Guarding Against Disposable Design — Smashing Magazine
Always refreshing to see some long-term thinking applied to the web.
Link tags: planning
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Tolerance | Trys Mudford
Trys ponders home repair projects and Postel’s Law.
As we build our pages, components, and business logic, establish where tolerance should be granted. Consider how flexible each entity should be, and on what axis. Determine which items need to be fixed and less tolerant. There will be areas where the data or presentation being accurate is more important than being flexible - document these decisions.
Prioritising Requirements | Trys Mudford
Over the past few years, I’ve given quite a few workshops and talks on evaluating technology. This methodical approach to evaluation and prioritisation from Trys is right up my alley!
In any development project, there is a point at which one must decide on the tech stack. For some, that may feel like a foregone conclusion, dictated by team appetite and experience.
Even if the decision seems obvious, it’s always worth sense-checking your thought process. Along with experience and gut-feelings, we also have blind-spots and biases.
I feel like there’s a connection here to having good design principles—the kind that explicitly value one facet over another.
Getting your priorities right | Clearleft
A ludicrously useful grab-bag of prioritisation techniques from Chris—so, so handy for workshops and sprint planning.
Le Corbusier: How A Utopic Vision Became Pathological In Practice | Orange Ticker
Through planning and architectural design, Le Corbusier hoped to create a scientifically rational and comprehensive solution to urban problems in a way that would both promote democracy and quality of life. For him, the factory production process applied to high-rise buildings with prefabricated and standardized components is the most modern and egalitarian of urban forms.
Something something top-down design systems.
BBC - Future - How to build something that lasts 10,000 years
As part of the BBC’s ongoing series on deep time, Alexander Rose describes the research he’s been doing for the clock of the long now—materials, locations, ideas …all the pieces that have historically combined to allow artifacts to survive.
Plotters, pantsers, and user onboarding | Krystal Higgins
Krystal compares two styles of writing and applies them to onboarding.
Malicious AI Report
Well, this an interesting format experiment—the latest Black Mirror just dropped, and it’s a PDF.
Folding Beijing - Uncanny Magazine
The terrific Hugo-winning short story about inequality, urban planning, and automation, written by Hao Jinfang and translated by Ken Liu (who translated The Three Body Problem series).
Hao Jinfang also wrote this essay about the story:
I’ve been troubled by inequality for a long time. When I majored in physics as an undergraduate, I once stared at the distribution curve for American household income that showed profound inequality, and tried to fit the data against black-body distribution or Maxwell–Boltzmann distribution. I wanted to know how such a curve came about, and whether it implied some kind of universality: something as natural as particle energy distribution functions, so natural it led to despair.
Medieval Fantasy City Generator by watabou
Procedurally generated medieval town plans. Pick a size and then have some fun with the “warp” option.
Weft. — Ethan Marcotte
I think we often focus on designing or building an element, without researching the other elements it should connect to—without understanding the system it lives in.
Architecting the uncertain - Getting started with Agile Software Architecture
Some ideas on the best of use of time in sprint zero of an agile project.
- Understand your context
- Identify risks
- Understand the business process
- Get testing infrastructure
- Understand quality attributes
- Get to know the people
- Prepare an initial product backlog
- Build a walking skeleton/spike
- Build a learning backlog
“The Only-ness Statement,” an article by Dan Mall
A useful design strategy exercise from Marty Neumeier.
TASAT – There’s a Story about That
An initiative by David Brin and the Arthur C. Clarke Center For Human Imagination at UC San Diego. You are confronted with a what-if scenario, and your task is to recall any works of speculative fiction that have covered it.
Accessing more than a hundred years of science fiction thought experiments, TASAT taps into a passionate, global community of writers, scholars, librarians, and fans. We aim to curate a reading list applicable to problems and possibilities of tomorrow.
The Fallacies of Distributed Computing (Applied to Front-End Performance) – CSS Wizardry – CSS Architecture, Web Performance Optimisation, and more, by Harry Roberts
Harry cautions against making assumptions about the network when it comes to front-end development:
Yet time and time again I see developers falling into the same old traps—making assumptions or overly-optimistic predictions about the conditions in which their apps will run.
Planning for the worst-case scenario is never a wasted effort:
If you build and structure applications such that they survive adverse conditions, then they will thrive in favourable ones.
Patterns Day 2017: Paul Lloyd on Vimeo
Paul pulls no punches in this rousing talk from Patterns Day.
The transcript is on his site.
Fantasies of the Future / Paul Robert Lloyd
Paul has published the slides and transcript of his knock-out talk at Patterns Day. This a must-read: superb stuff!
Design systems are an attempt to add a layer of logic and reasoning over a series decisions made by complex, irrational, emotional human beings. As such, they are subject to individual perspectives, biases, and aspirations.
How does the culture in which they are made effect the resulting design?
Designing Systems, Part 3: Components and Composition / Paul Robert Lloyd
Paul finishes up his excellent three part series by getting down to the brass tacks of designing and building components on the web …and in cities. His closing provocation has echoes of Heydon’s rallying cry.
If you missed the other parts of this series, they are:
Fractal Iterations | Clearleft
Danielle and Mark have been working flat out on Fractal. Here’s the roadmap they’re working to.
A practical guide to Progressive Web Apps for organisations who don’t know anything about Progressive Web Apps : Records Sound the Same
Sally gives a really good introduction to using service workers as a progressive enhancement.