There Is No Irrelephant
Mike Jackson wants the blind men and their elephant retired as a lesson in systems thinking, and his reasons are good. The parable's flaw is its narrator, who stands outside the world he describes and always has.
#design
6 articles
Emergent design, outside the codebase
Emergent design says architecture should flow from how something is used rather than from how it was dictated. Inside a codebase, that’s tests pulling the structure into shape. Across codebases it’s something older: a narrow substrate, a caller nobody expected, and a universe that stops exactly where the primitives do.
PUDL: the "Pleasantly Usable Design Language"
Paul Parks has released PUDL, the "Pleasantly Usable Design Language," a specification and toolkit for applying consistent and usable application design for applications.
Why Control Rooms Are Green - and Why That Matters
You've probably never thought about why your IDE's default theme uses the colors it does, or why every hospital, factory, and control room built between 1944 and 1980 looked the same. Beth Mathews' piece on Faber Birren answers the second question - and the answer has more to say about developer tooling than you might expect.
ByteCode.news UI design concerns
I've been trying to think about access control and data access patterns for ByteCode.news. One of the initial designs was based around having pluggable UIs. The actual app is a set of REST endpoints...
Why I Chose 21 Matches in Nevet
I chose 21 matches in nevet, the bot that accompanies bytecode.news, deliberately. It's a command, triggered with 21 matches, and it wants you to take between one and three matches every turn; the...