Published
Weekend Reading — Bagel Seeds
Thomas Baekdal "I think we need to have a discussion about how Google's burger emoji is placing the cheese underneath the burger, while Apple puts it on top"
Design Objective
Getting Users Psych'd—User Psychology for Better Onboarding Designing great on-boarding user flows starts with this principle:
Keeping track of how much psych a user has at any given time will inform the way in which you nudge them along in a given user experience. If their psych is high, then they're in a position to take in more information. If their psych is low, then they need to be pointed to value, gaining immediate satisfaction from their engagement.
The iPhone X Manual Apple Forgot The iPhone X is down one button: one button can be touched, can be single, double and triple clicked, and used in combination with other buttons. To compensate, iOS 11 adds new swipe gestures: this chart shows six, add one for Reachability.
There’s No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence 🤔 interesting perspective:
What is the function of a fire alarm?
The fire alarm doesn’t tell us with certainty that a fire is there. In fact, I can’t recall one time in my life when, exiting a building on a fire alarm, there was an actual fire. Really, a fire alarm is weaker evidence of fire than smoke coming from under a door.
But the fire alarm tells us that it’s socially okay to react to the fire. It promises us with certainty that we won’t be embarrassed if we now proceed to exit in an orderly fashion.
Sketching Interfaces Envy warning: Airbnb uses machine learning to rapidly turn hand-drawn sketches into functional prototypes (video).
Tools of the Trade
Takes Notes on Everything 📓 When in doubt, write it down:
I'm not claiming taking notes is more important than writing actual code. But in my coding workflow, I'm seeing that my note-taking is part of an important balancing act. … It helps me better examine what I'm learning and not overlook important details. In the long run, it makes learning easier and helps me remember more. As a bonus, it may even help others who read them.
xnoɹǝʃ uɐıɹq This:
“Don’t write your own X” — authors of an X
(Go ahead and write your own frameworks and crypto folks. It’s a great way to learn.)
The method to epoll’s madness Explains the Linux API for handling non-blocking I/O (Nginx, Node, etc)
@anothercoyote If all else fails …
Web-end
My approach to using z-index The logic behind this simple and effective rule:
Local: elements that need to render on top of a sibling or nearby element
- Must be contained in a new stacking context
- Will rarely have a z-index greater than 1
Global: elements that must render on top of elements elsewhere on the page
- z-index values must be declared as global variables in a central location
- There should generally be fewer than ten in a site
Safari service workers and other PWA good news stories PWA coming to Safari (mobile or just desktop?) and Microsoft Edge:
In fact, Microsoft has been working to enabled developers to publish PWAs in the Windows Store, side-by-side with regular apps.
HTML Template Instantiation That would be awesome: Web Components that use a standard template syntax, based on Mustache, with support for bidirectional binding.
I know we're all broken records but I'm going to say it again: the easiest way to improve the a11y of your app is use a
<button>not a<div>
Lines of Code
Jeff Graham DRY doesn't mean terse:
I wish 'DRY' wasn't such a dogma in programming. Somethings would be better off repeated and explicitly stated. Intent can be more clear.
Lindsey Bieda But more importantly 🔨:
No design pattern or software design principle should ever be taken as a MUST. When you stop being thoughtful about what you are coding you stop being active in the process.
Enough With the Service Objects Already Speaking of pattern over-use:
An object that handles business logic but doesn’t have a well-defined business domain role is like one of these dangerously-located seedlings. Objects tend to grow and accumulate more responsibilities. As Corey Haines puts it, objects are attractors for functionality. And once they mature, objects with confused, ill-defined roles can be some of the hardest to refactor.
Why is Elm more popular than PureScript? This (via Alexis King):
I think a lot of devs aren't necessarily looking for expressive power in a language. They're looking for a way to stop making nightmare code bases.
Architectural
Amy Renee Happened to me this week, and code base isn't even old:
Jonathan Matthews Worth every penny!
An infra consultancy service where I visit your startup and repeat "but ... why?" until you pay me.
vgill This is true, even if conference talks would have you believe otherwise:
Large-scale distributed systems are less about cool algorithms and more about the relentless hunting down of 6-sigma bugs.
What 108 Years Of Repaving Looks Like Under Indianapolis Motor Speedway's Asphalt Legacy code base, now under it's 8th maintainer in a decade:
Electric Sheep
Image upscaling supercharged Using machine learning to remove JPEG artifacts, and upscale image 4x. Check the before and after:
Fooling Neural Networks in the Physical World with 3D Adversarial Objects "Adversarial examples" that you can 3D print, and will fool a neural network. Nothing to worry about.
Yet, these same neural networks are particularly vulnerable to adversarial examples, carefully perturbed inputs that cause targeted misclassification. One example is the tabby cat below, which we perturbed to look like a guacamole to Google’s InceptionV3 image classifier.
"What's the difference between AI and ML?"
"It's AI when you're raising money, it's ML when you're trying to hire people."
Locked Doors
To paraphrase @patio11: “Identity Theft” is the banks reframing their failure to verify to whom they are extending credit as your fault.
Techtopia
Kumail Nanjiani Thread:
Tech has the capacity to destroy us. We see the negative effect of social media. & no ethical considerations are going into dev of tech.
The Web Began Dying In 2014, Here's How Well, it's not like two companies control access to information …
GOOG and FB now have direct influence over 70%+ of internet traffic. Mobile internet traffic is now the majority of traffic worldwide and in Latin America alone, GOOG and FB services have had 60% of mobile traffic in 2015, growing to 70% by the end of 2016. The remaining 30% of traffic is shared among all other mobile apps and websites. Mobile devices are primarily used for accessing GOOG and FB networks.
A Russian Facebook page organized a protest in Texas. A different Russian page launched the counterprotest. Well, it's not like they make disinformation easy …
None of the Above
Fluff Society "best Halloween costume, don't even have to walk"
nixCraft 💾
To the person who stole my Office install disk. I will find you and I will destroy you.
You have my Word.
Jenan Moussa "can't stop laughing"
@mzbat Solid:
Don’t forget to periodically update your resume by adding new skills and removing all the dumb shit you don’t want to do anymore. 🙃
