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
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus A Book by Ludwig Wittgenstein www.gutenberg.org The totality of factsEverything that can be saidI am my worldEthics and aesthetics are oneWhereof one cannot speak
The totality of facts The world is the totality of facts, not of things. The world is determined by the facts, and by these being all the facts. For the totality of facts determines both what is the case, and also all that is not the case.
Everything that can be said Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly. Everything that can be said can be said clearly. What can be put into words understanding
I am my world What we cannot think, that we cannot think: we cannot therefore say what we cannot think. In fact what solipsism means is quite correct, only it cannot be said, but it shows itself. That the world is my world, shows itself in the fact that the limits of that language (the language which I understand) mean the limits of my world. I am my world. (The microcosm.) The thinking, presenting subject; there is no such thing.
Ethics and aesthetics are one Hence also there can be no ethical propositions. Propositions cannot express anything higher. It is clear that ethics cannot be expressed. Ethics is transcendental. (Ethics and aesthetics are one.)
Whereof one cannot speak My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. What can be put into words meaning