“Storytelling — Harmon vs. McKee”
An interesting meditation on the role of intuition in strategy and analysis
On the deteriorating quality of Apple’s software
“Why reporting bugs to Apple may harm software quality – The Eclectic Light Company”
The quality of Apple’s software deteriorates with every release. Bugs languish for years. Small features, like search indexing of some file types, break.
These aren’t minor bugs either. Michael Tsai has been documenting a serious data loss bug in Apple Mail that is still unfixed after a year and a half in the wild.
This is as good a theory as to why this is happening as any other I’ve heard.
The only software team at Apple that stands above the rest is the Safari team, which seems to deliver software at a much higher standard than the rest. Which makes the Chrome team’s claim that Apple is deliberately sabotaging Safari development by starving the team of resources all the more annoying: it’s clearly Apple’s highest performing flagship software team.
That Safari seems to do better supports the process thesis in the original blog post. Safari has an open source library at it’s heart and works with open standards. It has to use a different process, one that clearly works better than what takes place at the rest of Apple.
“Leading your engineering team with ‘experiments’ not ‘processes’ - LeadDev”
On “The Curious Case of “Are you sure?” – the Usecrime That Just Won’t Die”
“The Curious Case of “Are you sure?” – the Usecrime That Just Won’t Die”
I’m as guilty as others of overusing confirmation dialogues but, in my defense, I’ve actually never even been asked to try to implement undo in any of the front end interfaces I’ve worked on.
The curious thing about this case (and other usecrimes) is that I keep hearing about UX designers running into programmers who are hesitant to implement features necessary for good UX.
And I keep hearing from programmers who are never asked to implement these things.
This leads me to think that something’s being unevenly distributed here.
“Running a Successful Membership / Subscription Program — by Craig Mod”
“Two songs from The Muppet Movie / Snarkmarket”
Always post links to discussions of Muppet songs.
Everybody is pussyfooting around the actual problem in front end development
This blog post by Chris Coyier does a good job of pulling together the various threads of dissatisfaction that have been cropping up in the front end development community.
He almost, almost gets into the problem.
Minor pushback there: a lot of people don’t get any choice in the technologies they are tasked with.
That isn’t minor pushback. That’s the heart of the issue: we are beset by crap managers who don’t understand tech, don’t understand how programming works (PDF), resort to React because it simplifies recruitment (no matter whether it’s appropriate to your project or not), and—to top it all off—don’t view their own job, management, as the craft that it is. They’d rather read a fluffy airport management book than ever pick anything up by Deming, Reinertsen, or Gareth Morgan.
It’s a rare manager in tech that actually practices—actually puts a constant effort into improving their management craft.
Our managers choose the wrong tech, wrong processes, wrong platforms, and then never invest in training. Without their backing, the complexities you witness in modern front end web development would never have had the resources to exist in the first place.
Even those of use with good managers still suffer because the managers the rest of you have made sure that the field’s standard practices are toxic as hell and its processes are broken as designed.
There’s actually nothing wrong with much of the tech in front end dev. The tools are fine. Some are complex and are used much to much with little attempt to control the spread of complexity. Some are simple and horrendously underused. The frameworks are useful when used appropriately and magnify complexity when used inappropriately. Browsers are fine and have amazing APIs out of the box but also have stupendously hard-to-use capabilities that you should rarely reach for without a framework.
The field of web development, however, has been mismanaged to within an inch of its life by people who think they know what they are doing but put no effort into studying what they are doing. And their mismanagement has poisoned our practices.
“A Useful Approach to Problem-Solving — Sympolymathesy, by Chris Krycho”
This works more often than you’d think.
“There’s No Such Thing As “Agile”. There’s Just Software Development. – Codemanship’s Blog”
“Managing focus in the shadow DOM - Read the Tea Leaves”
I’ve run into focus issues every single time I’ve tried using the shadow DOM and only ever been able to solve them properly by rewriting everything to not use shadow DOMs.
“Anxious feelings about optimisation through complexity (Interconnected)”
On “Do Adults Really Not Remember School Sucked? - Ian Welsh”
I will never get this. School was a miserable experience for me. I did really well but hated every moment. And pretty much everybody I went to school with hated the experience as well. Even disregarding the unusually horrible teachers I had*, the overall school experience still sucked.
But everybody seemed to forget immediately how bad it was—sometimes even on the day of graduation, just before they went to college.
It’s like watching people cognitively spin on a dime. One moment they are complaining about how miserable it is, the next they are filled with nostalgia for ‘an amazing experience’.
It’s almost as if school is a right of passage wholly unconcerned with improving the lives of those participating in it or something.
*: I had at least five teachers who were genuinely evil people and seemed to thrive on the misery of children.
“Progressive Enhancement reading list, draft 1 - QuirksBlog”
“Stop Obsessing Over Development Velocity, Focus on This Instead - Itamar Gilad Product Management”
“TBM 6/52: Discontinuous Improvement (and Stored Energy) - The Beautiful Mess”