Programming Leftovers
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Leon Mika ☛ Don't Be Afraid Of Types
But take it from someone that’s had do deal with codes passing through and returning several values of strings, ints, and bools through a series of function calls: a single struct value is much easier to work with. All it takes is the courage for someone to say “yes, that should be a type.”
Don’t be afraid for that someone to be you.
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Elliot C Smith ☛ Compressed Complexity
At work, in my role leading our product team, I have a rule of thumb which is “less magic”. If we are going to simplify something it cannot be at the cost of introducing more hidden or compressed complexity. That complexity is hard to understand and can often come across as ‘just one of those things the product does’ which I somewhat fondly call magic.
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Carl Svensson ☛ Past and Present Futures of User Interface Design
In 1968, Douglas Engelbart demonstrated a computer system called the oN-Line System, or NLS. The NLS is the source of a lot of computer firsts. Among other things, Engelbart showed video conferencing, collaborative text editing, embedded graphics, copying and pasting, and hypertext - all of it accessible through a mouse and keyboard. This event has since become known as "The Mother of All Demos".
Recently, Amelia Wattenberger published an article with ideas about a possible future for user interfaces. In short, she asks for interfaces with more tactile "friction", praises multi-modality and suggest variations in both input devices and feedback options. We'll return to her text, but first, let's look at some other visions of future user interfaces.
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Dirk Eddelbuettel ☛ Thinking inside the box
RcppExamples provides a handful of short examples detailing by concrete working examples how to set up basic R data structures in C++. It also provides a simple example for packaging with Rcpp. The package provides (generally fairly) simple examples, more (and generally longer) examples are at the Rcpp Gallery.
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Seth Godin ☛ Bad design might simply be obsolete design
Once it’s obsolete, good design becomes bad design.
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James G ☛ Bookmarklet to show all rel= links on a page
rel= links describe the relationship between the web page a link is on and the resource the page is linking to. For example, rel=alternate is used to say that there is an alternate representation of a web page available at another URL. This may be an RSS or JSON feed, or something else.
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Rust
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Bryan Lunduke ☛ Goodbye GNU/Linux, Hello Rust/Linux
Ubuntu plans to ditch the battle-tested GNU Coreutils (chmod, Is, kill, & others), in favor of an unfinished Rust-based re-write, in the next few months.
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