Published
Weekend Reading — Relationship Saving Station
Redditors design worst volume sliders possible.
Design Objective
Writing for UX: some practical tips A few simple writing tips to keep in mind when writing for user experience.
Cultural Blind Spots in UX Designing for international markets is about understanding the nuances, starting with how cultures look at web pages in different ways.
Is there a support group somewhere for designers who worked on a redesign & then read the comments? I’ll save you a seat, @design
Tools of the Trade
8 habits to become a better software engineer Forget fancy frameworks and tools, and follow the basic principles, for example, repetition:
Each repetition will yield minor improvements, and it will be easier to find errors early on that could lead to larger problems later, he says.
Make Your Pull Requests Visual. How to make PRs for front-end changes easier to review.
Browserslist is a Good Idea Auto-prefixing your CSS, Babel presets for your JavaScript, all you have to maintain is the list of supported browsers.
Charts Charts as a service, meaning they're rendered as PNG/GIF, so you can easily embed them on any website, in emails, SMS, etc.
Our dirty little secret: Cross-platform email client with nothing but HTML "That’s just an example of what comes for free when using the same build for all platforms and going 100% web." We're doing the same thing, so maybe I'll write about it in a future post.
Mirr.io Sketch plugin for developing prototypes and sharing them.
Cross-browser extensions, available now in Firefox If you can't beat them, then … Firefox, Microsoft and Opera planning on supporting Chrome extensions in their browsers.
@brittanystoroz Easter egg:
TIL: If you turn on Chrome DevTools experiments and press the SHIFT key six times you will get even more experiments 😈
Feathers "Simply beautiful open source icons."
Static sites are great for performance but they're also important for longevity. Not having to maintain server-side code is a *huge* deal
Tim Berglund "Emacs...is there anything it *can't* do?"
Web-end
Leveraging the Performance Metrics that Most Affect User Experience Will teach you how to use the new Paint Timing API.
HTTP/2 push is tougher than I thought Some of the gotchas you might come across, on the road to HTTP/2.
CSS Reminder: media query "device-aspect-ratio" is deprecated. It was a -webkit- thing only.
Lines of Code
Developers Who Use Spaces Make More Money Than Those Who Use Tabs Presented here for entertainment value only.
Assaf "When you forget to remove debugging code and deploy to production"
Architectural
Software architecture:
Finding the least disastrous option among many bad ones based on incomplete and constantly changing information.
Murphy's law 2017: all that can go wrong has already gone wrong, you just don't know it yet because your alerting system has also gone wrong
Machines are Learning
gwern When you know some startup is using this as their VC pitch:
'Cruelty-free non-batch-trained neural nets online methods ensure that our results are sustainably harvested from incoming data.'
This is What Happens When You Teach an AI to Name Guinea Pigs “Splanky,” “Gooper,” and “Spockers.”
Andrew Edman Ideal vs reality:
You: "Machine Learning & Big Data will make our cities smart, our lives easier"
Me: I just had to tell Google our office is not a restaurant
Locked Doors
MacSpy: OS X RAT as a Service Analysis of the MacSpy malware, which claims to be "most sophisticated Mac spyware ever."
None of the Above
Nutella 'Hired' an Algorithm to Design New Jars. And It Was a Sell-Out Success. These designs are fantastic. And if you don't fancy one, just get another jar.
The secret origin story of the iPhone Excerpt from the forthcoming book The One Device. Also, What Apple Thought the iPhone Might Look Like in 1995.
How I took my first step in tech Every person has their own journey; do what's right for you.
The Museum of Failure A collection of products and services that didn't quite make it, including such legends as the Apple Newton, Sony Betamax, Bic for Her, and Harley-Davidson Perfume.
Emergency Kittens "to understand the pillow, one must become the pillow"
Download your data PSA reminder that you can download and keep a backup of all your Google data.
Obvious Plant "I installed a ‘Relationship Saving Station’ at Ikea to help keep couples from fighting."
