a more or less weekly digest of juicy stuff

• the play deficit, at play, children learn the most important of life's lessons, the ones that cannot be taught in school. to learn these lessons well, children need lots of play - lots and lots of it, without interference from adults. highly recommended
• bullet journal, an analog note-taking system for the digital age. awesome
• the dribbblisation of design, it's still too rare to witness a designer talk about how their work maps to a mission, drives a vision forward, or how it is placed within product architecture, with the weight that these things deserve. this should be the norm, not the exception
• the internet hates me, of course i sat back down. of course i read every single comment. i did not ready myself mentally for a barrage of hipster-hating internet commenters critiquing me for everything. sad but recommended
• don't follow your passion, it's an age-old story: boy meets passion, boy follows passion, passion turns out to be a mirage and/or actually a big pain in the ass, despite how rosy it may have seemed from a safe distance
• optimizing ui icons for faster recognition, excellent overview
• getting the right design and the design right, testing many is better than one (pdf)
• why your startup can't find developers
• the shittiest project i ever worked on, another tale of clients who don't know what they want
• why you're not making sales, you don't start with code, or with an idea; you start by listening to people
• you are too serious - or why germany still sucks for startups, failure in germany is still perceived as something negative which is ridiculous since failing is usually the best learning experience you can get in life
• software development estimates, where do i start? every new piece of software is a machine that has never been built before. the more your machine looks like existing ones, the easier it is to estimate its difficulty
• git as a deployment tool
• f-16 flies with an empty cockpit
• in event of moon disaster
• map of europe, 1000 ad to present day
• the serious and the smirk, why do we so seldom see people smiling in painted portraits?
• how to teach your girlfriend programming, being a professional developer also means that you're a professional teacher to some extent, since our job forces us to constantly explain things to other people
• the 17 designs that bell almost used for the layout of telephone buttons