🔗 Martin Hähnel: Write Like You’re Ron Jeffries

The meandering pace of solving a problem, of how ideas develop and how people create are not replaced by the slick surface of the perfect how-to in which everything seemed to have worked on the first try, was clear from the beginning. Jeffries’ texts […] document the doing in the making, learning in the making. It makes it obvious that that which is presented is very often not how it was derived.

It would be nice to do more of this style of writing.

🔗 Brandon’s Journal: Save Your Writing

Some good advice about saving your previous creations, even if you feel you’ll never look at it again. Maybe you won’t, but if it’s writing, what’s a couple of megabytes in this world swimming in storage? Move it out of sight if you must, but don’t delete it.

🔗 Robert Birming: The world’s worst blogger

I moved my blog from Bear to Micro.blog because, as I put it, it “started to feel limited”. I had begun creating photo albums, a status log, and some other stuff. It became harder and harder to manage…

So I moved [to Micro.blog]. A place with great features for adding photo collections, logging books, writing both long posts and short ones without titles. All just a click away…

Now that I have all these possibilities, I can’t seem to do it. No matter how I try, it never feels right to mix things up. And when I tried running two blogs on the same platform, it just got confusing.

I can’t pretend to fully understand Robert’s feelings, but I that I’ve gone through similar feelings myself: wondering if this bit of content should be on this blog, or that one should be there, etc. And always looking at the next shiny thing glittering on the horizon: a new CMS I haven’t tried, a fresh theme. There’s always something else to look at.

And I think much of this is all a distraction from a worry that took me a while to acknowledge: is what I write of interest to anyone? If I were to write about this, will they get upset or board? Who am I to waste their time on writing about topics that are of no interest to my readers?

​I’m trying to get better at not worrying too much about this. Although I can’t fully know what others are thinking, I have at least one data point that can provide me an answer to this, which is being a reader of blogs myself. And I’m aware that not everything I get from my feeds is going to interest me. That’s fine, I’ll just skip over that one post and wait for the next one. I’d probably prefer that over someone splitting their posts across multiple feeds and knowing that I’m only getting part of what they’re writing.

So if I were to provide some advice to Robert, it’s to try and simplify. Have a single site that others can subscribe to and write everything there. The hassle of deciding where to write isn’t really worth the worry. Plus your simplifying things for your readers, who want to read stuff from you. That’s why they’ve subscribed.

Anyway, like I said, I can’t pretend to fully understand the feelings. I definitely don’t think Robert is the “world’s worst blogger.” I enjoy reading his posts and I look forward to seeing them pop up in my RSS reader. I just hope this helps in some way. And I know how much easier it is to give advice than to follow it yourself. Go through my archive where I’ve spun out topics into separate blogs/CMS myself. All in all, keeping things simple is probably good advice for both of us.

🔗 Steph Ango: File over app

The files you create are more important than the tools you use to create them. Apps are ephemeral, but your files have a chance to last.

This is excellent advice, and one that I’m trying to practice better. I’d also argue that this can be extended to a software design principal, which is to assume the data will outlive the system. Therefore, prefer a data scheme that will be long lasting, and worry less about the systems that operate over it. This is why I found it distasteful to offload schema designs to ORMs.

🔗 Ditch those words!

Liked this post by Robin Rendle.

Folks will spend so much time adding fancy illustrations and making sure the icons aren’t blurry but when it comes to words and actions in interfaces they seem to gloss right over them.

It’s a well known trope in UI design that the user generally doesn’t read things. So I can forgive those who feel that words in UIs are not as important as icons. But I do occasionally wonder if the pendulum has swung too far. More than once I’ve encountered a UI with icons, without any description, that I didn’t understand, and it had an effect of my ability to use it.

Every word in a UI needs to act like a hammer, with each successive word the interface should become clearer, more easily understood. If you put a word like Explore in an interface it might make sense but now add another navigation item like Discover beneath it and now both words make no sense. The UI has collapsed into meaninglessness and folks are forced to click and think and furrow their brows to understand the difference between the two.

I didn’t even consider the case where words could interact with each other this way, like elements in a chemical reaction. But seeing it described like this, it makes total sense.

The cynic in me worries that the folks who made this interface don’t want me to read the popup or modal or alert or web page or list of settings or whatever and they really just want me to click a button. The words are designed to be longwinded and confusing. They just want the click.

I think it’s easy to read this as the UI design being intentionally obscure, just to herd the user through specific interaction flows that benefit the company. I’m sure there’s a bit of that. But I also think that some designers are simply trying to help the user trying to achieve what they want out of their software. It may be that they just haven’t got the right words to explain it, being someone who’s working on the software every workday. And I don’t know how this could be improved. Adding more words for the user to not read doesn’t seem to be the solution. Maybe more user testing? Some way to better understand how the user thinks the software works.

Anyway, very interesting post.

🔗 Rebooting the blogosphere

Under the heading Don’t be shy:

Tell everyone you see. Be a nuisance.

I find the hardest part of blogging is telling people I have a blog. 🙂

🔗 Manuel Moreale: On em dashes

What if they tweak the instructions next week and tell it to use more full stops or commas? What are we gonna do then? Stop using those as well? Hell no. I’ll keep writing however I want, and if someone decides to stop reading what I write because they suspect it’s AI-generated because I use too many em dashes, or parentheses, or any other punctuation or word or whatever, well, good riddance.

My feelings exactly. To stop using em dashes because of AI chatbots seems ludicrous to me.

🔗 HN Comment by IanCal in a discussion about RDF (emphasis added):

Someone will suggest modelling to solve this but here lies the biggest problem: The correct modelling depends on the questions you want to answer. Our modelling had good tradeoffs for mapping academic citation tracking. It had bad modelling for legal ownership. There isn’t one modelling that solves both well.

That may be why I was turned off by RDF all those years ago. One seeks to model a domain, but domains can be extremely complicated, and even if you cover everything, it’s still only one domain. But the biggest crime is assuming that the model is necessary for all use cases. And it just isn’t. Does every website that tracks books need to know the full legal name, publisher name, the legal entity of the company that supplied the typesetting? Simplify, man.

Via: Simon Willison

🔗 Dave Winer: We Make Shitty Software

We know our software sucks. But it’s shipping! Next time we’ll do better, but even then it will be shitty. The only software that’s perfect is one you’re dreaming about. Real software crashes, loses data, is hard to learn and hard to use. But it’s a process. We’ll make it less shitty. Just watch!

It’s true. Speaking for myself, I too make shitty software. Probably have my entire career. It’s only today that I’ve internalised it. And it’s a hard thing to admit. How hard? Well, try four attempts at posting this declaration publicly.

Via: Coding Horror

🔗 GitHub: Gopher Hawaiian Shirts

Patterns for printing Hawaiian shirts with the Go gopher. I think I’ve found what I’ll be wearing to work in the future. 😄

Via: Golang Weekly