, helps multi-departmental organisation, but likely at the expense of long term performance. The complexity hits development sooner or later, and the schema-datasource mismatch is only going to grow as your app evolves. And it abstracts over HTTP a little bit too much for you to be able to leverage all of the free performance stuff that HTTP gives you for free (caching, built-in clients, universal support).
Of course, there’s a point where the payoff is big enough for it to be worth your while but I have yet to see an article that actually engages with and studies properly the costs and payoffs for concrete use cases.
That isn’t surprising. Tech writing alternates between utter hateful contempt and uncritical love-fests. Critical writing is in short supply. There is no way for an outsider (like, say, a manager) to assess whether something is a fad or not just by reading tech writing. You’re going to need to do the heavy lifting analysis yourself.
“Michael Tsai - Blog - Catalina Vista”
Windows Vista feels like the correct analogy here, except Vista was much less broken than Catalina.
“Michael Tsai - Blog - Catalina System Issues”
Hold off on updating to Catalina if you can.
“Style hover, focus, and active states differently - Zell Liew”
‘When People Say Students Should Do “More” - Just Visiting’
‘It has not led to an improvement in student writing and has in fact done considerable damage to student attitudes about and engagement with writing.’
Both ‘open’ systems I’ve seen so far, open source and open education, are mostly building value that’s freely coopted by corporations while doing serious harm to the wellbeing of the individuals doing the actual work.
There are exceptions, but most of those seem accidental.
“Designing accessible color systems”
This is very clever.
“The ‘Glass Floor’ Is Keeping America’s Richest Idiots At The Top - HuffPost Canada”
“Bear Tips: Note Links are live now, here’s how to use them”
I’d like to see more apps offer linking as a core affordance
“Cut out everything that’s not surprising - Derek Sivers”
Not a hard and fast law but certainly a very good rule of thumb.
“No, it’s a test of the society as a whole because it’s a test of whether that society exhausts the compassion of individuals.”