joshuago’s Bookmarks

Designers need to be there start to ship: from strategy to launch. This is different from other companies. Share early and share often. Sharing with the team and users helps make the design better. Don’t fall in love. Software is impermanent –it is always changing and you need to accept that.

Sometimes, of course, it can seem boring. Sometimes the devotion to balanced he said/she said panel discussions can leave you frustrated and angry and no smarter than you were 15 minutes earlier. Sometimes the interviewing is less challenging than one might hope. But the luxury of an uninterrupted hour of serious, straight-forward news and analysis is just that these days, a luxury. And, in today's world of media where fact and fiction, news and opinion, too often seem hopelessly blurred, it is good to have Lehrer — clearly a person of trust — still at work.

This is what a publisher should do: ensure the ongoing financial success and growth of his or her publication. Instead, what we have now in the media industry are publishers who believe their duties include dictating the editorial mission on behalf of a business principle. This is when publishers go wrong and, generally, is when they should be taken out back and shot.

First think of the consumer of the API. Think about his likely situation and the problems he's facing. He doesn't want to learn a new abstraction and he doesn't like the fact that your API is going to make him change the design of his program. Design for the benefit of the consumer, not your ease of implementation.

When I have been asked why I, as a conservative, support this man [Obama] the way I do, I can only answer: listen to him.

Over the course of the past decade we have invented a dozen technologies to solve the problem of asynchronous and bi-directional communication between the browser and the server: AJAX, Comet & HTTP Streaming, BOSH, ReverseHTTP, WebHooks & PubSubHubbub, and Flash sockets amongst many others. Having said that, it does not take much experience with any of the above to realize that each has a weak spot and none solve the fundamental problem: web-browsers of yesterday were not designed for bi-directional communication.

These techniques could be the difference between molding a product people will actually pay money for and going out of business with an idea you thought was perfect.

Having to think through and answer these questions forces you to identify what you need to do today to seek profits and growth.

By changing a problem slightly you can often do great work rather than merely good work. Instead of attacking isolated problems, I made the resolution that I would never again solve an isolated problem except as characteristic of a class.

The issue of pre-loading needed data for a Rails application has always been somewhat confusing and difficult.