- axe — accessibility testing of web apps, so you can integrate accessibility testing into your continuous EVERYTHING pipeline.
- metrics-graphics — Mozilla Javascript library optimized for visualizing and laying out time-series data.
- US Tech Funding: What’s Going On? (A16Z) — deck eloquently arguing that this is no bubble.
- Teach Don’t Tell — what I think good documentation is and how I think you should go about writing it. Sample common sense: This is obvious when you’re working face-to-face with someone. When you tell them how to play a C major chord on the guitar and they only produce a strangled squeak, it’s clear that you need to slow down and talk about how to press down on the strings properly. As programmers, we almost never get this kind of feedback about our documentation. We don’t see that the person on the other end of the wire is hopelessly confused and blundering around because they’re missing something we thought was obvious (but wasn’t). Teaching someone in person helps you learn to anticipate this, which will pay off (for your users) when you’re writing documentation.
"web" entries
Four short links: 16 June 2015
Accessibility Testing, Time-Series Graphing, NO BUBBLE TO SEE HERE, and Technical Documentation
Four short links: 1 June 2015
AI Drives, Decent Screencaps, HTTP/2 Antipatterns, Time Series
- The Basic AI Drives (PDF) — Surely, no harm could come from building a chess-playing robot, could it? In this paper, we argue that such a robot will indeed be dangerous unless it is designed very carefully. Without special precautions, it will resist being turned off, will try to break into other machines and make copies of itself, and will try to acquire resources without regard for anyone else’s safety. These potentially harmful behaviors will occur not because they were programmed in at the start, but because of the intrinsic nature of goal-driven systems.
- PreTTY — how to take a good-looking screencap of your terminal app in action.
- Why Some of Yesterday’s HTTP Best Practices are HTTP/2 Antipatterns — also functions as an overview of HTTP/2 for those of us who didn’t keep up with the standardization efforts.
- Tisean — a software project for the analysis of time series with methods based on the theory of nonlinear deterministic dynamical systems. (via @aphyr)
Four short links: 29 May 2015
Data Integration, Carousel, Distributed Project Management, and Costs of Premature Build
- Using Logs to Build Solid Data Infrastructure — (Martin Kleppmann) — For lack of a better term, I’m going to call this the problem of ‘data integration.’ With that, I really just mean ‘making sure that the data ends up in all the right places.’ Whenever a piece of data changes in one place, it needs to change correspondingly in all the other places where there is a copy or derivative of that data.
- TremulaJS — sweet carousel, with PHYSICS.
- Project Advice (Daniel Bachhuber) — for leaders of distributed teams. Focus on clearing blockers above all else. Because you’re working on an open source project with contributors across many timezones, average time to feedback will optimistically be six hours. More likely, it will be 24-48 hours. This slow feedback cycle can kill progress on pull requests. As a project maintainer, prioritize giving feedback, clearing blockers, and making decisions.
- YAGNI (Martin Fowler) — cost of build, cost of delay, cost of carry, cost of repair. Every product manager has felt these costs.
Four short links: 20 May 2015
Robots and Shadow Work, Time Lapse Mining, CS Papers, and Software for Reproducibility
- Rise of the Robots and Shadow Work (NY Times) — In “Rise of the Robots,” Ford argues that a society based on luxury consumption by a tiny elite is not economically viable. More to the point, it is not biologically viable. Humans, unlike robots, need food, health care and the sense of usefulness often supplied by jobs or other forms of work. Two thought-provoking and related books about the potential futures as a result of technology-driven change.
- Time Lapse Mining from Internet Photos (PDF) — First, we cluster 86 million photos into landmarks and popular viewpoints. Then, we sort the photos by date and warp each photo onto a common viewpoint. Finally, we stabilize the appearance of the sequence to compensate for lighting effects and minimize flicker. Our resulting time-lapses show diverse changes in the world’s most popular sites, like glaciers shrinking, skyscrapers being constructed, and waterfalls changing course.
- Git Repository of CS Papers — The intention here is to both provide myself with backups and easy access to papers, while also collecting a repository of links so that people can always find the paper they are looking for. Pull the repo and you’ll never be short of airplane/bedtime reading.
- Software For Reproducible Science — This quality is indeed central to doing science with code. What good is a data analysis pipeline if it crashes when I fiddle with the data? How can I draw conclusions from simulations if I cannot change their parameters? As soon as I need trust in code supporting a scientific finding, I find myself tinkering with its input, and often breaking it. Good scientific code is code that can be reused, that can lead to large-scale experiments validating its underlying assumptions.
Four short links: 18 May 2015
Javascript Tools, Elements of Scale, 2FA Adoption, and Empathy
- Tools are the Problem — Tools don’t solve problems any more; they have become the problem. There’s just too many of them, and they all include an incredible number of features that you don’t use on your site –but that users are still required to download and execute.
- Elements of Scale: Composing and Scaling Data Platforms (Ben Stopford) — today’s data platforms range greatly in complexity, from simple caching layers or polyglotic persistence right through to wholly integrated data pipelines. There are many paths. They go to many different places. In some of these places at least, nice things are found. So, the aim for this talk is to explain how and why some of these popular approaches work. We’ll do this by first considering the building blocks from which they are composed. These are the intuitions we’ll need to pull together the bigger stuff later on.
- Estimating Google’s 2FA Adoption — If we project out to the current day (965 days later), that’s a growth of ~25M users (25,586,975). Add that to the ~14M base number of users (13,886,058) exiting the graph and we end up at a grand total of…nearly 40 million users (39,473,033) enrolled in Google’s 2SV. NB there’s a lot on the back of this envelope.
- Empathy and Product Development — None of this means that you shouldn’t A/B test or have other quantitative measure. But all of those will mean very little if you don’t have the qualitative context that only observation and usage can provide. Empathy is central to product development.
Four short links: 13 May 2015
Makey Makey Go, Driverless Accidents, HTTP/2 Guidelines, and Choking The Mac
- Makey Makey Go (Kickstarter) — $19 portable Makey Makey hardware kit. (via Makezine)
- US Driverless Car Accidents (NYTimes) — Delphi sent AP an accident report showing its car was hit, but Google has not made public any records, so both enthusiasts and critics of the emerging technology have only the company’s word on what happened. The California Department of Motor Vehicles said it could not release details from accident reports. This lack of transparency troubles critics who want the public to be able to monitor the rollout of a technology that its own developers acknowledge remains imperfect.
- Architecting Websites for the HTTP/2 Era — HTTP/2 introduces multiplexing, which allows one TCP/IP connection to request and receive multiple resources, intertwined. Requests won’t be blocking anymore, so there is no need for multiple TCP connections on multiple domain names. In fact, opening multiple connections would hurt performance in HTTP/2. This is going to be exciting.
- tripmode — software to control the downloads your Mac software wants to make, even when you’re tethered or on a pay-per-meg hotspot.
Abstraction in web apps: an idea, not an ideology
Create the Web instead of colonizing it.
Some weeks ago, when it was still wintry in one half of U.S.A. and anything but in the other half, I encountered the following Tweet:
The old man seemed lost and friendless. “I miss static HTML,” he said.
— Jeffrey Zeldman (@zeldman) March 12, 2015
I’m grateful to call Jeffrey Zeldman a friend, seeing as he’s a terrific guy in addition to being one of the foremost doyens of web design. In that sentiment and with the wish to call attention to his lament, I replied:
@zeldman Story of my last five years, that. When did simplification & removal of dependencies become subversive?
— Ben Henick (@bhenick) March 12, 2015
…And now I get to unpack all of that, as briefly as possible.
Four short links: 7 April 2015
JavaScript Numeric Methods, Misunderstood Statistics, Web Speed, and Sentiment Analysis
- NumericJS — numerical methods in JavaScript.
- P Values are not Error Probabilities (PDF) — In particular, we illustrate how this mixing of statistical testing methodologies has resulted in widespread confusion over the interpretation of p values (evidential measures) and α levels (measures of error). We demonstrate that this confusion was a problem between the Fisherian and Neyman–Pearson camps, is not uncommon among statisticians, is prevalent in statistics textbooks, and is well nigh universal in the pages of leading (marketing) journals. This mass confusion, in turn, has rendered applications of classical statistical testing all but meaningless among applied researchers.
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Breaking the 1000ms Time to Glass Mobile Barrier (YouTube) —
See also slides. Stay under 250 ms to feel “fast.” Stay under 1000 ms to keep users’ attention. - Modern Methods for Sentiment Analysis — Recently, Google developed a method called Word2Vec that captures the context of words, while at the same time reducing the size of the data. Gentle introduction, with code.
Four short links: 25 March 2015
Selling Customers, Classier Parsing, License Plates, and GitHub's CSS
- RadioShack’s Customer Data For Sale (Ars Technica) — trying to sell customer data as part of court-supervised bankruptcy.
- Classp: A Classier Way to Parse (Google Code) — The abstract syntax tree is what programmers typically want to work with. With class patterns, you only have two jobs: design the abstract syntax tree and write a formatter for it. (A formatter is the function that writes out the abstract syntax tree in the target language.)
- 4.6M License Plate Records From FOIA Request (Ars Technica) — from Oakland.
- Primer — the CSS toolkit and guidelines that power GitHub.
Four short links: 24 March 2015
Tricorder Prototype, Web Performance, 3D Licensing, and Network Simulation
- Tricorder Prototype — collar+earpiece, base station, diagnostic stick (lab tests for diabetes, pneumonia, tb, etc), and scanning wand (examine lesions, otoscope for ears, even spirometer). (via Slashdot)
- Souders Joins Speedcurve — During these engagements, I’ve seen that many of these companies don’t have the necessary tools to help them identify how performance is impacting (hurting) the user experience on their websites. There is even less information about ways to improve performance. The standard performance metric is page load time, but there’s often no correlation between page load time and the user’s experience. We need to shift from network-based metrics to user experience metrics that focus on rendering and when content becomes available. That’s exactly what Mark is doing at SpeedCurve, and why I’m excited to join him.
- 3 Steps for Licensing Your 3D-Printed Stuff (PDF) — this paper is not actually about choosing the right license for your 3D printable stuff (sorry about that). Instead, this paper aims to flesh out a copyright analysis for both physical objects and for the digital files that represent them, allowing you to really understand what parts of your 3D object you are—and are not—licensing. Understanding what you are licensing is key to choosing the right license. Simply put, this is because you cannot license what you do not legally control in the first place. There is no point in considering licenses that ultimately do not have the power to address whatever behavior you’re aiming to control. However, once you understand what it is you want to license, choosing the license itself is fairly straightforward. (via BoingBoing)
- Augmented Traffic Control — Facebook’s tool for simulating degraded network conditions.