Search Results: design
the blind side of seniority
…that you learned the hard way. Two Event Buses We were designing an event bus at the time, and before you go "Ahhhh! Evented systems are hard to troubleshoot, and harrrrdddd! Why!?", we were… [more]
What Do Future Engineers Look Like?
…code production increases, we have to deal with technical design issues next week that might not have appeared for months or years in the past. Pragmatic Conductor Knows the difference between ideal… [more]
lab
…You can change the size with a size queryparam. https://designfrontier.net/maze?size=75 is the perfect size to print a letter size page of paper for instance. qr codes a simple tool for recording the… [more]
Spotify Archivist
So for the last 10 years I've been adding songs to my Spotify liked songs. It's great but every once in a while a song comes on and I think... "do I really still like this song?" I… [more]
Team! A Module For Teams!
Recently I found myself with some time on my hands... so I wrote a simple module for managing engineering team member information in automation projects. Basically I was working on some automation… [more]
The Hunt Begins
…I know how to help engineers, product folks, and UX designers collaborate effectively with each other. If you are looking for someone to help your team on a short term, or permanent basis with any of… [more]
Some Thoughts on Engineering Leaderhip
…provide them with mentorship, strong partners in product, design, and program management. They owe them clear role definitions so they know what to work on, and what to worry about. Sidebar: if you… [more]
Last Lectures
Way back in my year end review for 2021 I wrote, As part of that effort I’ve worked to build a culture in engineering where people coming and going is normal. We’ve started doing “Last Lectures” for… [more]
What Makes a Team Lead Great?
…of leadership styles. It's basically a story designed to prove that small independent teams beat large top down teams every time. Card might disagree with me about this, but you have Ender using… [more]
Lessons Learned From a Film Producer About Making Software
This last week, I had my leadership team in town for the first time in a while for some planning meetings, and some team building. I am always looking to learn from different disciplines, so I thought… [more]
Today is going to be a great day, and other mindset shifts
…think like an engineer. Allow some space for planning, and design, and you are well on your way. Lots of other good things in the article. Last one for this week’s topic is The psychological impact of… [more]
Organizational Design Democracy And Ownership
There are moments where the lightbulb comes on for you and things that have been bouncing on the tip of your brain just drop into place. This week I had one of those. And it was about why people leave… [more]
Why weird team names make sense
…drawn carefully, can be extremely useful in organization design, as well as software design. Third, fun names impact team culture positively. I want to just write "yep" here. That… [more]
2021: Year in Review
…immovable objects in engineering projects The Skill of Org Design How We Turn Authorization Logic into SQL What Impossible Meant to Richard Feynman The Denialist Playbook Why Disagreement is Vital to… [more]
Encourage teams to take risks
…can be taken too far. Maybe don’t let that intern design the core of the software ecosystem all on their own because they are enthusiastic about architecture. But maybe, give them a mentor who… [more]
Tech Things I read in 2018
…is a pretty solid decision. A Philosophy of Software Design by John Ousterhout This one is fine. It has some good stuff. It has some silly stuff. But the discussion about API first design, and… [more]
Neptune (Gremlin) Local Dev Setup
I am playing with some graph databases right now, for a fun project I may write about later. When I first started out I was using Neo4j, which has an excellent local development story, a lovely web… [more]
Making the world more beautiful
…with dings in it represent the highest form of praise for design? Of course this all falls apart if experiencing Japanese wabi-sabi, the aesthetic of use and decay, in our surroundings does not… [more]
design and the internet as ephemera
…from a search engine. So in the pursuit of minimalism in design it felt pretty clear that most navigation could be visually hidden since it is mostly a detractor from the experience of reading which… [more]
Office Hours
…How do I sign up? This is the easy part! See where it says designfrontier up there? Click on that. There will be a link there to office hours . [more]
Jumping on the AMA bandwagon
…above. "Wait?!" you say, "What navigation?" Click on the designfrontier up there. It expands into navigation. Yes I know that isn’t very discoverable. That is on purpose. I really should write… [more]
monument
…do it. Performance and scalability monument is fast. It’s designed to be fast. But it also makes it easy to scale out sections of the app that are slow. Because it uses an event bus, we can push… [more]
Critiques and Code Reviews
…I am going to start with a major caveat: I do not have a design degree. I spent two years pursuing a degree in Industrial Design before changing my major. These are insights I gained during those… [more]
Let's talk about Boot camps
…with a group of people in diverse roles, minimally with a designer, is how you will be working for most of your career. Getting experience with it is critical. Not having experience with it is going… [more]
Death to Jquery
Yesterday I presented ’Death to jQuery’ at Pandamonium, our internal Tech Conference at Instructure, because honestly it’s time. jQuery was critical to the development of the web, it… [more]
Seeing and Speaking
…we say, see, hear, and know. The oft perplexing use of design jargon in pop culture, I am looking at you HG TV, is a symptom of something similar. I am in the last breaths of a massive kitchen… [more]
CSS Only Partial Width Borders
A design that I was recently implementing required a partial width underline for some headings and a partial height border as a divider between two elements. But I didn’t want to add any extra… [more]
Io: the language, not the moon
This is the first in the Seven Languages series of posts and covers the Io language , a small prototypal language. Let’s get this out of the way right now. I love Io . It’s amazing. The… [more]
safe-shrinkwrap: for all your shrinkwrapping needs
…our dependencies. Shrinkwrap wasn’t really designed to work with dev dependencies. It works... mostly. But maintaining shrinkwrapped devDependencies is no walk in the park. We had to though… [more]
:hover should be dead
:hover ’s days are numbered. It has little time left in this world. I am serious. Here are the main reasons why: It doesn’t exist on touch devices It isn’t really accessible It often… [more]
2015: in review
…End Engineer for Instructure. During that time I re-wrote designfrontier on a new engine, using ansble for it’s data store and gave it an isomorphic facelift on monument . I also wrote ansble… [more]
Learning the Trade
…Broken into sections below. Podcasts: A Responsive Web Design Podcast This is one of my current favorites. It covers the concerns of responsive design and coding in a solid way. A must for designers.… [more]
Details. Details. Details.
…would have felt higher quality. Websites and all forms of design have this in common. Small details tell us about the quality of the things we interact with. From the sound of the car door you close,… [more]
Thoughts on Components and stuff
…creating to make components do things they aren’t designed to do. If it doesn’t do what you want it to create a new one that does. Last but not least. Your directory structure should… [more]
Design Tools are Broken
…code or not to code? I try to push all my friends studying design to learn to code. It can only help them be better designers. But this isn't an article about that. This is an article about how… [more]
On To New Horizons
…worked with some great people, and pushed for a developer/design centric culture on the teams I’ve worked with. I helped shift from jQuery to backbone to angular to... (they’re still… [more]
Line-Height... lineheight... line-height
…blurry vision, delusions of grandeur, ugly layouts, bad design in general, or starts acting strangely, we suggest that you consult with a professional. Also, if your website starts talking to you… [more]
Approaching CSS the OO Way
…of CSS?" Oh yeah! Totally... it’s that stuff that designers write right? You know it makes things pretty? "Yeah, that’s the stuff. Can you write it?" Sure... I mean designers can right?… [more]
Toward a More Responsive Future
…is that it needs to scale up as well as down. Responsive design is about tailoring the experience to the particular users context, whether it is larger or smaller than your default. This means we… [more]
There is a Right Way
…and, less often than they should, my development, and design. The first lesson, is that taking the time to begin correctly saves you time in the end. This one should be pretty obvious to everyone who… [more]
Don't Call Me. I'll Call You. Single Request Responsive Images
We’ve been talking about responsive design around the office a lot lately. It’s kind of a big deal these days. The holy grail seems to be responsive images, or a system that allows you to… [more]
Current Projects Update
…lying around that aren't mentioned anywhere here on designfrontier. So to remedy that I decided to put together this quick article. RandPop : a responsive website for creating random numbers in a… [more]
Now Serving: Obsolescence
…Serving,” that takes a look at the changes in design, and consumer culture, that are happening right now. “We have advanced technologically so far, and yet somehow it’s almost some… [more]
Relaunch of DesignFrontier
…After having worked for many hours, it's official. The redesign process has been exciting. Creating new features in new ways has been a blast. Is it done? Far from it. I am still working on the… [more]