a more or less weekly digest of juicy stuff

• kids can't use computers and this is why it should worry you. highly recommended read
• lower than a snake's belly in a wagon rut and other stories of low flying. highly recommended
• on design driving everything, the most important thing is to keep the user in mind. if you lose sight of who is using the product, then you're not solving things for people - you're just making things up. recommended
• john carmack discusses the art and science of software engineering, in reality in computer science, just about the only thing that's really science is when you're talking about algorithms. but those don't actually occupy that much of the total time spent programming. lots of solid gold
• why software projects are terrible and how not to fix them, to put things another way, bad project managers don't iterate on the software process. they iterate on assigning blame
• open source as a civic duty, i feel that people who are fortunate enough to survive on their own means have an obligation to give back to their community
• the creation of missile command and the haunting of its creator, it was a social commentary ahead of its time. one that resulted in punishing him with a reminder of the value of human life and just how quickly that can be taken from us
• loyalty and layoffs, a corporation is not a living creature. it has no soul. it has no heart. it has no feelings. it can neither experience towards you nor enjoy from you even the concept of loyalty. it is a legal fiction, and it exists for one purpose only: to make profit
• why quit? because they have bigger monitors
• the help me help you dinner
• faster progress bars: manipulating perceived duration with visual augmentations, visually augmented progress bars could be used to make processes appear 11% faster, when in reality, their duration remains unchanged
• "when you look back at yourself six months from today and don't feel embarrassed by your naiveté, there's a problem. that means you're not learning, growing", nathan bashaw
• cognitive consequences of forced compliance, also known as cognitive dissonance
• i will not do your tech interview
• hollywood tech jargon generator, generates tech jargon that can be used in any number of hollywood productions
• yolo driven development guidelines
• how would the unprotected human body react to the vacuum of outer space, see also human exposure to vacuum
• project west ford, the forgotten cold war plan that put a ring of copper around the earth
• 5/8erl in ehr'n, vienna soul band, brilliant