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Linkdump for April 29th

by Rob Friesel
  • The Myth of America’s Tech-Talent Shortage
    Jordan Weissmann writing for The Atlantic. And/but what I want to know is: Who are these companies that are clamoring to hire people on an H1-B because it's supposedly cheaper? The "indentured labor" line reads like a bit of a boogeyman to me, and though I'll buy the bit about stagnant wages being part of the problem, their counter example of "oil and gas engineers" seems like the outlier. (In other words: few sectors are actually experiencing a talent shortage, but nearly all sectors are suffering from stagnant wages.)
    (tagged: economy )
  • Hunt on for ‘Eyeball Earth’ Alien Planets
    Charles Q. Choi, writing at Space.com.
    (tagged: research astronomy exoplanets )
  • Learning to See
    functional vs. formal
    Oliver Reichenstein, writing for Information Architects. It's a long read, and some of it may seem a bit navel-gazing (how many "good vs. great design" articles can a person read before their eyes bleed? how many times can that Steve Jobs quote about "design is how it works" be abused?), but it all comes down to Fingerspitzengefühl.
    (tagged: Fingerspitzengefühl design )
  • Is Michael Pollan a sexist pig?
    Emily Matchar, writing at Salon.com:

    Food choices have become important political acts, with deep moral and environmental consequences. As self-righteous and irritating as this attitude can sometimes feel, it’s still speaking to a very real and scary truth. With rising obesity rates, a destructive system of factory farming, and terror-inducing 24/7 news stories about antibiotics in chicken and E. coli in spinach, many people have come to feel that their own food choices are among the most meaningful life decisions they can make.

    And/but:

    It’s easy to forget, in the face of today’s foodie culture, that cooking is not fun when it’s mandatory.

    The title is a bit baiting and inflammatory (no shit?) and it might be more fair to accuse Pollan of being naïve than of being sexist but… She has some interesting discussion in here, even if it meanders a bit.

    (tagged: politics slow food culture )
  • What If We Never Run Out of Oil?
    Long piece in The Atlantic by Charles C. Mann. Lots of history about petroleum energy, and lots of discussion of the geo-politics around it. There's some complicated stuff in there but it's worth reading, as it just might give some insight into the complexities of energy politics and policy.
    (tagged: politics petroleum energy )

Linkdump for April 27th

by Rob Friesel
  • Crafting a README
    By Chris White, writing at the Engine Yard Developer Blog. Most of this should seem like common sense, but I'm also glad someone went to the trouble of writing it down. He mentions Markdown in the blog post, but I'd really try to underscore that point: that Markdown really ought to be essential — the lingua franca of READMEs.
    (tagged: README )
  • What Jeff Built
    At Alison Pierce Photography. Alison is Jeff's wife. Both are quite talented, and this is a sweet write-up that she did of the piece that he has on display in Burlington right now. (Jeff's collaborator Dave is no slouch himself.) I'm trying to talk Jeff and Dave into giving a presentation about it for the next BurlingtonJS meet-up. (It runs Node.js under the covers.)
    (tagged: Burlington art JavaScript friend Vermont Node.js )
  • I’m not helping
    Very thoughtful post from James Coglan:

    The thing about being well-known is it creeps up on you. It’s very hard to tell, when you walk into a conference hall full of strangers, how many people know who you are. It still comes as a surprise to me when people have heard of me or know my work, and I still feel as anonymous walking into a venue as I did at the very first developer conf I went to in 2007. But the illusion of anonymity soon fades when people come and introduce themselves.

    tl;dr: It's easy to snark on Twitter (and elsewhere online) but sooner or later that shit creeps up on you… so if you can't be nice, at least be constructive.

    (tagged: community )
  • One less JPG
    By Chris Ruppel, writing at Four Kitchens; a case study to back up the spirit of Adam Sontag's "one less JPG" statement.
    (tagged: performance JavaScript )
  • Securing socket applications
    Slides from a presentation by James Coglan. I'd love to have the transcript, but even without it there's enough in here to chew on. (Also: I have a new power animal thanks to this.)
    (tagged: James Coglan websockets security )

Linkdump for April 22nd

by Rob Friesel
  • Agile in name only
    James Turner:

    In contrast, a company that’s agile in name only will cling to a distant release date and a laundry list of features, but still insist on short sprints and closing stories.

    (tagged: Agile )
  • shame.css
    Harry Roberts:

    You’d be forgiven for thinking the point of this whole exercise is to shame the developers (you can always pick a name other than shame.css) but it’s really not. I am well aware of (and responsible for) hacks and quick fixes; your product owner doesn’t care if you used an !important, they just want the new feature out of the door.

    Kind of a fun little idea, this is.

    (tagged: CSS shame.css hacks )
  • A shorthand for designing UI flows
    Ryan Singer at the 37 Signals blog. Short and one of those that may seem obvious. And/but worth it alone for this reminder:

    Now don’t forget: all diagrams are destined for the garbage.

    (tagged: UI UX design )
  • The usability error you don’t know you’re making
    By Dr. David Travis (@userfocus) over at User Focus articles. In a nutshell: be careful about the words you're using and some of the other things that you might take for granted (e.g., clicking on the logo to go "home" on your site). These things may be obvious to you but might completely miss your target audience. Also: worth it for the phrase "jargon in-breeding" alone.
    (tagged: UI language UX design )
  • How NASA brought the monstrous F-1 “moon rocket” engine back to life
    By Lee Hutchinson, writing at Ars Technica. Pretty fascinating story about the rockets at the business end of the Saturn V.
    (tagged: rockets space )

Linkdump for April 15th

by Rob Friesel
  • Simplifying For The Wrong Reasons
    At Meng To's blog. The writing is a little choppy in spots, but this post is thoughtful and the message rings loud and clear: simplifying your interfaces is great, when you're actually simplifying; but if you're not careful you wind up just making something that's sterile and/or confusing. This isn't just another "skeuomorphism vs. minimalism" bit of navel-gazing — he's got something worth reading.
    (tagged: UI UX design )
  • It’s not a web app. It’s an app you install from the web.
    Over at the Forecast.io blog. A great post with some outstanding observations about how what it means to develop apps using the web as your platform. Example:

    If you can’t find a way to do something that doesn’t feel choppy or awkward, then just don’t do it. Design your interface around the technology you have, not the technology you wish you had.

    Go read it.

    (tagged: Forecast.io web platform web development )
  • Durandal
    jQuery + Knockout + RequireJS = Durandal. I haven't looked at it in any depth yet, but for what it's worth these are some battle-tested names. Worth at least a cursory glance.
    (tagged: Knockout RequireJS jQuery JavaScript MV* )
  • Where next for Grails?
    Long-ish post by Peter Ledbrook — but worth looking at if you're interested in the future of Grails.
    (tagged: Grails )
  • We used to write things like …
    I promise I won't make a habit of linking to Hacker News, but this was timely because this was something that I found myself thinking about while hacking together the Project Management Dev Dice. "What makes ng-click any different from onclick?" There's the usual HN signal/noise to deal with here, but most of the discussion is worthwhile. For my money, where I landed on this was as follows: what makes ng-click and its brethren different than the old-fashioned tight-coupling of onclick etc. is that the the Angular views are basically hybridizing mark-up and JavaScript anyway — (a DSL?) — the lines are blurry. (And isn't Angular's philosophy to be declarative? to add something to the mark-up that it "should" have?) Now if I can just reconcile the whole "not progressively enhanced" bit that goes hand-in-hand with Angular…
    (tagged: AngularJS JavaScript )

happy birthday, Boo!

by Rob Friesel

A year ago, A. woke up me up from this strange dream about guerrilla pizza marketing to tell me that “it was time to go”, and a couple hours later, Emery Stephen (“Boo”, to us) was born.

last day as an 11-month old

That’s a picture A. took of him yesterday. 1 I’ve got one last picture to take of him today, and I’ll have completed the same picture-a-day project of E. that I did with H. (I’ll have missed only one day — due to travelling, and me not being on that trip — but I missed a day with H., too, so it balances out.) Not that I’ve posted all those pictures yet, but… All in good time.

We’ll be having a tiny little shindig at the house to celebrate this weekend. So glad you’re in our lives, Boo. Happy birthday!

UPDATE: (4/14/2013) Here are those birthday pictures; and here’s a picture for every day of the first year of his life. 2

  1. Source: @amy_chess on Instagram.[↩]
  2. Well… almost every day. We missed just one day. (Just like we did with H.)[↩]

inaugural BurlingtonJS meet-up

by Rob Friesel

Last night as the inaugural BurlingtonJS meet-up at the Office Squared space. As an attendee, I would call it a success. We had two fantastic speakers: Agilion’s Pete Brown (@beerlington) who gave a good intro to Ember.js (summarized thusly); and Draker’s Ian Metcalf, who demoed an attempt at building a Prezi alternative using Backbone.js and Paper.js (see the source in Github).

The really exciting thing was to see a packed room though. The event sold out quickly and almost every attendee who signed up actually showed up. What’s more, the energy in the room was wonderful — very positive, very engaged, very curious. (As an aside: the chapter leader for the local Girl Develop It, Maureen McElaney, was in attendance to do a little recruiting. You-yes-you should get in touch to help out.) Sitting in the room, it was obvious that Burlington has an active and thriving community of front-end developers and that they’re hungry for something like this. My hat goes off to Patrick Berkeley for organizing the event.

Sounds like they’re doing another one in about a month or so. I plan to be there, and hopefully present.

Linkdump for April 9th

by Rob Friesel
  • Animation in AngularJS
    At yearofmoo.com — looks like first class support for animations is well under way as part of the core AngularJS library.
    (tagged: animation AngularJS JavaScript )
  • Building a strong foundation for Vermont’s technology future
    Interesting piece by Pete Brown (writing over at Beerlington) on the local Vermont tech scene and really building a community around it. I think he's being just a little unfair to David Parker though — granted I wasn't there, so I can't speak to David's specific remarks about "changing the rhetoric", but in all the years I've known him, I wouldn't say that he's just all talk. There's also the bit about sponsorship, which can get a bit thorny, and to say that "these companies are missing the point" may be a bit reductionist. All that being said, I very strongly agree with Pete's points about building the community here. There's a whole blog post of a response in there about the how's and why's (and why not's) but I'll save that for later.

    In any case: Pete is presenting at tomorrow night's BurlingtonJS meet-up and I'm looking forward to meeting him and perhaps talking a bit about this.

    (tagged: Burlington Vermont )
  • Project Management Dev Dice
    A little joke that started a couple years ago… Finally did something with it. (Gave me an excuse to dork around with AngularJS, Bower, and Heroku…) See also: source
    (tagged: humor Patented Dev Dice )
  • Freeing the Floats of the Future From the Tyranny of the Rectangle
    At Adobe's Web Platform Team Blog. Looks promising.
    (tagged: CSS )
  • A Baseline for Web Performance with PhantomJS
    A deck by Wesley Hales. Looks like a good round up — and/but as usual: I wished I could hear the talk that goes along with it. For one thing, it would be nice to know whether/not he addresses some of the limitations that PhantomJS has w/r/t/ reporting (or not reporting) cached assets in a given page's payload. But overall it looks like some solid recommendations.
    (tagged: Wesley Hales front-end development performance PhantomJS )

dream.20130406: tiny bamboo models

by Rob Friesel

You press your nose right up against the hardwood floor. You can see every too-wide gap between the boards, can see every scuff and scratch. (The woodgrain used to be beautiful but now it’s a wreck.) You have a tiny sack cloth in one hand. You dump out the sack. Tiny boards of bamboo. And then you begin to arrange them, to stack them. You’re building a tiny replica of a Japanese farmhouse. It’s difficult work. Not unlike Buddhist monks making mandalas. Only the bamboo farmhouse keeps falling apart and you need to start from scratch. But you can see it in your mind.

reflecting on Data Analysis

by Rob Friesel

[Coursera] Data Analysis with Jeff LeekAs part of my “re-learn some statistics” goal for the year, I enrolled myself in the Data Analysis course taught through Coursera by Jeff Leek. It looked like a good survey of statistical and analytical methods and combined that with some R programming skills. So with that in mind, I signed myself up for the course and then spent eight semi-grueling weeks over February and March drinking from a firehose of singular value decompositions, tapply statements, tree graphs, vectors, and every other thing that was packed in there. In the end I scored much better than I thought (“With Distinction”), but I wanted to jot down some reflections on the experience. In no particular order… Continue reading →