May we all become wise enough to know when not to use a particular tool, and experienced enough to know how to use them all expertly.

More organizational beheadings for lousy software would do the industry some good. There’s no justification for doing things so poorly, other than gross negligence.

Point of order: That’s just poorly-designed software. And yeah, poorly-designed software is exasperated by distributing it. Components without compartmentalization and autonomy are a known known in terms of things that make life dismal. The point isn’t to avoid “microservices”. The point is to learn the fundamentals of software design, differentiate good from bad at a foundational level, and then apply those principles to software at all levels, whether or not it’s distributed. That so many have failed with “microservices” is a testament to how far the mid-curve of software development persists on pushing the envelope of proceeding without a strong, working understanding of structural design.

Adoption of Passkeys might have gone so much better if vendors had taken any time to explain to consumers what they are, how they work, how they differ from passwords, what happens to their passwords, the effect on their use of password wallets, and what they mean for security. Instead, what consumers got was just another pile of self-involved technobabble and the spectacle of yet more geeks taking yet another undeserved victory lap while technology sinks one more level of inscrutability.

RT @eventideproject: Eventide's Schema library introduces a new protocol for attribute type checking with version 2.5.0.0, and the declarat…

The @AppleTV device is selectively stripping all films of their sound. All streaming services. All non-TV show content. Takes a special kind of incompetent.

The successful ones would be equally successful in statically-typed languages, and often decamped from statically-typed languages when they realized it. There’s a point a which fluency in structural design opens the door to vastly-more productivity than can be had from differences in tools. Subtle knowledge, like universal principles and techniques, always has a higher yield than more crude things, like tools, languages, frameworks. The necessity to remember the shape of all objects in a system is a symptom of design habits that haven’t yet scratched the surface of the deeper problem. The time that we could be spending going deeper on subtle knowledge is often spent chasing more crude solutions, and repeatedly switching tools in the belief that tools hold the answer. Such things are only minority contributors to the fullness of what’s possible.

@soychotic The history and significance of the OODA loop is a worthy study. Making the unconscious conscious has saved the lives of many women in combat pilot seats (and many men, as well).

RT @mhartl: I feel like this may prove to be the most prescient cartoon of the 21st century.

RT @asmartbear: I don’t understand the fetishization of failure. Sure, you might have learned something, but often you haven’t. And maybe…

The staggering stupidity of software workers at @Ticketmaster to presume that these are reasonable asks at all (and yes, I'm logged in to my Ticketmaster account). If you know a developer who works at Ticketmaster, please smack them for me. Hard. I mean really, really hard. Maybe hard enough that they wake up in the moment and realize that they've got no business anywhere near a keyboard.

Indeed. PS: Same can be applied to The Big Rewrite (whether it’s program code being re-written, or social code)

RT @TheJackForge: “Oh, your title is software engineer? That’s nice, now can you go engineer some border-radius on that login button?” htt…

@DanielW_Kiwi A manager's first and most sacred duty is to teach. Management isn't a position of privilege or luxury. When it's exercised as privilege or luxury, the organization is in decline. Your job just got real, now it's up to you to demonstrate that you're up to it.

The conflict resolution UX in @TripIt is so bad, I assume it's done as an explicit, recreational "fuck you" to TripIt's users fromn socipathic managers at TripIt who enjoy the idea of imposing a struggle onto the users. Nothing in the conflict UI is actually a path to the resolution of the conflict. Think that clicking the "Conflict" tag would lead to the UI to resolve the conflict? Of course you would! You'd have to be mentally damaged to fail to presume that it would be a navigable element. But it is not. Instead, users are left to do a web search for "resolve TripIt conflict" only to learn from TripIt's own help documents that the user needs to click the header that conveys the flight origination and destination cities. And THEN the user is presented with the conflict resolution features. And since this doesn't happen often, there's no way to reinforce this arbitrary UX deficiency. And so, of the the search engine to figure out something that should so obviously be a simple in-line accommodation right there where the alert is displayed. I'm so damned tired of amateur designers working in software and taking up space that should be occupied by people who know the difference between designing for interactive and designing for static brochures. And I'm even more tired of managers who don't know the difference, and keep giving these people jobs that they're not qualified for.

I've been trying to reschedule a @Delta flight for days on their website. The website has a defect that denies me the ability to change flights. I've been on the phone with their customer service drones for an hour. The first one just transferred me to a survey which then disconnected the call when I declined to provide a response. The second one told me to "click the feedback" button. I need them to look up flights on a number of days. They're allowed to only look up three days of flights before being require to disconnect the call. Not a single interaction with Delta customer service is helping solve the problem. The best part was when a call center operator patronized me with descriptions of how the technology works. Do they not realize the high probability that there's a technologist on the other end of the call. Just an absolutely abdominal customer experience. And of course, they cut out the tier-2 customer service, so apparently, there's nothing to do but call back an get in the queue to ask yet another rep for flight times on other days.

Delta's reservation system has been rendered inoperable for a subset of customers. Their IT developers have introduced a number of defects known to their customer service people in a recent set of "updates". Here's what I'd do as Delta's CEO: 1-) Start at the CTO, and start demoting managers, starting from the top, and on down to the line-level manager above the developers who introduced the defects. That's all. That's the only thing that needs to happen. It's always the management system. Always. There's no such thing as a defect that isn't caused by managers and the management system that they themselves have implemented. When an organization can't do the easy stuff correctly, one of the most effective strategies is simply cleaning out the ranks of people directing workers to do things in the most unsafe way.

RT @allenholub:

RT @allenholub:

Captcha: the black-out bingo version 😐. Enough with the captcha already!! Half of the sites using captcha aren't even interesting bot attack targets.

Being able to differentiate between popularity and prosperity will keep you out of a lot of trouble. You'll almost never hear from or hear about prosperous people. They're busy working on prosperity. You'll always hear from popular people. Their work is to make you hear from them. By definition, that's what popularity is. And occasionally, there are people who are both prosperous and popular. And in every single case, you have to consider that the lust for popularity almost always diminishes the work toward prosperity. Every popular, prosperous person can do better. Some sacrifice some amount of prosperity out of a sense of an obligation to teach. And some just forgo some measure of prosperity because they're addicted to attention. But most prosperous people will go unnoticed and unknown, and without any noticeable following.