Baldur Bjarnason

You are here #1:
a selection of fine links and tweets for your pleasure

– Baldur Bjarnason

In this edition:

That’s what Bill was hinting at. As implemented by many organizations today, Agile — and its methodologies like Scrum — have no mechanism for determining if they’re building the right feature and whether that implementation is designed well and/or worth improving.

Agile doesn’t have a brain by Jeff Gothelf (441 words).

React makes me happy because it solves the problem a lot of people didn’t quite realize they had. Suddenly they are very enthusiastic about stuff that used to be really annoying. The Document Object Model (DOM) has been the foundation of most of the interactive work on the web since 1998, but it wasn’t very much fun then. As developers really get deeper into these things, the DOM has not exactly been a crowd-pleaser. In some ways React is a wrapper for the DOM, and in many ways it’s a just a better way to interact with the document tree.

Finding new in the Web by Simon St. Laurent (682 words).

Right now I’m on the sixth draft of a fiction project. (In other words, NOT the first draft, which goes by completely different rules.) When I start to work each morning I open onscreen five files

Files I Work With by Steven Pressfield (1232 words).

After the second round, when our group was almost ready, Bob would call us together and have us pin our two finalist campaigns to the wall. Then he’d ask, “Okay. What’s missing missing missing?”

Invariably something was. Usually a pretty big something, if not two or three big somethings. Meaning we’d miscalculated in our rush to get the work done. Maybe one of the campaigns was inadvertently offensive to women. Maybe there was some glaring void in logic. Maybe one campaign was dependent on a single visual and couldn’t be “pooled out” into multiple ads or commercials.

We’d have to go back to the drawing board and fill those holes.

Files I Work With, Part 2 by Steven Pressfield (1601 words).

The tech boom in Seattle is bringing in droves of successful, straight single guys. And as any woman will tell you: You don’t want to date any of them.

Amazon Is Killing My Sex Life by Tricia Romano (2492 words).

It drives me crazy when expert systems are called “AI”. They’re very useful, but decidedly NOT intelligent. (@AthenaHelivoy)

I find version control software works fantastically well as long as there is never any need to do any sort of version control ever. (@meyerweb)

The biggest antipattern I ever see in Retrospectives is no hypotheses! It means there’s no way of telling if our assumptions were right. (@flowchainsensei)

Flat design drastically reduces visual hierarchy in your UI. Everything is at the same contrast level and there’s no immediate focal point. (@flyosity)

My advice: assume the person who you absolutely do not want to read the thing you post is absolutely reading the things you post on the web. (@flyosity)