In Search of Organic Software An Article by Pirijan Ketheswaran pketh.org Two different kinds of farms can grow vegetables. One is a factory farm built for scale, and the other takes the time to grow more expensive but healthier plants without pesticides. Will everyone appreciate the difference? Of course not, but the latter plants are labelled ‘organic’ to give us the information and the choice, so that those of us who do care can make better decisions. So maybe we should have ‘organic’ software as well, made by companies that: Are not funded in such a way where the primary obligation of the company is to 🎡 chase funding rounds or get acquired (so bootstrapping, crowdfunding, grants, and angel investment are okay) Have a clear pricing page Disclose their sources of funding and sources of revenue softwarebusinessfarming
How I Build An Article by Pirijan Ketheswaran pketh.org In 2014, I wrote about my belief that design and engineering are best when tightly woven together. That’s truer now than ever. If I’m feeling confident, I’ll jump right into my text editor…From here, more functionality is added and the code is tweaked until the feature looks and feels right to me. Whether it’s something simple like this, or prototyping a new interaction like multi-connect, there’s no substitute for designing with real code. In rare cases when I have ideas or plans that I’m less confident about, it’s time to break out the paper, pens, and markers, Because the Kinopio interface elements and aesthetic are full-grown, I almost never use traditional design software anymore. makinginteractioninterfaces
Why Software is Slow and Shitty An Article by Pirijan Ketheswaran pketh.org Roman empire militaryBuilding is never a straight lineConversations, not commandments Planning doesn't make for better software softwareperformance
The return of fancy tools An Article by Tom MacWright macwright.com Technology is seeing a little return to complexity. Dreamweaver gave way to hand-coding websites, which is now leading into Webflow, which is a lot like Dreamweaver. Evernote give way to minimal Markdown notes, which are now becoming Notion, Coda, or Craft. Visual Studio was “disrupted” by Sublime Text and TextMate, which are now getting replaced by Visual Studio Code. JIRA was replaced by GitHub issues, which is getting outmoded by Linear. The pendulum swings back and forth, which isn’t a bad thing complexitysimplicitytoolssoftwaretechnologynotetaking