“The first thing a leader needs to learn to do is communicate—tell his team where they’re going and why. This is especially true when dozens of employees are being hired monthly, each with his own ideas about how to do things and what’s best for the company. After Zuckerberg stopped coding at Facebook, though, he didn’t communicate—he disappeared. He did so because he hadn’t yet learned another critical leadership skill: the art of saying “no.” — The Maturation of Mark Zuckerberg — New York Magazine
“There is an entirely different order of product being developed here, far beyond the outer reaches of irony. I first started seeing them in Google Image searches; the most random queries were returning pictures of t-shirts, trucker hats, and especially ties that were truly uncanny. One could not, by looking at them, decipher how they had come about, what possible thought process lay behind them, who they were for, or why anyone would want them. They had something akin to the lost-in-translation weirdness of Chinese Shanzhai culture, but what was being lost was in a language far more distant than Chinese; one got the impression the “designers” of these pieces were speaking strictly in ones and zeros. I had visions of design-bots, data mining for user patterns, instantaneously designing products based on trending search queries, generating t-shirts like predictive text and graphics through some kind of visual auto-tune. Amazingly, it turns out I am not totally wrong.” —
Spam-erican Apparel « DIS Magazine (via Michael McCracken)
Algorithmically created goods! The Horse Ebooks of Fashion! The Spam-ternet of Things! Paging New Aesthetic!
“My pragmatic summary: A large fraction of the flaws in software development are due to programmers not fully understanding all the possible states their code may execute in. In a multithreaded environment, the lack of understanding and the resulting problems are greatly amplified, almost to the point of panic if you are paying attention. Programming in a functional style makes the state presented to your code explicit, which makes it much easier to reason about, and, in a completely pure system, makes thread race conditions impossible.” —
John Carmack: Functional Programming in C++ (via Phillip Bowden)
This is the best, most pragmatic overview of functional programming I’ve ever seen. I’m accustomed to thinking of functional programming as a somewhat idealistic, neckbeard-ey thing, but this makes me realize I’ve gradually been converging on a functional approach (striving to be explicit, minimizing side effects, avoiding global state, etc.) in my own work without realizing it.
“But some of the tougher years at NeXT and Pixar had taught him how to stretch a company’s finances, which helped him ride out his first couple of years back, when Apple was still reliant on a weak jumble of offerings. With newfound discipline, he quickly streamlined the company’s product lines. And just as he had at Pixar, he aligned the company behind those projects. In a way that had never been done before at a technology company—but that looked a lot like an animation studio bent on delivering one great movie a year—Jobs created the organizational strength to deliver one hit after another, each an extension of Apple’s position as the consumer’s digital hub, each as strong as its predecessor. If there’s anything that parallels Apple’s decade-long string of hits—iMac, PowerBook, iPod, iTunes, iPhone, iPad, to list just the blockbusters—it’s Pixar’s string of winners, including Toy Story, Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, WALL-E, and Up. These insanely great products could have come only from insanely great companies, and that’s what Jobs had learned to build.” — Into The Wild: Lost Conversations From Steve Jobs’ Best Years | Fast Company (via Christopher Bowns)
From Ken Segall’s new book, Insanely Simple: The Obsession That Drives Apple’s Success:
Steve’s idea was to do a Willy Wonka with it. Just as Wonka did in the movie, Steve wanted to put a golden certificate representing the millionth iMac inside the box of one iMac, and publicize that fact. Whoever opened the lucky iMac box would be refunded the purchase price and be flown to Cupertino, where he or she (and, presumably, the accompanying family) would be taken on a tour of the Apple campus.
Steve had already instructed his internal creative group to design a prototype golden certificate, which he shared with us. But the killer was that Steve wanted to go all out on this. He wanted to meet the lucky winner in full Willy Wonka garb. Yes, complete with top hat and tails.
God, I wish this had actually happened.
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…[GMail’s] old interface had colored borders and variations in background color which served to deliniate navigation from content and provide visual landmarks that helped me find my way around the page. It had visual ‘texture’. The new interface lacks that visual texture. Without borders or landmarks, everything blends together into a featureless sea of white and light grey. It requires more work for me to parse visually, to figure out what I’m looking at or to find the link I want to click.
This is what happens when the cult of “minimalism” goes too far.
” —GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism « Not The User’s Fault
This nicely sums up what bothers me about the school of UI design that glorifies visual minimalism and denigrates even light skeuomorphism as kitsch (Google’s Honeycomb tablet UI is another great example). While I agree Apple has been pushing the bounds of good taste with a lot of their recent work (iCal, Find My Friends, iPhoto for iOS), people who dismiss anything but flat, utilitarian UI as fluff are missing the important usability cues that texture, shadow and visual hierarchy can provide.
“In their book Snakes in Suits, Paul Babiak and Robert Hare point out that as the old corporate bureaucracies have been replaced by flexible, ever-changing structures, and as team players are deemed less valuable than competitive risk-takers, psychopathic traits are more likely to be selected and rewarded. Reading their work, it seems to me that if you have psychopathic tendencies and are born to a poor family you’re likely to go to prison. If you have psychopathic tendencies and are born to a rich family you’re likely to go to business school.” — George Monbiot – The Self-Attribution Fallacy
Stanley Kubrick photographing show girl Rosemary Williams (via Mills Baker)
The Museum of the City of New York has a pretty amazing collection of Stanley Kubrick’s photos of New York City.
How to write an iOS app purely in C - Stack Overflow -
(via Klaas Pieter Annema)
I’m not big on super wonky interview questions, but when I interviewed engineering candidates at Apple, one of the advanced questions I occasionally liked to trot out was about ways to use object oriented techniques in a non-object oriented language like C (if you’re wondering what I was getting at with this, take a look at the OO-like conventions employed by Apple’s straight C Core Foundation frameworks).
I always liked this question because if someone did well on it, they demonstrated three things:
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In the case of gender-reveal parties, couples take a private moment made possible by science and oblige others to join in, with the result—as in so many invented rituals of our day—that the focus turns from where it ought to be (in this case, the baby) to the self. At a bris or christening, the emotional emphasis falls on the arrival of a new life in the embrace of family and community. At a gender-reveal party, the camera is on the expectant father tearing up at the sight of pink cake.
That’s the nature of manufactured customs and instant traditions. They emerge from an atomized society in order to fill a perceived void where real ceremonies used to be, and they end by reflecting that society’s narcissism. Is it too much to say that gender-reveal parties are a mild symptom of cultural despair?
” —Gender-Reveal Parties and Cultural Despair : The New Yorker (via Rachel Syme)
Things like this increasingly feel to me like plot points in my generation’s version of “Mad Men,” 50 years from now.