sloxy

If a medical doctors classifies himself as world class and then posts articles about medical matters, then my expectation would be his world class-ness is evident.

This guy's not writing an opinion piece about which brand ketchup tastes best. He has published an opinion piece in which he speaks authoritatively about matters related to the domain he claims he's a world expert in.

As for the harmless exaggeration, it's not harmless. It's poison to my chosen profession.

Well, I just looked through some of his commits on some of the repos. Not pretty good. Productive maybe but definitely not good. Commit messages are quite lacking he's hard coding user display strings.

Without spending more time or having some domain knowledge of his problem, I can't really comment on the architecture setup/choices.

That's interesting because I also picked up on that: "I am a world-class software developer living in New York’s East Village"

and I just thought, hmm, here's this guy with ~5 years of ~professional dev(mainly with iOS) and he self qualifies himself as world class.

Looking at his bio, I see he's worked for 3 companies doing quite ordinary things.

I would love to know what gave him the confidence/ignorance to describe himself as such.

comment not related to this article but more of a comment on data-driven user interfaces in general.

Building simplistic data driven UIs is (relatively) simple.

However, the issues arise as these get more complex. Instead of just needing to understand a thing, you now need to understand the engine which builds that thing.

Looking at the react community where the new hotness is also data driven everything. UI definition (incl. CSS) all now detailed in JSON(which each original author custom builds), a lot of time without constraints(..'cos flexibility)

Building a data driven anything without having a very strong focus on debug-ability right from the get go is doomed to fail.

You might visit dozens or hundreds of sites in a week, and it’s okay if some pages get lost in the shuffle

My opinion is it's not okay. Why would it be?

Having better default notifications on Android would be a start. Everything off(bar calls & messages) unless turned on by user.

every app now wants to notify you about everything.. so every phone i get, i need to go in and turn off notifications for everything bar calls & text messages.

Pity they don't sync your preferences when you get a new phone.

but I could have just installed a Windows VM, used VNC, shared the VNC session and gotten the same thing

I'm pretty sure there would be a noticeable(couple of seconds) lag between both incoming & outgoing audio to the VM making smooth flowing conversation near to impossible.

sure but it's slowly being eroded by the americanisation of companies & management styles.

salaried workers being exempt from paid overtime in most European countries has turned in to a joke. Instead of just being used to deal with "emergency" situations, it's used to coerce extra work for free.

would this not be better every other day or 3rd day? Every day is just too much and maintaining quality is not sustainable unless there is a team working full time on this.

They might have. No definitive answer to that alternate timeline.

If his name was France, his use of the domain would have been more defensible(depending on what he was doing with the domain).

why? nissan.com is owned by Mr. Uzi Nissan so there is a reasonable defense that he has a justifiable claim to the domain. seems a lot more clear cut than this.

I'm guessing it's more so that there's a lot of traffic coming from that IP that it was flagged as a proxy.

which was whether developers should be overriding designers and domain experts in matters of design

in matters of UX...

Kind of a pedantic comment given the articles content...

Do designers who design webpages/apps generally call themselves GUI designers?

A calendar is good for a 'free choice'. It can provide context(i.e. day of week) and can be overlayed with useful information(price for a date/availability etc.

A calendar is not good for pre-determined dates where the date is fixed before hand - i.e. you don't get to choose what value you want the date to be.

For example, if you're entering in your driving license details for insurance quote, you don't get to choose when it expires - that's already decided for you. Ditto for DOB and other such things.

So, there are far more efficient options for date entry ranging from single text input (with appropriate parsing/validation) or the '3 dropdowns option(D,M,Y)' which is more effort but easier to avoid mistakes with.

UI: User Interface - the layout & visual look & feel of the page/components. UX: User Experience - the interactions of these pages/components by the user (incl. expected behaviour etc.)

you seem to be using a particularly narrow definition of "designer" here

My definition of UI designer is somebody who designs UI (which encompasses those of print background which a lot will probably have been at some stage in the/their past)

but it's mostly orthogonal to their role as programmers

No, it's not, unless your programmers have been relegated to code monkeys. In years gone past (pre web dominance, when native desktop applications ruled), developers were designers/user experience etc.. which lead to the checkboxes everywhere UI.

Good UI needs someone with good design aesthetic. This is where UI designers shine.

In contrast to other design fields(most notably Industrial Design, where designers have pretty much always owned (& thought about) design & interaction as a whole), that is not something which UI designers have done. It's only in recent years that I've seen UI teams claim UX in the form of renaming themselves as "UI/UX team". My point is that UX has not historically been something they've put much thought into ,and as a result, they are not qualified to just own UX.

it's a problem with bad designers doing the design

No, it's not.

A designer making that mistake isn't a signal s/he is a bad designer. I've worked with UI designers who range from good to excellent when it comes to design.

Thus, my overarching point which was that UX ≠ UI

and that UX shouldn't be co-opted by UI teams.

My point was more so targeted as UI designers who co-opt the UX role. If there's a dedicated UX person, then they're less likely as they'll be actively thinking about the UX.

Whoever owns the UX should be putting the thinking effort into how that behaves. Things like this happen due to a) inexperience with whatever UI construct is being presented and/or b) not enough thought being put in to the usability of that component.

A developer is generally going to be more hands on with the resulting UI (checking/testing etc..) Whereas, a designer has more than likely mocked it up in InVision/whatever and then done surface level checks

And product managers will be hands on with the product but, well, they shouldn't be trusted with UI/UX/anything but the description of the problem they want solved :-)

I also think it should be noted that compromise between designers & developers & business domain experts (seemingly now called 'product managers) could vastly simplify all this.

The more empowered a developer is to over-ride a designer/biz person's preference[1], the better it is for all.

Way too often, I see developers just accept what the product manager/designer specifies with zero pushback when it strays outside what could be considered the 'norm' for whatever tech stack is in play.

[1] I use the word preference because that is all it is - their preference. They don't have a magic ball.

Sidenote: I'm also seeing a rise in UX suddenly becoming owned by the UI & product management team which is bizarre. You have designers(whether from print backgrounds or whatever) making poor(& I mean piss poor) UX decisions because they don't have the exposure/understanding of web platforms. Case in point: if your UX person has a calendar widget to enter a date of birth, they should no longer be allowed do UX.

/rant

bingo.

people who have natural leadership qualities can facilitate without thinking it harms their worth. too often, unsuitable people will be thrust into a management/leadership type role just because there is a (sudden, genuine) void that needs feeling(sudden growth /sudden departure).

Funnily enough, I like Intercom's hiring process (as it appears on paper). But...my real life experience was quite different.

Interviewed by a precocious child who didn't have interview skills.

well, if their catalog grows to 50% original content, here's hoping netflix adopt more UK/HBO style formats for tv shows.

have a clear defined arc lasting ~3 seasons with 6/8 episodes in each season..and then just stop.

point in case, house of cards should have been a 2 series show with frank never becoming President.

'Mark as read'

Add this action to notifications on Android. Then, I'll consider a business a/c.

more likely it's so they don't have to have a more convoluted process where they call out to requesting service to verify RQ & all which that entails (on both sides).

site down for maintenance.. cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:BQlyePw...

The OTA can buy & manage it's own stock of hotel rooms in advance for hotel X and then sell them on for $whatever, $whenever.

Not every OTA is just a proxy. Some maintain their own stock and do forecasting/yield management etc..

Protocol Buffers

Well, REST is architecture. Protocol Buffers are (de/)serialization.

I've tried it before (& although it has the properties I like[language agnostic schema definition..]), it was finicky to get working with of one the biggest IDEs out there(IntelliJ IDEA)

Also, it doesn't support Kotlin yet.(Java interop only option)

The only place I can see Protocol Buffers being useful is inside Google..cos it was a pretty crappy dev experience.

And I would be pretty confident in saying that not many Googlers/ex-Googlers outside Google use it. Cos if they did, somebody would make the dev experience much much better.

I find it beyond belief that local homeowners are being so short sighted. Do they not worry what their children/grandchildren are going to do for accommodation when they are property hunting? Or is their assumption that screw them, that's their problem?

one of the main tasks of a technical manager is to set conventions

I'd be more inclined to say one of the main roles any manager is facilitation more than anything else. Any manager that "sets convention" is somebody who wants the easy part of technology without the corresponding hard part.

Talking about technical solutions is easy. Implementing it is much harder.

I've come across multiple "technical managers" who were hands on with code greater than x years ago and they always end up talking out of their arse. And that's not to mention the numerous wrong choices they've committed to/spoke about at a high level meeting with zero notion.

they have had little success in understanding how we implemented the projects we were involved in

I don't think I've ever had trouble helping people to grok the implementation/architecture/whatever of any system I've been involved in.