Louie Mantia on Making Opinionated Software

“Making software isn’t easy. You have to make a lot of decisions and have good strong reasoning for doing so. A lot of the decisions I make are with my gut, and revolve around my personal taste. But there’s another way to design things, and that’s “safely.”

It’s not easy either, but designing safely means designing for everyone (80%+ of the population). Often, designing safely means making decisions that don’t make you happy personally. You include a feature so that someone else will like it.”

I think Louie should take it one step further. Write Opinionated Software. Don’t write mushy middle-of-the-road swiss army knife software. Write something with a voice.

Cognitive Biases in Software Engineering

“This is one of the harder biases to get over in my opinion, because it means acknowledging our own limitations, and really stressing the fragile parts of the code that we write. We all want and expect our software to work, so we are inescapably drawn to evidence that confirms this desire. Keep fighting this urge, keep testing, and always question your assumptions.”

Jonathan Klein on how our brains deceive us when encountering issues in software development.

Fleeting Thoughts on Design

I wrote this for some internal documentation around or data visualization (i.e. Dashboards) standards. I kind of like it.

 

Gas-pump-ui

Here’s something you may use every week, a gas pump. Most people probably don’t think much about how it was put together.

This is a perfect example of something made without much cohesive design. Every gas station is different, every pump manufacturer, every point-of-sale vendors, etc. Each with its own design decisions and logic. We learn to deal with these inconsistencies every time we stop for gas. In the worse case we become frustrated or make mistakes due to the lack of consistency. In the best cases all parts are easy to understand and work consistently.

In the physical world there is a long and complex history in the development of interfaces – multiple owners, physical and technical limitations, regulatory influences, etc.

However, even with those differences, we all know how to navigate this process. We’ve developed knowledge of what parts of the display we can interact with and how certain parts need to be selected first before seeing changes elsewhere.

The same is true in the digital world. People have come to rely on a lot of subtle clues to make their way through an interface: buttons have slight gradients and rounded corners, links have hover states, form fields have a soft inner shadow, and navigation bars “float” over the rest of the content.

These consistent elements are the focus of our user interface (UI) standards – the things we can make consistent should be consistent regardless of creator or audience. We have the unique opportunity, unlike the beleaguered gas station pump designers, to work together to create a shared language and experience when creating content for our co-workers.

Cadillac’s new Shield

“We’ve been working on it for more than two years now, and we’ve just been going through the motions of making it, designing it, figuring out how to manufacture it, incorporating all the right details, getting the colors, the grid patterns. And putting everything together, you just kinda do your work without the overall importance of it in a way.”

http://www.coolhunting.com/design/interview-nathan-korkus-anne-marie-laverge-webb-cadillac.php

I’m a big fan of the various crests, icons, and emblems used on automobiles. They signify much about the company, each true to its own time in history, and some instantly classic and recognizable.

This was an interesting read into the work behind the design of the new Caddy crest. I had no idea that the duck-like icons weren’t ducks at all!

Science to English Translator

When faced with a temptation, such as eating unhealthy food or skipping out on studying, telling yourself and others “I don’t eat unhealthy food” instead of “I can’t eat unhealthy food” will help you adhere to your resolution better.

The most successful sales people, measured by sales revenue, are not extroverts, but “ambiverts” – those halfway between extreme extroverts and extreme introverts.

 

Useful Science is a site that attempts to summarize research and scientific findings in a simple way. They even have a nice newsletter.