Links from 2014

<blockquote>Hull is a set of open engagement APIs that let you build user login and authentication, activity feeds, messaging, likes, ratings, comments and more into your apps in minutes.</blockquote>

<blockquote>The system PA uploaded your personal hospital records to is said to be Google BigQuery. It supports one-click database sharing with any other Google account, and is hosted on servers outside the UK (and possibly outside the EU, in breach of the EU Data Protection Directive). And what they uploaded was the entire shooting match—full personal medical records indexed by NHS patient number—with enough additional data (post code, address, date of birth, gender) to make de-anonymizing the records trivial.</blockquote>

<blockquote>First Movers tend to launch without really fully understanding customer problems or the product features that solve those problems. They guess at their business model and then do premature, loud and aggressive Public Relations hype and early company launches and quickly burn through their cash. This is a great strategy if there’s a bubble occurring in your market or you are going to bet it all on flipping your company for a sale. Otherwise the jury is in. There’s no advantage.</blockquote>

<blockquote>There are people in my profession who think they can ignore this problem. Some are murmuring that this mess is like MMR, a public misunderstanding to be corrected with better PR. They are wrong: it's like nuclear power. Medical data, rarefied and condensed, presents huge power to do good, but it also presents huge risks. When leaked, it cannot be unleaked; when lost, public trust will take decades to regain.</blockquote>

It gets worse.

<blockquote>The internet makes it absurdly easy for marketers to harness the tiniest twinges of boredom or loneliness or desire, channelling them into sales via "variable rewards" – so much more addictive, as Skinner discovered, than predictable ones. A fascinating new book, Hooked, by Nir Eyal, presents itself as a guidebook for companies who want to create "habit-forming products". But it's also a cautionary manual for resisting them. Eyal urges businesses to think ethically. (Creating addictive products you wouldn't use yourself, he says, "is called exploitation".) </blockquote>

"Absurdly easy" may be overstating things. I like the "wouldn't use it yourself" part. Not a bad general guideline.

<blockquote>Self-esteem fits perfectly over the top of the traditional ideal of the free and noble individual, striving to achieve the American dream. The movement’s sin was making it sound easy. It removed the part about striving, replacing it with an unearned assumption of exceptionalism. The lesson became that simply wanting it is enough. You’re special. You deserve it.</blockquote>

The first part of this (at least) is really quite good.

<blockquote>Seeing the web not as a “platform” but as a “continuum”—a truly fluid, chaotic design medium serving millions of imperfect clients—might help.</blockquote>

<blockquote>However friendly he was to the radical left, Iain had little interest in relating the long-range possibility of utopia to radical politics in the here and now. As he saw it, what mattered was to keep the utopian possibility open by continuing technological progress, especially space development, and in the meantime to support whatever policies and politics in the real world were rational and humane.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Scrum seems to be particularly common as the nominative process the team is following. For many people, this situation is exacerbated by Scrum because Scrum is process that's centered on project management techniques and deliberately omits any technical practices, in contrast to (for example) Extreme Programming.</blockquote>

<blockquote>You can't do this shit on an amateur basis and not get burned. Handling money makes you a target: the more money, the bigger the bullseye: and you can't write secure software on the run or patch up a proof of concept to production quality on a shoestring budget.</blockquote>

<blockquote>If you create a page using X, Y% of mobile users can use it</blockquote>

<blockquote>It's painful for me to write critically about a project like care.data, because I love medical data, and I know the good it can do. We have a golden opportunity in the UK, with 60 million people cared for in one glorious NHS. Opt-outs would destroy the data, and the growing calls for an opt-in system would be worse: opt-in killed people by holding back organ donation, and more than that, it would exacerbate social inequality around data, because the poorest patients, those most likely to be unwell, are also the least engaged with services, the least likely to opt in. They would become invisible.

So here's my advice: if you're thinking of opting out – wait. If you run care.data – listen. </blockquote>

So frustrating.

Highlight "weasel words" and passive voice as you write in Sublime Text.

<blockquote>The solution to this, with a lot of help from Heroku Support is: use a build pack!</blockquote>

Also: PHP.

<blockquote>Inject your Bower components right into your HTML from Grunt.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Keep multiple browsers & devices in sync when building websites.</blockquote>

Why bother with a classic CMS any more?

<blockquote>Our content site is in a private Github repository that all Asanas have access to. We create and edit the Markdown files directly through their web interface. Technical teammates can clone the repo locally and use whatever tool stack they choose.

Non-technical teammates don’t need to know Git – they just need to know that “commit” basically equals “save” – and that they can’t break anything because it’s all version controlled. The Github editor renders the Markdown for you when you commit – so you can see that your styling worked. </blockquote>

<blockquote>Easy version control and collaboration to improve your writing.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Write better with a simple markdown editor, version control and easy collaboration tools.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Singularity is based on internal ratios instead of context based which allows for better gutter consistency across breakpoints. Ratio based math also allows for non-uniform grids in any unit you want to use.</blockquote>

<blockquote>A multi-transport API Server with integrated cluster capabilites and delayed tasks.</blockquote>

Hand-picked registry of Node.js frameworks.

<blockquote>a node.js module built specifically to enable you to build correct REST web services.</blockquote>

A simple guide to responsive design.

<blockquote>A Mac PrefPane to manage all your Homebrew-installed services</blockquote>

Shopify alternative.