Links from 2024

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It is this “two-speed liberalisation”, a term coined by Mark Pack, a Liberal Democrat bigwig, that helps explains Britain’s culture wars. It may seem as though the combatants are pulling in opposite directions. But it is better to think of a camel train in the desert: arguments break out when those at the front of the caravan pull ahead of the stragglers.

the beautifully simple storytelling platform for teams in marketing, communications, and media.

We think taking a new approach makes it possible to shift government from an organisation of programmes and projects, to one of missions and services. It offers even constrained administrations an opportunity to improve their chances of delivering outcomes, reducing risk, saving money, and rebuilding public trust. Brilliant.

Comments that are easy to grok and grep

A look at the importance of shared vocabulary for projects with some non-tech world examples and showing how digital teams can benefit from this.

Maybe they’re perfect reminders of how violently smashing bytes together on a thin, vulnerable plastic / magnet sandwich is still one of the most punk things you can do as a musician and artist.

Telling stories well requires striking a balance between the power of the story, and its grounding in everyday realities. When trying to achieve this balance, it’s possible for leaders to get it wrong, and make two very different mistakes.

You were born to deploy Kubernetes.

We are sharing these recommendations to advocate for a practical and pragmatic approach to delivering change that starts locally, builds skills across the four nations of the UK, and makes public service attractive for a generation that wants to build a better, more equitable society.

API-first Identity Management, Authentication and Authorization.

Youch. Time to move.

when no amount of exhortation on the part of senior management had been successful. I pointed out to him that the people who resist the change the hardest are the ones who cannot see what their job would be post change. As a result the change is perceived as an existential risk to their own job and they will go to great lengths to sabotage the change because of that.

My lunch with a disability access campaigner was an eye-opener. Even booking was a problem.

Good marketers know that Distinctive Brand Assets are important to building a strong brand identity. Great marketers know that non-Distinctive Brand Assets matter just as much.

What is the average size of JavaScript code downloaded per website?

"A Walking Skeleton is a tiny implementation of the system that performs a small end-to-end function. It need not use the final architecture, but it should link together the main architectural components. The architecture and the functionality can then evolve in parallel." -- Alistair Cockburn

Do people understand the impressions they make on others or do their anxieties lead them to assume the worst? Across nearly 10 years of research and tens of thousands of observations, the authors have come to this answer: people underestimate how much others like them, and this bias has important implications for how people work together.

There are real issues to be addressed: companies do need more diversity of perspective and underrepresented groups do need more opportunities. But organisations must rethink their methods by drawing more on social science and less on social activism. No amount of social idealism will rewire millions of years of neural evolution.

For reasons, I tried to evaluate the distributed Matrix chat and their clients. That did not work out very well.

The fastest growing sector of the culture economy is distraction. Or call it scrolling or swiping or wasting time or whatever you want. But it’s not art or entertainment, just ceaseless activity.

Rather than deciding how to respond to ultimata and threats, sellers can instead use two key moves to improve their fortunes: Analyze the set-up and shape the process.

Modern UI teams are designing components first; Interfaces are merely the thoughtful composition of components. This leaves an often glaring hole for users on “the unhappy path” — The places where users may, intentionally or not, stray from your idealized flow. As we learn to craft systems rather than pages, we must invest effort into shaping these often missed states of design and create with a component lifecycle that can support everyone.

Old but gold

“UI is a function of state” is a pretty popular saying in the front-end world. In context (pun intended), that’s typically referring to application or component state. I thought I’d pull that thread a little further and explore all the states that can effect the UI layer…

Let's assume that SGE is a wild success and that Google gambles its entire ad revenue business on replacing search results with direct question answering. This means that your search engine traffic drops to zero tomorrow. What do you do?

Liberalism’s great strength is that it is adaptable. The abolitionist and feminist movements broke apart the idea that some people counted more than others. Socialist arguments about fairness and human dignity helped create the welfare state. Libertarian arguments about liberty and efficiency led to freer markets and a limit on state power. Liberalism can adapt to national conservatism, too. Right now, it is falling behind.

In 1971, Knight and his (Blue Ribbon Sports, Inc., later Nike) co-founder needed a logo for a new line of running shoes they were getting ready to introduce. They asked Davidson to design a stripe (industry term for a shoe logo) that "had something to do with movement".

This is a slightly problematic article, but worth noting: so few people write about the complexity of UI in a useful way. Organisations too often treat visual design as being as good as done, missing all the nuance behind great UI.

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