“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.”
“(MacOS) Catalina Crisis – On my Om”
Don’t upgrade to Catalina until it’s seen at least one bug fix release.
The file metaphor is fading into the background
“Computer Files Are Going Extinct - Technology services are changing our internet habits”
Don’t mistake the increased attention and features that the Files app has been getting in iOS as a reversal of this trend. Files are now generally either a part of legacy workflows or have been pushed into the background as an implementation and exchange metaphor. Which means that a lot of people aren’t going to learn properly about files until they get a job at a company still built around files or until they get into a field that’s still using it as an implementation metaphor (like coding). And even then, it might be easier to just skip teaching people about files and go straight into teaching them about modules or packages as a subset of how files work.
‘Steve Blank Why Companies and Government Do “Innovation Theater” Instead of Actual Innovation’