A dumping ground for miscellany; the amusing, the thought-provoking, the otherwise memorable.
A couple weeks ago, I finished reading Shore and Warden’s The Art of Agile Development as part of a (half-hearted? abandoned?) book club/reading group. Our goal was to get familiar with Agile’s core tenets and terms, 1 to become adept at speaking about it, and to allow that knowledge to guide us as Agile practitioners […]
When I posted my review of Jonah Lehrer’s Imagine, I also posted a copy/variation of that review to Goodreads. Today, I received a question in the comments: If he made up some of his sources, would you still respect his message? Given Michael C. Moynihan’s article and Lehrer’s own admission and resignation (see Julie Bosman’s […]
People are basically a giant pile of intermittent bugs. With this simple humorous statement, Fitz and Ben 1 perfectly capture the attitude that leads us to need a book like Team Geek (O’Reilly 2012). It’s not the only reason we need a book like this, but it’s an important one, considering our target audience: otherwise […]
I was intrigued by this recent post by Elisabeth Hubert, “Agile is Wrong for UX”. I was curious what her thoughts were on how to best fit the user experience role into an Agile project, as I haven’t seen anyone write much about this. Unfortunately, my enthusiasm waned when I came to this: Most of […]
With Alien Contact, Marty Halpern presents us with an anthology of science fiction short stories predicated on (what else?) first contact with alien species. I was looking for exactly such an anthology, and in my desperation to find such a thing, I decided to start a rumor that John Joseph Adams 1 was going to […]
About six weeks ago, I started using Prismatic and entered it into my daily 1 routine. It’s like your own personal “best of the web” that gets smarter about your interests as you go along. I’m still feeling as positive about it now as I was after the first 24 hours. Ever since that post, […]
In Clojure Programming (Chas Emerick, Brian Carper, and Christophe Grand; O’Reilly, 2012), the preface asks Who is this book for? It’s for a lot of people: experienced JVM developers, curious Rubyists, dissatisfied Pythonistas… Developers of all stripes that are looking to get introduced to, and become proficient in, Clojure. I myself have been circling the […]
Last week, Prismatic opened their virtual doors for 24 hours, letting anyone with a Twitter account sign-up. Having heard about it from friends a few times, and having seen it pop up in in my Twitter stream way more than a few times, I decided to try it out. The premise intrigued me: a service […]
Eric Sarrion’s jQuery UI (published by O’Reilly) is a beginner-to-intermediate level overview of the jQuery UI library and its widgets. 1 Sarrion walks through these widgets one-by-one, chapter-by-chapter, offering a description for each, elaborating on the UI problem that each is designed to solve, and then detailing the API for each of these widgets. Each […]
I just wrapped up reading 1 Theresa Neil’s Mobile Design Pattern Gallery (published by O’Reilly), and I am happy to call it a worthwhile survey. I say “survey” because that’s exactly what we have here: Neil takes a look at the dominant patterns (and anti-patterns) in the application interface designs that are targeted at mobile […]