Latest Posts

• Usability in the non-software world

  When you spend a lot of time in the digital world, it can be bit jarring to come back into the real, physical world. It seems like our non-digital “interfaces” are clunky and un-intuitive compared to a slick online tool that can sometimes feel like it’s reading your mind.

• It’s what’s on screen that matters, right?

  A project I’ve been working on recently is a bit of a beast. It has a pretty large and sprawling codebase with a long history. Code quality is.. shall we say, a little lacking. (Y’know, all those attributes like efficiency, maintainability, extensibility etc. that are sometimes a little hard to quantify).

• Starting and finishing projects

  I discussed working remotely in my last post, but didn’t mention the website I use to find (or at least browse casually for) remote roles: remoteok.io. It’s an interesting website for a few reasons:

• Working from home

  I find it surprising and frustrating that roles that allow working remotely are still not overly common, at least not in my part of the software development world.

• Solve the right problem

  I’ve worked at a few different companies over the years, and been involved in early design work for some large and challenging software projects (aren’t they all?).

• Processing

  I’ve always liked Processing. Weather it’s an idea for an interesting visual effect or perhaps a game mechanic, I want to make it happen as fast as I can. And in terms of quickly prototyping something, and getting to a result fast, Processing is pretty much unbeatable for me.

• Drowning

  It seems like every other day there’s a new toolkit, API, language, library or SDK that I’d like to try out, play with and learn. D3, Angular.js, Leaflet.

• Hello World!

  Like many software developers, I’m always working on side projects. Or I’m thinking about the next potential side project. Most of them never see the light of day, either abandoned or somewhat “finished” and then forgotten. Sometimes I realize the initial idea wasn’t quite as cool as I thought it was. Or sometimes I’m only developing that project (be it tool, demo or algorithm) as a learning experience anyway, never intending it to be a finished product.

• Don’t repeat yourself (DRY)

  “Every piece of knowledge must have a single, unambiguous, authoritative representation within a system.”