I really wanted to write this up as a paper, perhaps for SigGraph. But I’ve never submitted a paper before, and I don’t know how worthy this would be of a SigGraph paper to begin with. So instead, I thought I’d write this up as a blog post–and we’ll see where this goes. Introduction This [...]
Well, the rant on TechCrunch has gone global: Tech’s Dark Secret, It’s All About Age. Excuse me while I throw in my two cents, as a 44 year old software developer. Pretty much all of the useful stuff in Computer Science was invented by the 1960′s or 1970′s. Very little is out there today that [...]
I remember the original “Inside Macintosh.” I actually still have the loose-leaf binder version of “Inside Macintosh” that shipped with System v1. The original Inside Macintosh documented the “Macintosh Toolkit” (the acronym “API” wasn’t in common use then), and, aside from two introductory chapters–one which described the OS and one which documented a sample application–each [...]
Just saw a résumé cross my desk today, with “JavaScript” spelled “JAVA Scripts.” (Yes, from the context of the sentence, the guy was clearly referring to JavaScript.) Naturally I bounced it. I’m a terrible speller. My english skills are at best “okay.” But come-on: if you’re going to send off a résumé to impress a [...]
“Typical” computer science workspaces off-putting to women This is something that has concerned me greatly. In part, because my wife (who graduated from Caltech and who is smarter than I am at mathematics) would do quite well as a software developer–and she won’t touch the industry with a 10 foot pole. And in part because, [...]
Here’s a user interface design anti-pattern I just ran into. So I’m trying to complete my company’s on-line sexual harassment training program. I guess they teach you how to be better at engaging in sexual harassment; I dunno. And the reason why I don’t know is because when I logged into the program using Safari [...]
After watching Objectified again a few days ago I started formulating an idea of the concept of “Design”. It seems to me there are two separate concepts of “Design” that have become mashed together. The first concept, which to me is interesting but somewhat useless, is the idea of design as art or as artistic [...]
Excuse my ramblings. Here’s a common mistake. Say I’m building a client/server application. In attempting to understand the problem set I first design the back-end database layout, the data flow between systems, and the transformations (procedures, program statements) which perform the tasks that I need to use to achieve my system design. The transformations then [...]
Via BoingBoing: Gadget problems divide the sexes The service found that 64% of its male callers and 24% of its female callers had not read the instruction manual before ringing up. 12% of male and 7% of female customers simply needed to plug in or turn on their appliance. This is why good design–site design, [...]
If you’re a developer, you probably have already read it, or read about it: The Duct Tape Programmer. There are some really good points about this article–but it’s clear that the article itself is written by someone who is not a duct tape programmer. The differentiation between an Architecture Astronaut and a duct tape programmer [...]