On online collaboration and our obligations as makers of software An Essay by Baldur Bjarnason www.baldurbjarnason.com Is it the notetaking system that’s helping you think more clearly? Or is it the act of writing that forces you to clarify your thoughts? Is it the complex interlinked web of notes that helps you get new ideas? Or is it all the reading you’re doing to fill that notetaking app bucket? Is all of this notetaking work making you smarter? Or is it just indirectly forcing you into deliberate, goalless practice? Towards a crap decisionSo much knowledge not being applied notetakingbloggingsoftwarethinkingcommonplace
What do I need to read to be great at CSS? An Article by Baldur Bjarnason www.baldurbjarnason.com A rule of thumb is that the importance of a blog in your feed reader is inversely proportional to their posting cadence. Prioritise the blogs that post only once a month or every couple of weeks over those that post every day or multiple times a day...Building up a large library of sporadically updated blogs is much more useful and much easier to keep up with than trying to keep up with a handful of aggregation sites every day. bloggingcsscodelearningrss
136 things every web developer should know before they burn out and turn to landscape painting or nude modelling An Article by Baldur Bjarnason www.baldurbjarnason.com The best way to improve software UX is regular direct observation, by everybody on the team, of the work done. Have some personality. Minimalism is garbage. Metaphors are fantastic. Naming things is fantastic. Try to write HTML that would make sense and be usable without the CSS. The buyer is quite often wrong. That fact never changes their mind. Working on a functioning app’s codebase does more to increase its quality than adding features. A good manager will debate you, and that’s awesome. The term ‘project’ is a poor metaphor for the horticultural activity that is software development. Two Hundred Fifty Things an Architect Should Know wwwworkuxcollections
Nobody gives a hoot about groupthink An Article by Baldur Bjarnason www.baldurbjarnason.com Two relatively common ‘fashions’ today are real-time collaboration and shared data repositories of one kind or another. Both increase productivity in the naive sense. We work more; everybody is more active; the group feels more cohesive. The downside is that they also both tend to reduce the quality of the work and increase busywork. On that of the highest authorityPersonal Information Management (PIM) productivitycollaborationinformation
Situationist Theses on Traffic An Essay by Guy Debord www.cddc.vt.edu Two cars per familyTo form an integrated human milieuA matter of opposing the automobile urbanism
Two cars per family A MISTAKE MADE by all the city planners is to consider the private automobile (and its by-products, such as the motorcycle) as essentially a means of transportation. In reality, it is the most notable material symbol of the notion of happiness that developed capitalism tends to spread throughout the society. The automobile is at the center of this general propaganda, both as supreme good of an alienated life and as essential product of the capitalist market: It is generally being said this year that American economic prosperity is soon going to depend on the success of the slogan “Two cars per family.” transportationcapitalism
To form an integrated human milieu EVEN IF, during a transitional period, we temporarily accept a rigid division between work zones and residence zones, we must at least envisage a third sphere: that of life itself (the sphere of freedom and leisure — the essence of life). Unitary urbanism acknowledges no boundaries; it aims to form an integrated human milieu in which separations such as work/leisure or public/private will finally be dissolved. But before this is possible, the minimum action of unitary urbanism is to extend the terrain of play to all desirable constructions. This terrain will be at the level of complexity of an old city. worklife
A matter of opposing the automobile IT IS NOT a matter of opposing the automobile as an evil in itself. It is its extreme concentration in the cities that has led to the negation of its function. Urbanism should certainly not ignore the automobile, but even less should it accept it as its central theme. It should reckon on gradually phasing it out. In any case, we can envision the banning of auto traffic from the central areas of certain new complexes, as well as from a few old cities.