hyperdeficit

Ah, the controversial hamburger icon. I have taken to calling it the 'Junk Drawer' myself because it is the place where you put everything that you can't think of a better way to represent in the UI. I think it has a place, but it is overused as a solution to create a clean UI because it makes it easy to meet the requests from different stakeholders to include a variety of functionality.

I find it interesting that they were thinking of it in a very similar way based on this quote from the article "In your garage organization, there’s always a bucket for miscellaneous. You’ve got nuts and bolts and screws and nails, and then, stuff, miscellaneous stuff. That’s kind of what the hamburger menu button was."

I hadn't even thought of this specifically, but after it was mentioned in the initial post I realized just how much that is my use case most of the time and how often I am fighting with google maps to accomplish what are relatively simple tasks like adding an additional point along a route. If you are trying to add multiple additional points on a route it gets even worse.

This is all much worse on the Android app as well, where it makes the assumption that your use case is to get from where you are right now to somewhere else. Trying to get from point A to B, where neither is where you are now, is unnecessarily frustrating.

I relate to this and give a lot of credit to my father for teaching me work ethic that I never knew I would need at the time. School was easy and I never learned to work hard at academic work, but I sure worked hard finishing a basement, chopping wood, shoveling the driveway, and much more. I always hated doing that work, but I would see my dad just continue to power through any project no matter how difficult it got. I would always find ways to take a break, but then I would see him continuing on and get right back in there and help him out.

After getting out of school and finding out that it actually does take time and grit to finish a project I have been grateful for the example that he set. It hasn't been easy learning to work hard at something, and I don't do nearly as well as he does at it, but I have gotten better over time.

Its because of this that my perspective has changed greatly around what makes a person succeed. I help teach people programming in my spare time and one thing I have noticed repeatedly is that the ones who do best over time are the ones who just keep at it even if it is difficult. Too often the "gifted" ones do great at the beginning, but once they encounter a topic that they don't naturally get then they might just give up because they feel it is too hard for them or that they will never get it.

Pretty cool little tool. We have a product that is a combination of ASP.NET Razor views, Backbone, jQuery, and more as a result of several different partial transitions of the codebase. Sometimes it is difficult to figure out which framework is setting a given value in the UI, so I'm going to give this a try and see if it helps out.

I really like this idea. I use Pocket pretty heavily for bookmarking, but there has been something off about it and nearly any other solution that I used that I couldn't quite pinpoint. I think this is part of the issue. I save a set of bookmarks on a topic over a period of time, but it isn't easy to get access to all of those bookmarks again. Searching doesn't quite accomplish the goal because I might have been looking into a similar topic months ago, but a search will return results from both "mental sessions" together and I have to separate them myself.

I have tried saving all of my bookmarks also, but then I usually have to remove my pinned tabs that are part of my overall workflow and not part of the mental session.

Seconded. This is also a great read on how to track down a deep problem, going through all of the steps required to figure out where it was coming from. That's on top of it being an entertaining view of early computer networking.

Hot Exit is one of those features that I didn't think I needed or wanted...until I started using Sublime like a notepad to store text, but not save it. I'm excited that this feature is now in VSCode now, and it also works with files that have never been saved just like Sublime.

It's great to see other people's solution to these types of challenges in React. We have been implementing something similar for images because the existing components didn't meet our needs. I look forward to digging into your code and seeing how you implemented it.

This is a real problem in our industry. We all like to think that we 'know' how to write good code, after all we read 'Clean Code' once. That, combined with either overconfidence in our abilities or the negative perception that comes with not knowing the answer to every problem leads to a lot of software that has applied 'good' coding practices and architecture to produce a mess of awful code.

In reality it is probably a lot more like learning how to apply any other concept, it takes practice, yet we don't spend enough time practicing our craft. This is particularly a problem because in the course of developing a product you will only get to implement a new solution to a problem a few times at best, or once more likely. This means we don't get enough experience with the different possible approaches to really internalize what a 'good' solution looks like.

We spend much more time learning the software development approach du jour, XP, Scrum, Kanban, Lean, etc. It doesn't matter what software development approach you use if the output is an unmaintainable mess of code.

I watched the video of a Pharo demo linked in the article and it was amazing. I don't know how much of that capability comes from the way Smalltalk is built vs just a clever IDE feature.

I imagine this would be much easier to implement in a language with strong typing since the vast majority of possible matches could be ruled out with a simple signature check instead of evaluation.

Having a feature like this would be very useful when teaching people how to program since it would help answer a lot of the basic questions that get asked.

This is also a reason that Cloud9 makes sense for us. The group I work with is focused on teaching programming to people who aren't traditionally represented in software development and sometimes they don't even have their own computers and have had to borrow a computer from a friend to do the work.

With Cloud9 they can develop on any computer they have access to, whether their's, a friend's, or even one at the public library. It is just one less barrier to being able to engage people.

I really hope that the Cloud9 service keeps running, and maintains the free version that it currently provides. I have been using Cloud9 with the Michael Hartl Rails Tutorial to teach new programmers the basics of programming with Ruby and Rails and it has greatly reduced the friction for them to start learning.

In previous classes we had the students setup a Ruby and Rails environment on their own systems and not only did that take multiple sessions to get setup, but then we were dealing with environment differences that took the focus away from the basics of learning Ruby nearly every session.

I don't understand why anybody thinks that Uber and Lyft will be the ones to capitalize on a fleet of automated cars. Once auto manufacturers have solved the arguably harder problem of creating automated vehicles, why wouldn't they then just run the fleet of cars themselves? Especially if there is as much profit in it as people assume. Even if they didn't run the fleets themselves, it seems like they already have a great infrastructure through their dealership networks to allow the dealerships to run their own fleet of vehicles. That even helps solve one of the obvious challenges of how to build out the infrastructure to manage the fleet in each city.

So if Uber is building their long term business plan on the idea that once automated cars exist they will buy them in bulk, build the infrastructure to maintain them in each city they operate in, and reap the profits then I am pessimistic on their model.