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Something that dawned on me while I was writing this piece on bug chaining -- ever run into software where your experience was being controlled by bugs, and not the software's features? Sometimes things get so bad that you feel like you're being kicked from one defect to another instead of piloting your own way through the software.
To me, that feels almost exactly like the difference between the slings and the flippers being in control of your pinball. ^_^;
Brought to you by my discovery of the Transatlantic Sessions.
If you put a bunch of skilled, motivated people in a room together with a minimum of structure and organization, you can witness some amazing results. In tech we get a hackathon or an unconference. In music we get a jam session.
The Transatlantic Sessions are a project of BBC4 Scotland that brings together folk musicians from both sides of the pond. They've been called "the greatest backporch shows ever", and it shouldn't come as much surprise to see Celtic and American trad musicians gel so well, given the amount of crossover in the styles' origins.
Unfortunately the BBC site seems to be kind of shite when it comes to actually describing or showing what the whole thing is about, so instead I give you some starting points to browse on Youtube. There's a lot of really, really amazing music to be found.
So this happened to swim by in my Twitter feed:
New Approaches To Designing Log-In Forms
This kind of thing makes me want to metaphorically grab hold of the field of User Experience Design, tell it "Here, I have someone I'd like you to meet," and drag it over to the field of Security. The converse goes for Security when (for instance) its practitioners come up with an amazing new security procedure that no user will ever follow. In fact, a great many problems would be solved if we could but make a few more introductions between disciplines. Getting Software Development acquainted with fields like Ethics, Sociology, and Social Justice and concepts like privacy, identity, diversity, and accessibility would be a good start.
(This post courtesy of my discovering a store of unfinished, half-written blog posts hanging out on my hard drive.)
A fair while ago, I read The Mythical Man-month, a truly legendary tome in software engineering. While the maxims, rules, and expertise it contains are what make it a classic, I was astonished at the accuracy of the predictions that Brooks laid out in an out-of-the-way table near the back of the book: (p203, Fig 16.1)
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