Bravo to the Semantic UI team! The Developer Experience seems very smooth and this kit is now a contender... I am now planning to use it on my next small project. Previously I may have only considered Bootstrap or Foundation.
Great talk! I am excited by the possibility of seeing Mirabai Knight launch a Kickstarter campaign for a steno keyboard for programmers and other users. Given the promise of typing 200 WPM comfortably I think many of us would pay a premium for a new device and training software.
This is a very exciting project! Well done! This and the "Remote Storage" movement [1] seem to be making movements towards a web with data in the hands of the users. This is important if smaller SaaS companies want to sell into the big enterprise that have strict policies about data storage remaining on the internal network.
Thank you! If I am understanding correct then the tl;dr is: node-webkit is made for building native apps using JS. breach is a web browser made for hacking with JS.
This. It seems to me that many authors are pointing to the importance of a balance between the long-term paradigmatic and principled knowledge and short-term tactical knowledge. Both are important and not to be neglected at the expense of the other.
My plan: go all in on Angular (wish it were Ember or Backbone) through 2015. These frameworks have reached a maturity and popularity that makes them useful and reliable. I expect to switch to Polymer / Web Components early 2016. I work at a very large company. I think it makes sense for us to stay in the "late majority" because most benefits come for technology adopters after the trail has not only been blazed but has been thoroughly paved and landscaped by others. There may be competitive advantages however to individual developers and smaller organizations (startups) who can pioneer the new.
Excuse me while I wax melodramatically rhetorical.
Dear CanILeavePlease,
Congratulations are in order. You have crossed a threshold that you will most likely not understand the full importance of until much later in your life. That threshold is named "Your limits". Crossing this threshold is a privilege reserved for only those worthy of learning and growing.
The long and short of it is this: The world seems to love throwing more work at competent and resourceful people. The problem is that the world is full of work and so the competent and resourceful typically fill up very quickly to the point of overflow and explosion.
You write about freedom. The lesson that you will learn is that freedom starts with saying "no". Once you start saying no you will immediately start to feel the freedom enter your body. It's very surprising how great it feels.
Lets imagine that tomorrow a client calls for a status update on their project and they ask you if it will be done on time? Tell them "No. The project will not be done on time." and see what happens. I can almost guarantee you that you will feel great for the following hours. You won't feel good because someone else didn't get what they wanted. You'll feel good because you were able to tell someone else the truth. Bonus points: if the client is reasonable they will respect you more than before because they now know they can trust you. Afraid your friends and employees won't like to hear it? Bullshit. Start saying "no" and you'll become leader that your friends and employees really need and can respect.
It's true that some people expect the entire universe to never say no to them. The good news is that those people aren't worth having in your life. When one exposes themselves by trying to make you feel guilty you can be please that now you know it and can disassociate yourself. This works in reverse as well: You can choose to associate with people that have the proper respect for your boundaries.
I've been there. I quit my job and started freelancing. Not even 3 months later I'm triple booked and sleeping 3 hours a night. One morning I cracked and my wife found me in the living room beside myself rocking back and forth, visibly shaking. Later on that day I had to make some of the most difficult decisions of my life. Guess what? Once I made the tough calls the liberation began.
As you have probably figured out already, working 14 hours a day is not the answer. Making better decisions is.
While I generally agree with the direction of this article, I think the author is not rigorous enough.
I think the author conflates multiple types of design with each other (product design, industrial design, systems/solution design, service design, visual design, interaction design, user experience design) and then proceeds to conflate the success of each one with the other while mostly focusing on interaction and visual design throughout the article. Second I think the author conflates the success of "design" with the success of Square which is a big mistake because if you really study Square's success it is a fantastic case study for the success of design. AFAIK Intuit launched a similar product and service with a single UX designer on a large dedicated staff well before Square launched. Square's intense focus on design trounced Intuit with a product and service based at least partially on superior design and UX. I think the author also slips his assumptions past the audience at the beginning of the article stating that design has won it's “a seat at the table” which is highly contextual and in general may still be less true than the author makes the case for. While design may not be batting last anymore it most certainly almost never bats first.
In my opinion Daniel Rosenberg offers a more scathing and valuable critique of today's design scene in his IXDA 2014 talk "The De-intellectualization of Design" [1]. I highly suggest that if you are interested in this topic that you pay attention to what he states in that talk.
All they had to write was "It’s been two years since HipChat joined the Atlassian family"... the rest is obvious. IMHO Atlassian is a company focused on helping enterprises control users of their software, not help them. JIRA's maddening UX is Exhibit A.
Thank you Rob. Although there are perhaps some things to nit-pick about your post, I think you have expressed something important about recent changes (last 5 years) to attitudes in the JS community.
Alan Kay posits that yes it does matter that PARC "invented the future" because there were and are very few researchers working with the opportunity mix necessary. They had five years of freedom from business concerns, tons of ambition, the right context, intelligence and inspiration. Kay claims that the extremely unique situation and persons at PARC and previously at ARPA are what gave rise to the inventions. I think he would agree with you that other people would have made similar discoveries and inventions, if only they too had the opportunity and necessary materials. From what I have heard Alan say in his speeches his perspective is that the opportunity simply does not exist today, at least not in the necessary configuration to do what PARC did.
Check out this video for a more detailed history recounted by Kay about PARC and what led up to it:
http://vimeo.com/84523828
I think the interview question detailed in the post makes a fine web development Fizz Buzz Test. It may not define the hard skill floor but not being able to answer this question correctly clearly identifies a candidate that has not written or read much Javascript at all. Basic JS experience and skill is a requirement for web development work today.
8000 people 'working' on it most definitely helps get initial usage off the ground for apps that require a network effect. But you are right, this was my initial concern as well. People and product management seems as though it will be the major challenge for Assembly. However this is an enormous opportunity to go meta and dog food new distributed labor management systems and structures. Valve Software + "The Cloud".