Why Apps Are Designed Against You
AI, I tried to love you – Writings and rehearsals by Nathan Schneider
Among my peers who study the cultures and economies surrounding technology, I often find myself more tech-positive than most. On the whole I like computers, like the internet, and like in general the emergent human creativity that these things have enabled and revealed. A source of my appreciation is that I expend a lot of effort on the practice of “slow computing,” which is to say, choosing tools and technical communities that I can feel in right relationship with. I tend to approach new socio-technologies (like gig economies, blockchains, and social media) not from a perspective of why is this so bad? so much as asking how could we do this right?
Scaling Engineering Teams: Lessons from Google, Facebook, and Netflix
After spending over a decade in engineering leadership roles at some of the world’s most chaotic innovation factories—Google, Facebook, and Netflix—I’ve learned one universal truth: scaling e…
Pure and impure software engineering
Why do solo game developers tend to get into fights with big tech engineers? Why do high-profile external hires to large companies often fizzle out? Why is AI-assisted development amazing for some engineers and completely useless for others?
Alex Moore on Open Web Advocacy and Why "Innovation Doesn't Come from the Gatekeepers"
Ten FOSS Development Fallacies For User Facing Software
This is a list, inspired by the Five Geek Social Fallacies, of common patterns or behaviours that developers of free/open source software (FOSS) fall into when they try to develop software for users who are not technical, or for whom non-technical users would be the most obvious userbase. Hopefully writing these down (which frankly is cathartic more than anything) is helpful to some in recognising these thought patterns and avoiding them when developing software - I’ve got some of my own thoughts on this at the bottom.
Design Frictions for Mindful Interactions: The Case for Microboundaries
Design frictions, a term found in popular media articles about user experience design, refer to points of difficulty occurring during interaction with technology. Such articles often argue that these frictions should be removed from interaction flows in order to reduce the risk of user frustration and disengagement. In this paper we argue that, in many scenarios, designing friction into interactions through the introduction of microboundaries, can, in fact, have positive effects. Design frictions can disrupt "mindless" automatic interactions, prompting moments of reflection and more "mindful" interaction. The potential advantages of intentionally introduced frictions are numerous: from reducing the likelihood of errors in data-entry tasks, to supporting health-behaviour change.
Something Big Is Happening
A personal note for non-tech friends and family on what AI is starting to change.
Apps - Social Media Lab
As part of our work, the Lab develops public-facing information-integrity dashboards, along with research apps and tools, to support social science research on online participation and communities. Our apps and tools are used by thousands of students, educators and researchers worldwide each year. If you are interested in developing a custom version of any of […]
I see talk on here about the public being "platform brained", and a lot of that in my experience comes down to impatience. It's what you see when mainstream apps change layout. People have expectations about how apps are supposed to work, and learning something else is an imposed waste of effort.
jordan silver 🔵
My take on the "explaining atproto" discourse is that all the UX/filesystem/etc metaphors are still very verbose and that you can explain the same idea in a lot less words: It separates data from apps, so any app can use data from any other app. That fits in a tweet, with other sentences around it.
Who cares if it’s vibe coded It’s either a good app or a bad app 🙃 humans can make bad websites too @standard-reader.app is basically entirely authored by ai (it’s also the best most full featured thing I’ve ever made)
hayleigh
all the vibe coded apps is really killing my atproto enthusiasm icl gang, do folks have some recommendations for Organic Free Range atproto apps they like?
@pfrazee.com question. is there a technical reason why social-app forks are not able to quickly launch native apps? We have blacksky and mu and witchsky, yet no alternative social-app native apps. @rude1.blacksky.team I recall you putting out a request for development contributions to put out an app
