software development concepts
Philip Chu’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective Programmers is witty, eloquent, and peppered with illustrative real world anecdotes: Upon joining an early-stage startup called Neomar, I found myself in two months of design meetings for a wireless internet portal that was due to launch in six months. Eventually we
html
I’m a big fan of showing the user visual feedback as soon as possible, whether you’re downloading a web page or rendering a windows form. Images already render progressively in a web browser – but you can do even better. Simply save your GIF or PNG images with the
ui/ux design
Ever wonder how you could possibly find something in that complex, ten-tabbed options dialog? How about a search function on the options dialog, as featured in Quest’s Toad for SQL Server: Aside from the fact that it’s completely insane to build an options dialog so complicated that it
user experience
Seth Godin’s Incomplete Guide to Building a Web Site that Works (6mb PDF) is a great reminder of how to build a popular website without becoming a marketing weasel in the process: Big Picture #1: A Web site must do at least one of two things, but probably both:
hardware
I’ve talked about all the essential environmental things a programmer should have: a good chair, at least two monitors, and a great keyboard. One thing I haven’t talked about, though, is headphones. Headphones are probably the most optional item in that list. But if you’re not blessed
case sensitivity
One of the most pernicious problems with C-based languages is that they’re case-sensitive. While this decision may have made sense in 1972 when the language was created, one wonders why the sins of Kernighan and Ritchie have been blindly perpetuated for the last thirty-three years. I realize this is
font legibility
If you’re not reading the Wichita State Software Usability Research Laboratory newsletter regularly, you should be. It’s an amazing source of usability experiments with actual data, hypotheses, citations, statistics, and all that other stuff that puts the science back into computer science. A 2001 SURL experiment compared the
web technologies
I try to avoid posting entries from the Mindless Link Propagation Department, but Adam Bosworth’s article Learning from The Web is excellent and it deserves a careful read: The Web taught us several unintuitive lessons: 1. Simple, relaxed, sloppily extensible text formats and protocols often work better than complex
search engines
Let’s say I was to search Google for the word Jaguar: There’s an immediate problem. The semantics of Jaguar only exist in my head, not in any search box. Did I mean... * Jaguar the car? * OSX Jaguar? * Jaguar the animal? * The Atari Jaguar? * Austin Power’s Shaguar? Whichever
html
One thing I dislike about ASP.NET is that it renders the entire web page in memory before sending one single byte of that page to the browser. Consider an ASP.NET page with an embedded DataGrid that relies on ten complex database queries over 15 seconds. Why can’t
software development concepts
In response to My Giant Calculator, Joost commented: I’ll jump to the defense of trusty old calc.exe. Even though it’s crappy, we know it’s on every Windows box we touch. He’s got a point. The applets that ship in the box with the operating system
software development
Have you ever noticed how many people keep a physical calculator next to their computer? The irony is almost palpable. My favorite is the calculator mousepad. Jef Raskin, in The Humane Interface, defends the practice of keeping a pocket calculator next to your PC: It’s true. Many of us