- Rands In Repose: The Makers of Things
I had no idea how cool the story of the Brooklyn Bridge was.
(categories: innovation inspiration engineering nyc bridges history )
All posts by ajohnson
Links: 3-21-2009
- ESPN Dev Blog
ESPN guys have a dev blog, rails though? Where?
(categories: blogs programming rails espn ) - Tell Us: Why does working at Google suck?
Google’s 20% time is known internally as 120% time. Fun idea while it lasted.
(categories: innovation google idea ) - This is why you’re fat.
Also, things I need to try: fried guacamole, deep fried cupcakes, bacon wrapped meatloaf stuff with mac ‘n cheese.
(categories: funny food america cooking health ) - Streams, affordances, Facebook, and rounding errors – Laughing Meme
Quote: "Don’t let your design make promises you can’t keep." Takeaway: we’re severely underestimating the scope of doing activity stream right, we need to put a lot more thought into how we design it and more specifically, what we’re *not* going to do.
(categories: messaging architecture flickr facebook design twitter scalability activity activitystreams ) - Protovis
Firefox only right now but the examples are really amazing.
(categories: infoviz visualization firefox javascript canvas stanford graphs )
Links: 3-20-2009
- Enjoymentland » Locavore 1.0 is now available!
Cool idea: a powerful yet simple application for the iPhone and iPod Touch that allows users to find the freshest, most sustainable fruits and vegetables no matter where they are in the United States.
(categories: iphone food location gps shopping locationenabled ) - Code: Flickr Developer Blog » Building Fast Client-side Searches
Couple interesting things about this post: a) they store your contacts in a blob, b) the client-side autocomplete / search algorithm could probably be used on Clearspace.
(categories: flickr performance optimization ajax javascript json )
Links: 3-19-2009
- Painless Functional Specifications – Part 4: Tips – Joel on Software
Rule 1: Be Funny, Rule 2: Writing a spec is like writing code for a brain to execute, Rule 3: Write as simply as possible, Rule 4: Review and reread several times, Rule 5: Templates considered harmful
(categories: writing programming documentation specification functionalspec functionaldesign requirements ) - Painless Functional Specifications – Part 3: But… How? – Joel on Software
(categories: software design documentation specification functionalspec functionaldesign requirements )
- Joel on Software: Sample Functional Specification: WhatTimeIsIt
(categories: software design documentation specification functionalspec functionaldesign requirements )
- Painless Functional Specifications – Part 2: What’s a Spec? – Joel on Software
(categories: software design documentation specification functionalspec functionaldesign requirements )
- Painless Functional Specifications – Part 1: Why Bother? – Joel on Software
(categories: software design documentation specification functionalspec functionaldesign requirements )
- Blogging Roller: OAuth everywhere!
This post explains, at a very high level, how [he] got a Roller Gadget working, one that uses OAuth to call Roller and enables Roller to use OAuth to call back to the social network.
(categories: blogs oauth roller apache wiki shindig opensocial ) - Design Fiction: A short slideshow on design, science, fact and fiction
ETech presentation: slide 24, quote: "Stories Matter More Than Features, Specs and Engineering."
(categories: design etech functionaldesign stories designfiction minorityreport ) - 7 Essential Guidelines For Functional Design | How-To | Smashing Magazine
Consider the screwdriver. The goal of a screwdriver is pretty straight-forward: to drive screws. Although there’s certainly a lot of room for innovation in screwdriver design — there are screwdrivers with more ergonomic handles, ratchet-assemblies, magnetic tips, and exchangeable heads — ultimately everything in a screwdriver’s design is aimed towards the accomplishment of that single goal: driving screws.
(categories: ux ui usability functionaldesign usermodel userfocus ) - Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable « Clay Shirky
Round and round this goes, with the people committed to saving newspapers demanding to know “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.
(categories: culture news publishing journalism media newspapers ) - rc3.org — Discomfort is a necessary side effect
People are too unwilling to face discomfort. Journalists don’t want to make the people they interact with on a daily basis squirm. People want to read that the politicians they support are fighting the good fight. And this reaches far beyond politics as well. Java programmers didn’t want to read that C# had a lot of nice language features that improved on weaknesses in Java. People in general seem to prefer to remain ignorant of the practices of industrial agriculture in the modern world.Ignorance may be bliss, but it also has negative externalities.
(categories: psychology growth learning discomfort ) - activity strea.ms
An effort to develop an Activity Stream protocol for syndicating activities taken in social web applications and services, similar to those in Facebook’s Newsfeed, FriendFeed, the Movable Type Action Streams plugin and elsewhere.
(categories: social atom standards web2.0 activity opensocial diso )
Links: 3-15-2009
- » Gravatar in Gmail » Jon Fox
When is someone going to join email and social software in an OOTB application? Seems silly that I have to download a greasemonkey script or a FireFox plugin to get this behavior.
(categories: social socialsoftware greasemonkey gmail ) - How to be a program manager – Joel on Software
The exact form the functional specification takes may vary. All a functional specification has to do is explain how the program will behave. It doesn’t say anything about how the code will work internally. You start at the highest level: a vision statement, no more than one page explaining the gist of the new feature. Once that’s nailed down, you can develop storyboards… mockups of the screens showing the user’s progression through the application, with detailed notes showing how they work. For many types of functionality, especially UI-heavy functionality, once you have these storyboards, you’re done.
(categories: programming design process development management engineering functionalspec ) - Entrepreneurs – Don’t Be Afraid of GDP Growth Rate
The list of companies started during periods of negative GDP Growth include Wang, TI, DEC, Fairchild, EDS, Compuserve, Intel, Atari, CA, Apple, Microsoft, Amdahl, Autodesk, Sun, Compaq, Cisco, 3Com, Genzyme, EMC, Amgen, Lotus, EA, Adobe, AOL, Dell, Cisco, and Network Appliance. I know the startup story of many of them and it includes single-mindedness of purpose, frugality/capital efficiency, and more sweat than equity.
(categories: startups entrepreneurship economy motivation ) - Google Friend Connect: Add social features to your site
Rating widget, friend widget, create account widgets… Nice stuff.
(categories: google openid opensocial widgets friendconnect )
Links: 2-18-2009
- Play the Point, Not the Score
Quote: "Play the point, not the score. Down 4-1? Doesn’t matter – play the point. Just had someone quit on you. Doesn’t matter, play the point. Fell short of plan for the month of January – doesn’t matter – play the point. Just had a big deal go off the rails? Doesn’t matter – play the point."
(categories: business inspiration management success psychology )
Links: 2-8-2009
- Little tweaks make big money
Quote: "37signals recently changed how they labeled charges on credit card statements and reduced chargebacks by 30%." Remind me to
(categories: ux design interface ecommerce details ) - Web Hooks
Web hooks are simple HTTP callbacks. They’re nothing new, you may be familiar with the PayPal IPN feature. That’s a web hook. The idea is to have web applications let users register post-receive URLs for various events. This can be used as a lightweight alternative to XMPP for real-time push notifications, but also for integrating arbitrary web services. For the truly daring, you can use web hooks to create a plugin systems or platforms.
(categories: http webhooks notification events callback asynchronous push )
Links: 1-28-2009
- Fabulous Adventures In Coding : Future-Proofing A Design
Quote: Premature generality is expensive. Designing code to be future-proof without a clear understanding of what the future holds often leads to excess generality; generality has very real costs, and they might be higher than the benefit accrued.
(categories: software programming architecture change future-proofing ) - Charlie Owen – Success Factors for Program Managers from Joe Belfiore
Maniacally focus on building a product your customers will love.
(categories: software design microsoft management leadership )
Links: 1-18-2009
- Techpaulogy: Analyst Report Hits the Wires – Congrats to Jive!
And that was based on the product last year. Just wait until 2009.
(categories: clearspace jive 2008 forresterwave analysts )
Links: 1-6-2009
- Anatomy of a Software Development Role: Development Manager
Great series (thanks Gato!) on the roles / titles of a software development organization.
(categories: software development management roles ) - Encouraged Commentary | DontTrustThisGuy.com
Cool commenting UX ideas.
(categories: ux ui javascript comments interaction commenting ) - Constellation Roamer | Asterisq.com
$550 gets you a force directed graph in SWF format that you can throw an XML file at.
(categories: infoviz visualization socialnetworks flash socialviz ) - Painfully Obvious → Blog Archive → Paginate THIS
Love the attention to detail. Need to do more exercises like this at Jive.
(categories: ui design pagination ux )