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Monthly Archives: November 2014

the key for a lock that doesn’t yet exist

by not another Rob?

“Writing the first sentence of a novel, for me, is something like filing, from a blank of metal, the key for a lock that doesn’t yet exist, in a door that doesn’t yet exist, set into a wall … An impossible thing, yet I find it must be done, or at least approximately done, else nothing will follow. The white wall (once of paper, now of pixels) will only open to the right key, or at least something approximating it, as I tend to keep filing, endlessly, through the ensuing composition.”

William Gibson, The First Sentence Is a Handshake (interview in The Atlantic)

And the rest is even better than that. But this quote here was a light bulb for me. In that moment, his words described the act of writing as something very familiar to me, but also something very alien and strange and brilliantly true.

because they are in crisis

by !undefined

“Why do I tell this story? Mostly because it’s an example of a problem that found a solution, rather than the other way around. But also because it illustrates why people require solutions in the first place: because they are in crisis.

Amy Chess, The User Experience of….Fixing Things

She brings up a good point here about empathy: that it’s the critical tool in the UX researcher or designer’s toolkit because she is not faced with the same motivation-generating crisis that the person on the other end of the problem is.

Matt Asay: Why Web Tools Like AngularJS Need To Keep Breaking Themselves

by !undefined

Why Web Tools Like AngularJS Need To Keep Breaking Themselves:

By Matt Asay, writing for ReadWrite.

tl;dr: AngularJS 2.0 is targeting the future because the future is where we’re going and anyway let’s not forget that the existing architecture/design is at least four years old anyway, and who’s on a 10-year software development lifecycle anymore?

In large part, I think the points that he’s making are good, but easy to make. What he doesn’t seem to address, and is the thing that keeps coming up in the conversations I’ve been having, has been the real-world developer concerns around the upgrade path. Or rather: the fact that none has been communicated. In other words, “the point” of picking a framework like AngularJS has a lot to do with not wanting to solve the problems that are not central to your application’s domain. You’re building a travel planning app or a photo sharing site or a CMS or… fill in that blank with just about anything. You’re not building dependency injection and data-binding and a whole host of other abstract things because… well, that’s not what you’re customers are paying for. And I think that by and large no one minds the occasional refactor of their application, so long as the things that you’re refactoring are your features.

Not having an upgrade path is a source of anxiety because it goes from feeling like a “big refactor” to “complete rewrite”. This is the cringe that I hear in everyone’s voice.

That being said… (1) I’m still not convinced that we won’t see any upgrade path — even if it’s a painful one. And (2) I agree that we want the frameworks we’re using (when we’re using them) to be powerful and tap into the powerful underlying modern APIs.