apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health?
629 karma · joined March 10, 2009
Unfortunately some developers think that once you've chosen one particular storage technology (RDF, relational DB, document storage) that's the bucket you hae to put everything into in order to do anything in your application. I suspect that was the mental model of the other devs in the story above.
The more I manage people (especially developers) the more I'm drawn to the adage of 'a metric that becomes a target ceases to be a useful metric' but at the same time many companies put great stock in trying to develop measurable KPIs - something that I've greatly struggled with through several roles as a development manager.
If I was going to land on anything currently it would probably be something like 'Features released within a iteratively improved estimated timeframe'. In other words a metric that focused on an improvement between now the and last time the measurement was made but not towards a specific target. Also a metric that made people realise that the focus is more around them working as a team and even across multiple teams to achieve a goal.
QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter, by Richard Feynman - for someone who never got science, this book was a beautiful revelation of just how extra-ordinary our natural world is.
A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century, by Barbara Tuchman. Probably the best history book I've ever read. There's a reason the woman won two Pulitzer's - such a fantastic writer.
The entire selling point of email is its instantaneous nature and its immediacy. If connecting up to retrieve your emails becomes too arduous it stops being a useful tool and other things take its place. Such as printing documents, secure phone calls or video conferencing...
Journalism is also about providing a narrative that provides the reader deeper understanding of a topic in question. There's easily space for that kind of journalism to exist in conjunction with the raw data of individual conversations that take place to generate that narrative. In the same way that data journalism takes data available to anyone and makes it palatable I would expect the same could easily be done in this case if the journalist felt the story was engaging enough.
Consider "1. seated close 2. relatively large screen 3. precise mouse" in the context of (what should be your very first imaginary user): a search bot. Not one of them make sense and they don't make much more sense if you expand your users beyond your very, very limited set.
Consider also: vision impaired users, users without the mechanical ability to use a mouse, or any number of use cases with accessibility issues.
Personally I think the best use case in order to begin thinking about design for the web begins with: universal access to information. Every design, UX and technical decision should flow from that basic principle.
and the associated drive SDK for publishing web content https://developers.google.com/drive/publish-site
I think it's fairly safe to say that by the time something gets a writeup in the Sydney Morning Herald the majority of readers of HN will already have heard of it.
I was struggling with an ending - something banal about two young people in love and I couldn't figure out why I wasn't getting the ending I wanted. I turned to my teacher and said something along the lines of: "I don't get it. It keeps reading like a tragedy but the hero is right at the end so I don't understand what's going on." The guy just looked at me, shook his head and said "Being right isn't the same as being happy."
You can be right all the way to your grave, but you can still live a tragedy.
(You're right though, it's still one of my favourite writeups about java)
Edit: Received. Thank you very* much