Technology

Linknote — 6 December 2017 — 112 words

Ashamed to work in Silicon Valley: how techies became the new bankers

It definitely feels like there has been a sea-change in people’s perceptions about Silicon Valley in the past year or so. This article goes some way to explaining why.

MBA jerks used to go and work for Wall Street, now wealthy white geeks go to Stanford and then waltz into a VC or tech firm…

The focus of Silicon Valley used to be innovation with the wonderful bonus of money on the side of that, but those two things seem to have switched – just as the pencil-pushing mentality of finance in the 70s became the champagne lifestyle in the 2000s.

Linknote — 30 November 2017 — 57 words

Technology

The improbable origins of PowerPoint

A history of PowerPoint, a piece of software that has taken over office life more than any other.

Many of us rely on it. But on the downside, PowerPoint persuades pencil pushers that they are designers. The result is that highly-paid people end up spending hours on end mucking about with fonts.

Linknote — 29 November 2017 — 58 words

Web

Faux grid tracks

Now that we have CSS grid, people apparently want to know how to style the divisions between the rows and the columns. Here, Eric Meyer explains one way to do it.

At this stage, I can’t help feeling that no matter how many features get added to CSS, it always results in more gnarly hacks.

Linknote — 17 November 2017 — 41 words

Human-centred approaches — Technology

A/B testing ain’t for settling your disagreements — Tom Kerwin

We’re running experiments based on ideas we’ve had and ignoring the very real possibility that the thing we’re testing doesn’t actually matter to our customers.

Linknote — 16 November 2017 — 12 words

Digital

Alpha to live is not a linear progression — Michael Brunton-Spall, Medium

Linknote — 15 November 2017 — 61 words

Web

The web began dying in 2014, here’s how – André Staltz

Highly interesting article about how the dominance of Facebook, Google and Amazon is beginning to damage the web. Facebook and Google are silently conspiring to specialise in social and knowledge respectively, further increasing their dominance. Meanwhile, the weakening of net neutrality threatens to move to goalposts even further in their favour.

Article — 13 November 2017 — 1,239 words

Facebook and Twitter are repeating the catastrophic mistakes of past designers

Architecture — Digital — Technology

Architects had to face up to the problems that eventually emerged with bold modernist designs. Now Facebook and Twitter need to wake up to the fact that their platforms are damaging society.

Linknote — 13 November 2017 — 31 words

Human-centred approaches — User experience — Web

Brutalism and antidesign — Kate Meyer, Nielsen Norman Group

Nielsen Norman Group look into brutalist web design.

I have written about this before: Can web design really learn from brutalist architecture?

Linknote — 10 November 2017 — 24 words

Web

Some principles for blogging – Ben Holliday

This snappy set of principles is useful food for thought as I ramp up my own blogging activities.

Linknote — 10 November 2017 — 33 words

Accessibility — User experience — Web

Captchas suck – Hampus Sethfors, Axess Lab

…there’s something iffy and unprofessional about web site owners putting the burden of their spam problems on their users. Solve it “on your side” instead.

Linknote — 9 November 2017 — 65 words

Web

Installing progressive web apps — Jeremy Keith, Adactio

In this post about a Google Chrome mobile user interface change, another telling comment that explains part of the reason why the web appears to be in trouble.

The way we’ve turned browsing the web—especially on mobile—into a frustrating chore of dismissing unwanted overlays is a classic tragedy of the commons. We blew it.