Link tags: rules

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Dumb Password Rules

A hall of shame for ludicrously convoluted password rules that actually reduce security.

What is CSS Specificity? Sarah Chima - Front-End Developer

An excellent and clear explanation of specificity in CSS.

The CSS Cascade

This is a wonderful interactive explanation of the way CSS hierarchy works—beautiful!

The Ugly Truth about Design Systems

The video of a talk in which Mark discusses pace layers, dogs, and design systems. He concludes:

  1. Current design systems thinking limits free, playful expression.
  2. Design systems uncover organisational disfunction.
  3. Continual design improvement and delivery is a lie.
  4. Component-focussed design is siloed thinking.

It’s true many design systems are the blueprints for manufacturing and large scale application. But in almost every instance I can think of, once you move from design to manufacturing the horse has bolted. It’s very difficult to move back into design because the results of the system are in the wild. The more strict the system, the less able you are to change it. That’s why broad principles, just enough governance, and directional examples are far superior to locked-down cookie cutters.

4 Rules for Intuitive UX – Learn UI Design

  1. Obey the Law of Locality
  2. ABD: Anything But Dropdowns
  3. Pass the Squint Test
  4. Teach by example

Readable Code without Prescription Glasses | Ocasta

I saw Daniel give a talk at Async where he compared linguistic rules with code style:

We find the prescriptive rules hard to follow, irrespective of how complex they are, because they are invented, arbitrary, and often go against our intuition. The descriptive rules, on the other hand, are easy to follow because they are instinctive. We learned to follow them as children by listening to, analysing and mimicking speech, armed with an inbuilt concept of the basic building blocks of grammar. We follow them subconsciously, often without even knowing the rules exists.

Thus began some thorough research into trying to uncover a universal grammar for readable code:

I am excited by the possibility of discovering descriptive readability rules, and last autumn I started an online experiment to try and find some. My experiment on howreadable.com compared various coding patterns against each other in an attempt to objectively measure their readability. I haven’t found any strong candidates for prescriptive rules so far, but the results are promising and suggest a potential way forward.

I highly recommend reading through this and watching the video of the Async talk (and conference organisers; get Daniel on your line-up!).

Design Laws in Nature by Jordan Moore

A deep, deep dive into biomicry in digital design.

Nature is our outsourced research and development department. Observing problems solved by nature can help inform how we approach problems in digital design. Nature doesn’t like arbitrary features. It finds a way to shed unnecessary elements in advancing long-term goals over vast systems.

Derek Powazek - AI is Not a Community Management Strategy

A really excellent piece from Derek on the history of community management online.

You have to decide what your platform is for and what it’s not for. And, yeah, that means deciding who it’s for and who it’s not for (hint: it’s not bots, nor nazis). That’s not a job you can outsource. The tech won’t do it for you. Not just because it’s your job, but because outsourcing it won’t work. It never does.

Password Tips From a Pen Tester: Common Patterns Exposed

I’ve been wondering about this for quite a while: surely demanding specific patterns in a password (e.g. can’t be all lowercase, must include at least one number, etc.) makes it easier to crack them, right? I mean, you’re basically providing a ruleset for brute-forcing.

Turns out, yes. That’s exactly right.

When employees are faced with this requirement, they tend to:

  • Choose a dictionary word or a name
  • Make the first character uppercase
  • Add a number at the end, and/or an exclamation point

If we know that is a common pattern, then we know where to start…

Laws of UX

  1. Fitts’s Law
  2. Hick’s Law
  3. Jakob’s Law
  4. Law of Prägnanz
  5. Law of Proximity
  6. Miller’s Law
  7. Parkinson’s Law
  8. Serial Position Effect
  9. Tesler’s Law
  10. Van Restorff Effect

Not listed:

  1. Murphy’s Law
  2. Sturgeon’s Law

Password Rules Are Bullshit

And here’s another reason why password rules are bullshit: you’re basically giving a list of instructions to hackers—the password rules help them narrow down the strings they need to brute force.

Tom Armitage on Vimeo

Tom talks about “Things Rules Do.”

Tom Armitage on Vimeo

Things Rules Do is twenty minutes that looks at games of all forms, and the rules and systems that make their skeleton. It’s about the weird things that rules can do, beyond “tell you how to play”, such as inspire mastery, encourage deviance, and tell stories.