Published
Weekend Reading — A handle on this
Hsing-Hui Hsu "I thought I had a handle on this"
Design Objective
Information Architecture. The Most Important Part of Design You’re Probably Overlooking. Indeed:
Tips for Creating Good, Clean Information Architecture
- Be very clear about what’s important (and what isn’t).
- Think in terms of “buckets” of information
- Don’t be afraid to revisit your Information Architecture
Every team should be required to test their alpha on the NYC subway before shipping. Make it work under those network conditions. Seriously.
Stark Color-blind simulator and contrast checker for Sketch.
Graphic Means "The graphic design office of 1980."
Andrew Stacy Hamburger menu!
Just released our new Menu Board software to every McDonald's store in the US. Built with @polymer to be completely modular.
Tools of the Trade
A Better Way to Code d3.express is a better Jupyter Notebook, all JavaScript, with d3 APIs (for better or worse).
Roughing It Dev Style: Coding Without a Computer I remember when "coding without a computer" meant pencil and graph paper, or punchcards. This article explores coding with an iPhone. We made some progress in a few short decades.
Spending 100K USD in 4,5 days on Amazon Web Services The unintended consequence of leaving AWS credentials in a public Github repo, and what to do when your account gets hijacked.
How SSH port became 22 Back when you could send an email, and get a designated port number.
Competitive Programmer's Handbook Will prepare you to participate in the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI), and the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC).
Gameleon "Out of context IT jargon makes you sound like a psychopath"
Webtech
Journey to Highly Effective and Maintainable CSS Media Queries Has good ideas on how to write media queries, how to structure stylesheets with many queries, and how to choose breakpoints and tweakpoints. Also, this: "breakpoints should be content-based, not device based."
Sizzy A tool for developing responsive websites.
It’s Time To Start Using CSS Custom Properties CSS catching up with Less/Sass.
Fathom: a framework for understanding web pages A better way for browsers to act on page content: sign in forms, products pages, articles, etc. Uses logic programming, so no control flow, plugin systems, etc.
Painting with Code Bridging the gap between designers and engineers: "React-sketchapp is an open-source library that allows you to write React components that render to Sketch documents."
An engineer just suggested an RFC for HTTP response
HTTP 299 Disappointed: The server has accepted your request but thinks you can do better
Lingua Scripta
ryanmcdermott/clean-code-javascript "🛁 Clean Code concepts adapted for JavaScript" A few misses (e.g chained methods are better immutable), but overall solid write up, and every suggestion comes with examples.
7 tips to handle undefined in JavaScript Even experienced developers get undefined wrong.
Axel Rauschmayer And besides, you may want to use Map for clarity:
Object.create(null)for dictionaries is only safe in ES6+. Don’t forget there’s also Map! http://speakingjs.com/es5/ch17.html#dict_pattern
To a non JavaScript developer, it must sound extremely redundant that we run our code through both Prettier and Uglify.
Lines of code
Cory House 🏠 Check rest of thread for more details/nuances:
A function name should describe what it does, not when it's run.
Why? Good function names summarize what happens inside.
I like to title my code reviews like clickbait so people actually read them:
"You'll never believe this one quick fix that solves our bug!"
sean 🌹 Is exactly:
Writing is hard because it often ends up being the process through which you realize that you don't actually understand something.
A programmer started to cuss
As getting to sleep was a fuss
As she lay there in bed
Looping 'round in her head
was: while(!asleep()) sheep++
Architectural
Hype Driven Development And how to make sure it doesn't kill your development process.
Michael D. Hill This thread, on why, when, and how to TDD:
i use TDD for one reason and one reason only: to move features faster. more faster features is my job. TDD does that.
And:
we use our judgment to decide when to write a test, or not. when to write a faster one, or not. how to 'joint' a problem testably, and so on
Dan Woods #NoDramaOps
For production, I fucking love "boring". I favor consistency and reliability over speed every day of the week.
Peopleware
Why your programmers just want to code Creative problem solvers need an outlet for their creativity:
How you handle ideas from new programmers sends an important signal. Good or bad, it sets the stage for what they expect. This determines if they share more ideas in the future… or keep their mouth shut.
Simply telling someone you like the work they did today could be the reason they make something again tomorrow.
Techtopia
Hey, Computer Scientists! Stop Hating on the Humanities This article can be summarized as: learn some ethics, apply some ethics to your work, just because ethics are taught in humanity studies, doesn't mean they don't belong in STEM.
Lyrebird Ethics One company that has an ethics page. Though we may not like what they have to say, at least they're giving us a head's up:
Lyrebird is the first company to offer a technology to reproduce the voice of someone as accurately and with as little recorded audio. …
Voice recordings are currently considered as strong pieces of evidence in our societies and in particular in jurisdictions of many countries. Our technology questions the validity of such evidence as it allows to easily manipulate audio recordings.
Locked Doors
I Got Hacked So You Don't Have To What is spearphishing and why it's so damn effective:
You can’t sell a box that stops people from trusting their daughters, from missing a typo in an e-mail address, from being a little too tired to check the URL of a link.
None of the Above
maple cocaine "Fuckin rené magritte is my landlord"
On the spelling of Resumé That settles if for me:
“Resumé” in this sense is an English word, not a French one. It’s not pronounced like the French word. And it doesn’t even have this meaning in French—French, like British and International English, uses the Latin term “curriculum vitae”
Ikea Had a Great Reaction to Balenciaga Making a $2,145 Version of Its 99-Cent Blue Bag "How to identify an original Ikea Frakta bag." Brilliant.
Facebook Data ‘Does Not Contradict’ Intelligence on Russia Meddling That's one way of phrasing what happened.
The earth is flat (p>0.05): Significance thresholds and the crisis of unreplicable research How p-values came to be the standard bearer, and why it's time for researchers to move on.
daphne "Life Hack 😂"