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
Walden A Book by Henry David Thoreau The quality of the dayI went to the woodsI love to be aloneQuiet desperationA new wearer of clothes+2 More Upstream ColorThoreau 2.0Upstream Color Original Soundtrack naturesolitudeenvironmentlabor
The quality of the day It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. Suburban Nation uxartmoralitybeauty
I went to the woods I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. lifenaturetruth
I love to be alone I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. Upstream Color Original Soundtrack solitudefriendship
A new wearer of clothes I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes. fashion
To create noblemen and kings While civilization has been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them. It has created palaces, but it was not so easy to create noblemen and kings. societycivilization
The experiment of living How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living? lifeadolescenceexperiments