There are many opposing forces in the #IndieWeb that can seem like catch-22s, yet help clarify priorities, and balance present pragmatism & future optimism.
This is part 2 in my “Software and its Discontents” series. This series is the product of my asking a bunch of folks about the current state of software engineering, the sense that it is not going well, that people are disillusioned and frustrated. In part 1 I talked a bit about …
I’ve been drawn to the idea of having many tiny sensors around my home intermittently collecting data points about all sorts of things - the Lumen measurement of our bedroom at night, the noise of the street below us, the AQI of our kitchen.This was mostly a pipedream until …
I was chatting with my new colleague Alex yesterday about a link she had shared in Slack. It was the Nielsen Norman Group’s annual State of Mobile User Experience report.
I really like the maxim, which apparently originated in stand-up comedy, that you should always punch up:Jokes are funny when they mock the powerful. They are not funny when they mock the powerless. […] Jokes are not funny when they have victims. Some of the tricks played by PR …
My loves, I have been remiss in writing for you because, well, I wrote a book. I don’t know if you have heard this but that is very hard. As a result, I have been doing a lot of work to see it safely out into the world and hopefully into your hands at some point. And lo, it is …
Forms on the web are an opportunity to make big improvements to the user experience with very little effort. The effort can be as little as sprinkling in a smattering of humble HTML attributes. But the result can be a turbo-charged experience for the user, allowing them to sail …
I used to love web development. I mean, I wasn’t necessarily great at it. But I loved it. I even managed to pay my rent through my senior year of college mostly from subcontract work where I’d take some lowest-bidder web design from a guy and turn it into a responsive bootstrap …
A long time ago, I decided to show Bridgy‘s end users its raw logs. Like, raw logs. HTTP requests, database reads and writes, JSON objects, stack traces, etc. It’s an unusual UI feature, but it’s been an unqualified success, enough that when I built Bridgy Fed, I immediately …
Alex S.
