design patterns
A common response to The Ferengi Programmer: From what I can see, the problem of "overly-rule-bound developers" is nowhere near the magnitude of the problem of "developers who don't really have a clue." The majority of developers do not suffer from too much design
design patterns
The introduction to Head First Design Patterns exhorts us not to reinvent the wheel: You're not alone. At any given moment, somewhere in the world someone struggles with the same software design problems you have. You know you don't want to reinvent the wheel (or worse,
usability
I was struck, the other day, by how much I had to think when attempting to heat up my sandwich in the microwave. There are so many controls: a clock, a set of food-specific buttons, defrost and timer controls, and of course a full numeric keypad. Quick! What do you
design patterns
Many developers consider the book Design Patterns a classic. So what's a design pattern? A design pattern systematically names, motivates, and explains a general design that addresses a recurring design problem in object-oriented systems. It describes the problem, the solution, when to apply the solution, and its consequences.
information retrieval
I'm currently reading through Peter Morville's [http://findability.org/] excellent book Ambient Findability [http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0596007655/codihorr-20]. It cites some papers that attempt to explain the search behavior of web users, starting with the berrypicking model: > In a 1989 article
design patterns
A recent post by Steve Makofsky reminded me that the excellent UI Patterns and Techniques site is now a book from O'Reilly -- Designing Interfaces. There's technically no reason to buy a book on visual design patterns when you can find the same information online .. * GUI
programming languages
Artima has another great interview series, this time with Erich Gamma. You know, Erich Gamma: Gang of Four, JUnit, Eclipse. As you might expect from such a notable developer, it's full of great advice. Like this section on avoiding frameworkitis: Frameworkitis is the disease that a framework wants
ui design
The Top 8 reasons user interface design is in the stone age is more of a rant than a reasoned argument, but it's still worth reading. If UI design is in the stone age, why are there at least two sites which document known UI patterns? 1. UI
software development concepts
I'm beginning to wonder if the book Head First Design Patterns would be better titled Ass Backwards Design Patterns. Here are some quotes from pages 594 and 595 of this 629 page book: First of all, when you design, solve things in the simplest way possible. Your goal
programming languages
Paul Graham's essay Revenge of the Nerds is a nearly pornographic love letter to Lisp [http://www.paulgraham.com/icad.html]. If you can manage to read all the way to the end, there's an interesting footnote buried at the bottom: > Peter Norvig [http://norvig.