Weekend Reading — Launch The Octopus

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Scott Hanselman "I have never felt so special"

Design Objective

Doug Collins Way to drive the point home:

Give your users a warning and an out before they take actions with potentially catastrophic consequences. #ux #design


Sarah Federman 💯

Your periodic reminder that design is what ships, not what you want to ship.

nicole The hardest problem in design is knowing the limits of the medium:

it takes 1 minute for a designer to add unnecessary fanciness that costs a developer hours of time, technical debt, and can even make things less accessible by not using out of the box element features

Patricia Aas "Progress bars are surprisingly hard to do well"

Lydia Nicholas Good point!

Just interrupting truism "older people don't use technology" to remind it's often because tech DOES NOT WORK FOR THEM.
Low circulation in your fingers? Touch screen won't respond. Got a tremor? Out of luck. Low contrast designs without zoomable text? It's doable but exhausting.

Doug Collins 🚀🐙

What does this button do?

A. Launch the octopus.
B. Activate the showerhead.
C. Turn on the grow light.

This is why icons need labels.


Tools of the Trade

Chaos Oh, snap!

last week i got to witness an engineering department lose a full day's work because if you put an emoji in a git commit message, Atlassian Bamboo chokes on it forever and you're forced to rebase master, like you should NEVER DO. this was of course referred to as The Emojiency

somebody asked me which emoji it was, and i didn't actually know, so i had to go find out

it was 🤦🏻‍♂️

can't see how that could have been improved upon

Hazel Clementine That explains … a lot:

math notations explained

=      equals
=/=  not equals
<      left
>      right
~     worm
π     stonehenge
√     right answer
x      wrong answer
⋯    soon…
∮      what Exactly the fuck
∝    fish
∞    fish with 2 heads
↯    lightning
:⇔   he Scream

Ken Shirriff Why don't I have this knob on my laptop?

Back when there were 12 pence in a shilling and 20 shilings in a pound, the IBM 1401 computer had optional hardware (i.e. transistors) to do arithmetic on pounds/shillings/pence. Of course, there were two incompatible data standards—BSI and IBM—so this knob selected the format.



davy "I put a webcam in a favicon you're welcome Demo"

Nick Sherman "Checks out"


Lingua Scripta

Announcing WAPM: The WebAssembly Package Manager WebAssembly on the server side is an interesting development.

Chris Heilmann 🤔

It is confusing that JavaScript conferences are both events and functions.

Lines of Code

Accenture sued over website redesign so bad it Hertz: Car hire biz demands $32m+ for 'defective' cyber-revamp Not sure why they expected more out of Accenture:


Kevin Isom Sigh. Yes.

Ah, the weekly security alert emails from @github or as I like to call them, the regular reminder of just how many unfinished ideas I've had over the years.


Jennifer Kim One of the trickiest part about interviews:



In other words, under-confidence vs over-confidence.


Troy Hunt 😂

I’m a responsible parent so I use the controls on iOS to limit screen time on the old iPhone my 9-year old uses. A white-listed exception is iMessage; he’s worked out he can send someone a YouTube vid then watch it in iMessage to circumvent the control. So proud 😅


Danny Tuppeny We're slowly approaching the point where you need DevTools and Wireshark just to keep the lights on in your house:

The smart meter in-home-device that @bulbenergy gave us seems to do 2 DNS queries every 3 seconds. The WiFi light is continually flashing like it can't connect. 🤷🏼‍♂️


A poem about Silicon Valley, assembled from Quora questions about Silicon Valley Spot on (h/t DynamicWebPaige)


Locked Doors

Brooke Simmons The appropriate reply to the "Five X" memes:

Five jobs I’ve had:

  1. Don’t
  2. answer
  3. security
  4. questions
  5. on Twitter

A 'Blockchain Bandit' Is Guessing Private Keys and Scoring Millions I guess "don't reuse your private key" is the new "don't reuse your password":


None of the Above

ScienceHex I love this new meme that's going around Twitter of people as X:

Queen Elizabeth as Turkish food: a thread


oshu C 😭

I want to see a version of Star Trek where instead of ending transmissions dramatically, everyone has to click the "confirm" button to end their Zoom calls

Steve Chambers "There is no day that can't be improved by seeing pictures of how they weigh an owl."


LEGO Joseph Smith Good point:

Nobody talks about Jesus' miracle of having 12 close friends in his 30s

aly 👇 No spoliers!

Game of Thrones but with Mean Girls subtitles.


dirtyIiar "Did you know professional tag was a thing?"

Cyrus 🔥

If you:

  1. go to Google right now
  2. enter "Thanos"
  3. click the golden glove
    You can get a live inside look at Google's secret strategy to send fewer clicks to publishers


arstechnica "How serious does Volvo take safety research? They have a freaking fake moose for testing."


Vala Afshar "The stunning focus and balanced head of the kingfisher while hunting"

Space Explorer Mike "Neat or Cheat?"