A recent pleasure-reading jaunt through the Internet impressed me in its fluidity, so I want to document it here as a great example of user narrative. It started when I opened the “Opinion Today” newsletter I receive daily from the New York Times. In it, toward the bottom, was a small item on the Dot [...]
Stuff I think about rather than things I’ve made.
Occupy Wall Street & the Death of Steve Jobs
2011.10.07
Hearing about these two current events in the same news broadcasts this week has given me a bit of cultural whiplash. I own and use a few Apple products, most of which I need in order to do my job. They are elegant. They are easy to use. They are functional. Despite all of these [...]
I wish my government was this responsive
2011.09.16
We get these Bed Bath & Beyond coupons in the mail roughly once a week. Perhaps you’ve seen them? Anyway, I’ve never once used one, mostly because I don’t even know where one is around here. So a few weeks ago I was looking at one of these coupons and it dawned on me: They [...]
Messes we knew we were making
2011.08.29
Today, I came across the idea (probably via stackoverflow) of technical debt. To quote Martin Fowler: You have a piece of functionality that you need to add to your system. You see two ways to do it, one is quick to do but is messy – you are sure that it will make further changes [...]