The show itself was an unbelievable outpouring of energy and love. I couldn’t help but imagine if anyone in the audience had decided to go on a lark, not knowing anything about it. I would think they would have been pretty damn impressed. This wasn’t just a couple of nerds poking around at instruments (except me), these were some serious musicians giving it their all.
Aw, man, this gets me in the feels!
Just over here sobbing while reading Jeremy’s recount of Frostapalooza.
Another follow-on to my post about design systems and automation. Here, Matthew invokes the spirit of the much-misunderstood Luddite martyrs. It’s good stuff.
Design systems are used by greedy software companies to fatten their bottom line. UI kits replace skilled designers with cheap commoditized labor.
Agile practices pressure teams to deliver more and faster. Scrum underscores soulless feature factories that suck the joy from the craft of software development.
But progress requires more than breaking looms.
This is a great piece! It starts with a look back at some of the great minds of the nineteenth century: Herschel, Darwin, Babbage and Lovelace. Then it brings us, via JCR Licklider, to the present state of the web before looking ahead to what the future might bring.
So what will the life of an interface designer be like in the year 2120? or 2121 even? A nice round 300 years after Babbage first had the idea of calculations being executed by steam.
I think there are some missteps along the way (I certainly don’t think that inline styles—AKA CSS in JS—are necessarily a move forwards) but I love the idea of applying chaos engineering to web design:
Think of every characteristic of an interface you depend on to not ‘fail’ for your design to ‘work.’ Now imagine if these services were randomly ‘failing’ constantly during your design process. How might we design differently? How would our workflows and priorities change?
When I’m asked to give an example of a beautiful piece of design, perfect in form and function, I often respond with “the URL.”
I love every word of this beautifully-written love letter from Brendan.
This is how Graham proposed to Linzi …and you can try it out for yourself.
(I must’ve got something in my eye when I got to the end of the level. Weird.)
A detailed history of Babbage and Lovelace through the lens of Wolfram’s work today:
Ada seems to have understood with some clarity the traditional view of programming: that we engineer programs to do things we know how to do. But she also notes that in actually putting “the truths and the formulae of analysis” into a form amenable to the engine, “the nature of many subjects in that science are necessarily thrown into new lights, and more profoundly investigated.” In other words—as I often point out—actually programming something inevitably lets one do more exploration of it.
If this piques your interest, I highly recommend the Babbage biography The Cogwheel Brain by Doron Swade.
Our new intern—L’il James—demonstrates good .gif skills in his write-up of the project he worked on at Hack Farm.
It’s like Downton Abbey and Silicon Valley had a baby.
This is a great piece of writing by Lance Arthur. It breaks my heart that I have to read it on Medium instead of Glassdog.
I think this is kind of brilliant.
What Erin has written here makes me want to be a better person.
This is so lovely! The story of Jessica and Russ’s romance, illustrated by fifteen of their friends.
The lovely (and responsive) Great Discontent site has a lovely interview with Dan, who is lovely.
This is a beautifully heartfelt post from Timoni:
Every day, I feel things because of the internet, and that’s amazing. Humans have been using abstracted communication for thousands of years, but it’s never been so instantaneous, never so capable of bringing folks of completely different backgrounds together in conversation. This is a huge step. Good job us.
The final post in ten years of blogging. Derek is dead. I can’t imagine what it must have been like to write this.
Of plush toys and tentacle porn.
This is wonderful: sad, beautiful, and wonderful ...it's what I've been trying so hard to clumsily articulate. Read it. And smile. And weep.
I'm not sure I can resist ordering one of these T-shirts featuring crime-fighting duo Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace.
I think this has to be my favourite contribution to Ada Lovelace day. Brilliant!